Belgian 1860-1949 Belgian painter, printmaker and draughtsman. No single label adequately describes the visionary work produced by Ensor between 1880 and 1900, his most productive period. His pictures from that time have both Symbolist and Realist aspects, and in spite of his dismissal of the Impressionists as superficial daubers he was profoundly concerned with the effects of light. His imagery and technical procedures anticipated the colouristic brilliance and violent impact of Fauvism and German Expressionism and the psychological fantasies of Surrealism. Ensor most memorable and influential work was almost exclusively produced before 1900, but he was largely unrecognized before the 1920s in his own country. His work was highly influential in Germany, however: Emil Nolde visited him in 1911, and was influenced by his use of masks; Paul Klee mentions him admiringly in his diaries; Erich Heckel came to see him in the middle of the war and painted his portrait (1930; Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Mus.); Alfred Kubin owned several of his prints, while Marc Chagall and George Grosz also adapted certain elements from Ensor. All the artists of the Cobra group saw him as a master. He influenced many Belgian artists including Leon Spilliaert, Rik Wouters, Constant Permeke, Frits van den Berghe, Paul Delvaux and Pierre Alechinsky.  Related Paintings of James Ensor :. | Still life with Chinoiseries | Self-Portrait,Called The Big Head | The Holy Family | Christ and the Afflicted | Tribute Money |
Related Artists:
Giambattista Tiepolo
1696-1770 Italian painter, master of Venetian school. Tiepolo was famous in his own lifetime as a superb painter in fresco and a brilliant draftsman. A highly inventive artist, he could create spectacular effects in difficult sites, from the narrow gallery at the patriarchal palace at Udine in the mid-1720s to the vast staircase ceiling in the Residenz at Werzburg in the early 1750s. Contemporaries recognized his spirited, dynamic approach to subject matter and his frankly sensuous manner of painting. Tiepolo is comparable in his restless energy and imaginative power to Peter Paul Rubens, and essentially he worked with a similar baroque language of myth, allegory, and history, which he infused with a sense of freshness and modernity. His approach to religious art is characterized by candor and naturalism, while he was responsive to the different concerns of patrons and viewers at a time when the church was faced with new kinds of devotion and criticism. With the advent of neoclassicism, Tiepolo's art fell from favor: In an age that prized archaeological correctness, rationality, and ideals of improvement, his witty, Veronese-inspired conception of historical or classical subjects seemed frivolous, while his visually seductive qualities were seen as inimical to the serious intellectual aims of the new art. Nevertheless, his drawings and oil sketches continued to appeal to collectors, including Antonio Canova. The son of a Venetian shipping merchant, Tiepolo was apprenticed in 1710 to Gregorio Lazzarini (1655C1730), an artist of international reputation patronized by prominent Venetian families. Before becoming an independent master, he worked in the household of Doge Giovanni Corner; members of the Corner family were to be his most steadfast and liberal patrons. Lazzarini encouraged his pupils to study Venetian sixteenth-century art, and Tiepolo made drawings of some famous works for publication in Domenico Lovisa's Gran Teatro di Venezia of 1717. His early involvement with the thriving Venetian engraving and publishing world was renewed in 1724 when he made drawings of antique sculpture as illustrations for Scipione Maffei's Verona Illustrata, an experience that gave Tiepolo an imaginative empathy with fragmentary antique remains, which recur in his drawings, etchings, and paintings. As well as studying the art of the past, Tiepolo looked to the tenebrism of Federico Bencovich (1677C1753) and the realism and monumentality of Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (1682C1754). In 1719 Tiepolo married Cecilia Guardi, with whom he was to have nine children. By then, the artist was working for a network of mercantile and noble patrons on religious and secular subjects.
Jan Toorop
1858-1928 Dutch Jan Toorop Gallery He moved to the Netherlands in 1872 and took a course in drawing at the Polytechnische School in Delft (1876-9). He also studied at the Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam (1880-82) and at the Ecole des Arts D?coratifs in Brussels (1882-5). In Amsterdam he joined the St Lukas Society, and in Belgium he was a founder-member of Les XX in 1884. Although he had met Jozef Isra?ls in 1880 and respected the style of the Hague school, he was more attracted by what he saw in Brussels, particularly work by French artists. His portraits of 1884 are painted in an Impressionist style. With other members of Les XX he trained himself in plein-air; he learnt from James Ensor how to apply colours with a palette knife and how to use white with the same intensity as other colours. His style, however, remained austere and his scenes of workmen show a sensitive realism reminiscent of Gustave Courbet's work, for example Respect for the Dead.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
French Impressionist Painter, 1841-1919 French painter, printmaker and sculptor. He was one of the founders and leading exponents of IMPRESSIONISM from the late 1860s, producing some of the movement's most famous images of carefree leisure. He broke with his Impressionist colleagues to exhibit at the Salon from 1878, and from c. 1884 he adopted a more linear style indebted to the Old Masters. His critical reputation has suffered from the many minor works he produced during his later years.