Italian Rococo Era Painter, 1712-ca.1793 The records of his parish in Venice show that Francesco Guardi was baptized on Oct. 5, 1712. His father, Domenico, who died when Francesco was 4, had a workshop. Francesco and his elder brother, Gian Antonio, worked in a small studio, carrying out such orders as they could get for almost anything the client wanted:mythological pictures, genre, flower pieces, battle scenes, altarpieces, and even, on rare occasions, frescoes. They did not hesitate to copy compositions by other artists, but what they borrowed they always transformed into something more capricious, less stable, more fragmentary in the refraction of light. Francesco did not emerge as an independent personality until 1760, when his brother died. Then, 48 years old, he married, established his own studio, and devoted himself chiefly to painting views of Venice. For the most part he worked in obscurity, ignored by his contemporaries. He was not even admitted to the Venetian Academy until he was 72 years old. Guardi and Canaletto have always been compared to one another because the buildings they chose to paint were often the same. But the way each artist painted them is very different. Canaletto's world is constructed out of line. It provides solid, carefully drawn, three-dimensional objects that exist within logically constructed three-dimensional space. Guardi's world is constructed out of color and light. The objects in it become weightless in the light's shimmer and dissolve in a welter of brushstrokes; the space, like the forms in space, is suggested rather than described. Canaletto belonged essentially to the Renaissance tradition that began with Giotto and, as it grew progressively tighter and more controlled, pointed the way to neoclassicism. Guardi belonged to the new baroque tradition that grew out of the late style of Titian and, as it became progressively looser and freer, pointed the way toward impressionism. Such differences appear even in Guardi's early view paintings, where he was obviously trying to copy Canaletto, such as the Basin of San Marco. The famous buildings are there, but they are far in the background, insubstantial, seeming to float. In front is a fleet of fishing boats, their curving spars seeming to dance across the surface of the canvas. What is important for Guardi is not perspective but the changing clouds and the way the light falls on the lagoon. Guardi became increasingly fascinated by the water that surrounds Venice. In late works, such as the famous Lagoon with Gondola, buildings and people have been stripped away until there is nothing but the suggestion of a thin line of distant wharfs, a few strokes to indicate one man on a gondola, a long unbroken stretch of still water, and a cloudless sky. Guardi also painted the festivals that so delighted visitors to the city, such as the Marriage of Venice to the Sea. This was a symbolic ceremony in which the doge, in the great gilded galley of the head of state, surrounded by a thousand gondolas, appeared before all Venice, in Goethe's image, "raised up like the Host in a monstrance." Of all Guardi's paintings the most evocative are his caprices, the landscapes born out of his imagination though suggested by the ruined buildings on the lonely islands of the Venetian lagoon. A gentle melancholy clings to such scenes.   Related Paintings of GUARDI, Francesco :. | The Torre del-Orologio | The Feast of the Ascension fdh | Gondola | Piazza di San Marco (detail) dh | Carnival Thursday on the Piazzetta dgs |
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Octave Tassaert
Paris 1800-1874 was a French painter of portraits and genre, religious, historical and allegorical paintings, as well as a lithographer and engraver, though this family was of Flemish origin. He was the grandson of the sculptor Jean-Pierre-Antoine Tassaert. Octave's first artistic training came from his father Jean-Joseph-François Tassaert (1765-c. 1835) and his older brother Paul (?-1855), before he was apprenticed to the engraver Alexis-François Girard (1787-1870). Next he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts (1817-25) from 1817 through 1825, under Guillaume Guillon-Lethi??re, but never won the school's Prix de Rome. Winning popular but not critical success, his works showing poor people's lives were felt melodramatic by critics but acclaimed by the public. His submission to the 1855 World Exhibition was well received by the critics, but Octave ceased to exhibit after the 1857 Salon, withdrawing more and more from the formal art world. Collectors of his works included Alfred Bruyas and Alexandre Dumas, fils, but in 1863 Octave stopped painting altogether and tried to become a poet (though none of his works are extant),
Abbey, Edwin Austin
American Golden Age Illustrator and Muralist, 1852-1911 American painter and illustrator, active in England. He began his artistic training in 1866, studying drawing with the Philadelphia portrait and landscape painter Isaac L. Williams (1817-95). In 1868 he attended evening classes in drawing at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Christian Schussele (1824-79). In the same year Abbey began to work as an illustrator for the Philadelphia publishers Van Ingen & Snyder. In 1870 Harper's Weekly published the Puritans' First Thanksgiving, and in 1871 Abbey moved to New York to join the staff of Harper & Brothers, thus inaugurating his most important professional relationship. Throughout the 1870s Abbey's reputation grew, both for his detailed exhibition watercolours and for his elegant line drawings, which, translated to wood-engravings in numerous periodicals, illustrated both factual and fictional events of the past and present. The influences on him were mainly English, in particular the works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and illustrations in the English press, which he studied avidly. The success of his illustrations to some of Robert Herrick's poems, such as Corinna's Going A-Maying in Harper's New Monthly Magazine (May 1874), prompted Harper & Brothers in 1878 to send Abbey to England to do a complete series of drawings for an illustrated gift-book, Selections from the Poetry of Robert Herrick (New York, 1882).
j. g. sandberg
Johan Gustaf Sandberg, född 1782, död 1854, var målare; han var professor i teckning vid Konstakademien från 1828, och direktör där 1845?C1853. Sandberg ägnade sig främst åt historiemåleri, med motiv ur nordisk mytologi och svensk historia. Hans främsta verk inom detta område är kalkmålningarna över Gustav Vasa i Uppsala domkyrka. Han målade också en mängd porträtt. Efter akademiska studier i Åbo med början 1783, och Uppsala, dit han flyttade 1788, blev han filosofie magister 1791. Han blev 1792 extra ordinarie kanslist i akademiska kansliet. Juris utriusque kandidat blev han 1792 och kort därefter docent vid juridiska fakulteten, blev juris licentiat 1800 och utnämndes 1807 till jurisprudentiä, oeconomiæ et commerciorum professor i Uppsala. Juris utriusque doktor 1810; arbetande ledamot i Lagkommissionen 1811-1814; ledamot av Krigsvetenskapsakademien 1810, Lantbruksakademien 1812, Vetenskapssocieteten i Uppsala 1829 samt flera andra lärda samfund. År 1834 erhöll han adlig värdighet och tog avsked från sin professur 1837. Lars Rabenius ligger begravd på Uppsala gamla kyrkogård.