Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1596-1656 Jan van Goyen was born in Leiden on Jan. 13, 1596. Apprenticed from the age of 10, he had several masters. About 1617 he went to Haarlem to study with Esaias van de Velde, an important innovator in the Haarlem movement of realistic landscape painting. Van Goyen's works between 1621 and 1625 are sometimes hard to distinguish from those of his teacher. They are colorful, detailed views of villages and roads, usually busy with people, as in Winter (1621). It was Van Goyen's usual practice to sign or monogram and date his paintings. He traveled extensively through the Netherlands and beyond, recording his impressions in sketchbooks, occasionally with dates and often depicting recognizable scenes. Thus the chronology of his development is clear. His paintings of the late 1620s show a steady advance from the strong colors and scattered organization of his early works toward tonality and greater simplicity and unity of composition. By 1630 he was painting monochromes in golden brown or pale green; he played a leading part in the tonal phase of Dutch landscape painting. In 1631 Van Goyen settled in The Hague, where he became a citizen in 1634. The simplicity, airiness, and unification of his compositions continued to increase in his abundant production of dune landscapes, river views, seascapes, town views, and winter landscapes. The River View (1636) displays a river so open and extensive as to suggest the sea, with reflections that prolong the vast and luminous sky. In its monumentalization of humble structures and its composition built on a firm scaffolding of horizontal and vertical forces, it forecast at this early date developments that dominated landscape painting in the 1650s and later. In the Village and Dunes (1647) the traditional double-diagonal composition still exists, but it is dominated by horizontal and vertical accents. Stronger contrasts of light and dark replace the earlier tonality. In the last year of his life Van Goyen produced an eloquent new style, in which powerful forms stand out against the radiant sky and water in an exquisitely balanced composition (Evening Calm; 1656). The commission in 1651 to paint a panoramic view of The Hague for the Burgomaster's Room shows the high regard in which Van Goyen was held. He was enormously productive; well over 1,000 of his paintings still exist, and almost as many drawings.   Related Paintings of Jan van Goyen :. | River Landscape | Skaters in front of a Medieval Castle | Haymaking. | Farmyard with Haystack | View of Dordrecht from the Oude Maas |
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john banister
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PERRONNEAU, Jean-Baptiste
French Rococo Era Painter, ca.1715-1783 French pastellist, painter and engraver. He was, with his older contemporary Maurice Quentin de La Tour, the most important pastel artist and portrait painter in 18th-century France. Perronneau trained first with the engraver Laurent Cars and then with the successful portrait painter Hubert Drouais. His work as an engraver, which includes prints after Charles-Joseph Natoire, Fran?ois Boucher, Edme Bouchardon and Carle Vanloo (see Vaillat and Ratouis de Limay,), did not continue beyond the 1730s. Nevertheless, his involvement with Cars, much of whose work consisted in the reproduction of portraits by artists such as Hyacinthe Rigaud, left its mark on the composition of his pastels, most of which employ the bust-length format, often within a feigned stone oval typical of 17th- and 18th-century engraved portraits. His early pastel portrait of Mme Desfriches (1744; France, A.M. Ratouis de Limay priv. col.), mother of his friend and patron, the Orl?ans collector Aignan-Thomas Desfriches,