b. March 30, 1746, Fuendetodos, Spain--d. April 16, 1828, Goya is considered the 18th Century's foremost painter and etcher of Spanish culture, known for his realistic scenes of battles, bullfights and human corruption. Goya lived during a time of upheaval in Spain that included war with France, the Inquisition, the rule of Napoleon's brother, Joseph, as the King of Spain and, finally, the reign of the Spanish King Ferdinand VII. Experts proclaim these events -- and Goya's deafness as a result of an illness in 1793 -- as central to understanding Goya's work, which frequently depicts human misery in a satiric and sometimes nightmarish fashion. From the 1770s he was a royal court painter for Charles III and Charles IV, and when Bonaparte took the throne in 1809, Goya swore fealty to the new king. When the crown was restored to Spain's Ferdinand VII (1814), Goya, in spite of his earlier allegiance to the French king, was reinstated as royal painter. After 1824 he lived in self-imposed exile in Bordeaux until his death, reportedly because of political differences with Ferdinand. Over his long career he created hundreds of paintings, etchings, and lithographs, among them Maya Clothed and Maya Nude (1798-1800); Caprichos (1799-82); The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808 (1814); Disasters of War (1810-20); and The Black Paintings (1820-23).  Related Paintings of Francisco de goya y Lucientes :. | What courage | Portrait of Juan Antonio Cuervo | Witches Sabbath | Majas on a Balcony | The Bewitched Man |
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Fernand Leger
French Cubist Painter, 1881-1955,was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker,Leger was born in the Argentan, Orne, Basse-Normandie, where his father raised cattle. Fernand Leger initially trained as an architect from 1897-1899 before moving in 1900 to Paris, where he supported himself as an architectural draftsman. After military service in Versailles in 1902-1903, he enrolled at the School of Decorative Arts; he also applied to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts but was rejected. He nevertheless attended the Beaux-Arts as a non-enrolled student, spending what he described as "three empty and useless years" studying with Gerome and others, while also studying at the Academie Julian. He began to work seriously as a painter only at the age of 25. At this point his work showed the influence of Impressionism, as seen in Le Jardin de ma mere (My Mother's Garden) of 1905, one of the few paintings from this period that he did not later destroy. A new emphasis on drawing and geometry appeared in Leger's work after he saw the Cezanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne in 1907. In 1909 he moved to Montparnasse and met such leaders of the avant-garde as Archipenko, Lipchitz, Chagall, and Robert Delaunay. His major painting of this period is Nudes in the Forest (1909-10), in which Leger displayed a personal form of Cubism??his critics called it "Tubism" for its emphasis on cylindrical formsethat made no use of the collage technique pioneered by Braque and Picasso. In 1910 he joined with several other artists, including Delaunay, Jacques Villon, Henri Le Fauconnier, Albert Gleizes, Francis Picabia, and Marie Laurencin to form an offshoot of the Cubist movement, the Puteaux Group??also called the Section d'Or (The Golden Section). Leger was influenced during this time by Italian Futurism, and his paintings, from then until 1914, became increasingly abstract. Their vocabulary of tubular, conical, and cubed forms are laconically rendered in rough patches of primary colours plus green, black and white, as seen in the series of paintings with the title Contrasting Forms. Leger's experiences in World War I had a significant effect on his work. Mobilized in August 1914 for service in the French Army, he spent two years at the front in Argonne. He produced many sketches of artillery pieces, airplanes, and fellow soldiers while in the trenches, and painted Soldier with a Pipe (1916) while on furlough. In September 1916 he almost died after a mustard gas attack by the German troops at Verdun.
Jan Davidz de Heem
1606-1684 Dutch Jan Davidz de Heem Galleries
Andrea Di Giusto
b Florence, c. 1400; d Florence, 2 Sept 1450 Italian painter. He was an eclectic minor Florentine master who was influenced by, and at different times imitated, the styles of Masaccio, Masolino, Lorenzo Monaco, Fra Angelico and Domenico Veneziano. In 1426 he was an assistant of Masaccio in the execution of the altarpiece for the Carmine church in Pisa (London N.G.; Naples, Capodimonte; Berlin, Gem?ldegal.; Malibu, CA, Getty Mus.; Pisa, Mus. N. & Civ. S Matteo) and painted its predella panels of the Legend of St Julian and the Charity of St Nicholas (Berlin, Gem?ldegal.). His name appears in the tax registers of the Florentine Archivio delle Decime from 1427 to 1447 and in the protocols of the Arte della Calimala in 1436, the same year in which he received 60 florins for an altarpiece (destr.) for S Lucia dei Magnoli. In 1437 he signed and dated the Assumption of the Virgin with SS Catherine and Francis (Florence, Accad.). His other dated works are a Virgin and Child with Four Saints (1435; Prato, Mus. Com.), which is a copy of Lorenzo Monaco's Monte Oliveto Altarpiece of 1410 (Florence, Pal. Davanzati); a Virgin and Child (1435; Florence, Villa I Tatti), a rustic interpretation of a Virgin and Child by Fra Angelico (Turin, Gal. Sabauda)