French Romantic Painter, 1798-1863
For 40 years Eugene Delacroix was one of the most prominent and controversial painters in France. Although the intense emotional expressiveness of his work placed the artist squarely in the midst of the general romantic outpouring of European art, he always remained an individual phenomenon and did not create a school. As a personality and as a painter, he was admired by the impressionists, postimpressionists, and symbolists who came after him.
Born on April 28, 1798, at Charenton-Saint-Maurice, the son of an important public official, Delacroix grew up in comfortable upper-middle-class circumstances in spite of the troubled times. He received a good classical education at the Lycee Imperial. He entered the studio of Pierre Narcisse Guerin in 1815, where he met Theodore Gericaul Related Paintings of Eugene Delacroix :. | The Death of Sardanapalus | Jewish Wedding in Morocco | Cleopatra and the Peasant | Odalisque (mk05) | The Women of Algiers | Related Artists:
SEGHERS, GerardFlemish Baroque Era Painter, 1591-1651
Flemish painter, dealer and collector, active also in Italy and Spain. He grew up in Antwerp, a city that had only recently been liberated from the rebels by the Spanish troops. His father, a keeper of a wine tavern, originally had Calvinist sympathies but returned to the Catholic faith after 1585. Gerard possibly trained, as did afterwards his younger brother Jan Baptist Seghers, who later became a goldsmith, with Gaspar de Crayer (b 1551), the father of the well-known painter of the same name. At the age of 12 Seghers was listed as a pupil in the Guild of St Luke in Antwerp; the documents, unfortunately, fail to mention the name of his teacher. Florent Le Comte (1699) called him a pupil of Abraham Janssen
Octavius Oakley1800-1867
was a Victorian watercolourist. Oakley initially worked for a cloth manufacturer near Leeds in Yorkshire. He developed into a specialist of portraits in watercolour and enjoyed the patronage of the Duke of Devonshire. From living in Derby where he depicted rustic scenes, he moved to Leamington Spa in Warwickshire in 1836, but returned to London in the 1840s and worked there until his death, producing paintings of street scenes and gypsies and their lifestyle. His emphasis on gypsy paintings which he exhibited at the Royal Watercolour Society earned him the name 'Gypsy Oakley'. Oakley met Thomas Baker in Leamington Spa where Baker was living and working and in 1841
LONGHI, PietroItalian Rococo Era Painter, ca.1702-1785
Painter and draughtsman. His father, Alessandro Falca, encouraged his natural talent for drawing, and he studied under Antonio Balestra for 'several years', according to his son, Alessandro Longhi. Balestra probably took Pietro to Bologna and recommended him to Giuseppe Maria Crespi. No documents exist on Longhi until 1732, the year he married, and some doubt has been expressed about his study with Crespi. There is no trace of Crespi's influence in Longhi's altarpiece for the parish church of S Pellegrino in Bologna, St Pellegrino Condemned to Death, installed in 1732; Crespi's style is an intimate one, however, and would have been inappropriate for such a large altarpiece. One of Longhi's first independent works, the St Pellegrino altarpiece recalls his Venetian origins and training in its broken brushwork and colour glazes. In another early work, the Adoration of the Magi (Venice, Scuola Grande S Giovanni Evangelista), documented in 1733 as at S Maria Materdomini, Venice, the subject-matter lends itself to a more domestic treatment, and Crespi's influence is evident. Both these works contain passages anticipating Longhi's subsequent development as a genre painter; in each picture a boy or young man, perhaps a self-portrait, gazes out at the spectator, unconcerned with events in the painting.