Dutch Baroque Era Painter, ca.1625-1679
Daily life was Jan Steen's main pictorial theme. Many of the genre scenes he portrayed are lively to the point of chaos and lustfulness, even so much that a Jan Steen household, meaning a messy scene, became a Dutch proverb (een huishouden van Jan Steen). Subtle hints in his paintings seem to suggest that Steen meant to warn the viewer rather than invite him to copy this behaviour. Many of Steen's paintings bear references to old Dutch proverbs or literature. He often used members of his family as models. Jan Steen painted also quite a few self-portraits, in which he showed no tendency of vanity.
Steen did not shy from other themes: he painted historical, mythological and religious scenes, portraits, still lifes and natural scenes. His portraits of children are famous. He is also well known for his mastery of light and attention to detail, most notably in textiles. Steen was prolific, producing about 800 paintings, of which roughly 350 survive.
Steen's work was valued much by contemporaries and as a result he was reasonably well paid for his work. He did not have any students, but his work proved a source of inspiration for many painters. Related Paintings of Jan Steen :. | An Interior with a Man Offering an Oyster to a Woman | Interior of an inn | The Feast of St.Nicholas | Landscape with skittle playes | In Luxury, Look Out | Related Artists:
Wilhelm KrauseWilhelm Krause (July 12, 1833 - February 4, 1910) was a German anatomist born in Hanover. In 1854 he earned his medical doctorate, and later (1860) became an associate professor at the University of Göttingen. In 1892 he was appointed head of the Anatomical Institute Laboratory in Berlin. He was the son of anatomist Karl Friedrich Theodor Krause (1797-1868).
Krause is remembered for the discovery and description of mechanoreceptors that were to become known as Krause's corpuscles, sometimes called "Krause's end-bulbs". His name is also associated with "Krause's membranes", which are isotropic bands in striated muscle fiber that consist of disks of sarcoplasm and connect the individual fibrils. In addition he performed pioneer research in the field of embryology. One of his well-known students at Göttingen was bacteriologist Robert Koch (1843-1910).
Philipp Otto RungeGerman Romantic Painter, 1777-1810
..German painter, draughtsman and theorist. He stands alongside Caspar David Friedrich as a leading figure in German Romantic painting even though his early death restricted his oeuvre to relatively few stages of development. The enduring prominence of philosophical and theoretical concerns suggests that further work would have contributed to the history of ideas as well as to that of art. Runge's greatest influence was on later, largely 20th-century artists and thinkers rather than on his immediate contemporaries. While 19th-century developments certainly bore out Runge's claim for a new, symbolic role for landscape,
Salomon GessnerSwiss Painter, 1730-1788,a bookseller's son, was apprenticed to the bookseller Spener in Berlin. Giving up this employment, he lived for a time by painting and engraving, for which he had a considerable talent. In 1750 he settled in Zurich, continuing to live by painting, including painting on porcelain. He began to write idylls in poetic prose, beginning with Daphnis (1754). His Idyllen (1756) achieved a nation-wide success. In Der Tod Abels (1758) he attempted an epic in prose, which was followed by two plays (Schaferspiele), two stories, including Der erste Schiffer, and a few more idylls, Neue Idyllen (1772). In his idylls, Geßner, who is indebted to Theocritus and Virgil, creates an idealized, orderly, almost horticultural state of nature, from which everything rough and craggy has been eliminated; his shepherds are similarly untouched by the ruder aspects of country life. His work embodies the city-dweller's longing for a nature which he does not know, and this explains its instant popularity. W. Raabe uses Gebner's Idyllen, the publication of which coincided with the outbreak of the Seven Years War