b.c. 1527, Milan, d.1593, Milan Italian Giuseppe Arcimboldo Galleries Arcimboldo was born in Milan in 1527, the son of Biagio, a painter who did work for the office of the Fabbrica in the Duomo.Arcimboldo was commissioned to do stained glass window designs beginning in 1549, including the Stories of St. Catherine of Alexandria vitrage at the Duomo. In 1556 he worked with Giuseppe Meda on frescoes for the Cathedral of Monza. In 1558, he drew the cartoon for a large tapestry of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, which still hangs in the Como Cathedral today. In 1562 he became court portraitist to Ferdinand I at the Habsburg court in Vienna, and later, to Maximilian II and his son Rudolf II at the court in Prague. He was also the court decorator and costume designer. King Augustus of Saxony, who visited Vienna in 1570 and 1573, saw Arcimboldo's work and commissioned a copy of his "The Four Seasons" which incorporates his own monarchic symbols. Arcimboldo's conventional work, on traditional religious subjects, has fallen into oblivion, but his portraits of human heads made up of vegetables, fruit and tree roots, were greatly admired by his contemporaries and remain a source of fascination today. Art critics debate whether these paintings were whimsical or the product of a deranged mind.. A majority of scholars hold to the view, however, that given the Renaissance fascination with riddles, puzzles, and the bizarre (see, for example, the grotesque heads of Leonardo da Vinci, a fellow Milanese), Arcimboldo, far from being mentally imbalanced, catered to the taste of his times. Arcimboldo died in Milan, to which he retired after leaving the Habsburg service. It was during this last phase of his career that he produced the composite portrait of Rudolph II (see above), as well as his self-portrait as the Four Seasons. His Italian contemporaries honored him with poetry and manuscripts celebrating his illustrious career. His hidden-face still-lives are a possible influence on his younger Lombard contemporary Caravaggio, whose painting of fruit in the Brera museum in Milan ranks as one of the earliest independent still-lives. When the Swedish army invaded Prague in 1648, during the Thirty Years' War, many of Arcimboldo's paintings were taken from Rudolf II's collection. His works can be found in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Habsburg Schloss Ambras in Innsbruck, the Louvre in Paris, as well as numerous museums in Sweden. In Italy, his work is in Cremona, Brescia, and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, the Denver Art Museum in Denver, Colorado, the Menil Foundation in Houston, Texas, and the Candie Museum in Guernsey also own paintings by Archimboldo.  Related Paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo :. | Der Winter | Spring | Spring | Flora | The autumn |
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Malbone, Edward Greene
American Miniaturist, 1777-1807 .American miniature painter. Like his boyhood friend Washington Allston, he was encouraged in his artistic pursuits by Samuel King, who lent him engravings to study. In autumn 1794 Malbone set himself up as a miniature painter in Providence, RI, where he worked for two years, achieving almost immediate success. His earliest miniatures, such as that supposedly of Nicholas Brown (1794; New York, NY Hist. Soc.), although somewhat primitive, demonstrate his precosity. The sitters' faces are modelled with a stippling technique and chiselled planes; their outlines are distinct and crisp. These first compositions all include a conventional portrait background, usually a red curtain pulled back to reveal a blue sky. Despite the laboured technique, they are lively, direct and sensitive. During the second half of the 1790s Malbone travelled the eastern USA in search of commissions. He renewed his friendship with Allston in Boston and later visited New York and Philadelphia. In 1801 he was in Charleston, SC, where he befriended the miniature painter Charles Fraser, on whose work he had a strong influence. He developed a brilliant technique of delicate, barely perceptible crosshatching, using interwoven lines of pale colours to create graceful forms.
Pascal Adolphe Jean Dagnan-Bouveret
1852-1929 The popular French naturalist painter Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret is best known for his painstakingly detailed paintings of peasant scenes. Dagnan-Bouveret also created portraits and religious paintings. Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan was born in Paris on Jan. 7, 1852. His father moved to Brazil when he was 16, but he decided to stay in France with his mothers father. Later Dagnan-Bouveret added his grandfathers family name Bouveret to his own. Dagnan-Bouveret entered art school in Paris at age 17 and studied under the well-known academic painter Gerome. During this period Dagnan-Bouveret entered his paintings in several official competitions and placed highly in several. In 1878 Dagnan-Bouveret moved to the region known as the Franche-Comte, where he produced many landscapes and still life paintings. Dagnan-Bouveret won recognition in 1880 with his oil painting An Accident, which depicts a peasant boy with an injured hand visiting the doctor. Considered one of his finest paintings, it exemplifies Dagnan-Bouverets attempt to examine the psychology of his subjects through the use of well-rendered detail. Dagnan-Bouveret took advantage of new photographic technology to bring greater detail and heightened realism to his paintings. Dagnan-Bouveret used this technique especially in his paintings of peasants, such as Horses at the Watering Trough (1885). Dagnan-Bouveret was known to select people from his village, dress them in historical costumes, and then take photographs, which he then used with sketches as the basis of his paintings. By the 1890s his popularity as a portrait painter among wealthy patrons allowed him to explore more personal themes. Many of Dagnan-Bouverets later paintings, such as Supper at Emmaus (1896 C97), were religious in nature. Dagnan-Bouveret died in Quincey, Haute-Saone, France, on July 3, 1929.