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 :. | The Meuse at Dordrecht with the Grote Kerk. | Landscape with Cottage and Figures | A River Scene, with a Hut on an Island. | A View on the Maas near Dordrecht | View of Dordrecht |
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Constantin Hansen
Danish 1804-1880 Constantin Hansen Galleries Danish painter. In 1816 he entered the Kongelige Akademi for de Sk?nne Kunster, Copenhagen, intending to study architecture; however he later became attracted to painting and worked under C. W. Eckersberg from 1828 to 1833. Around the middle of the 1820s he started developing an individual style of portraiture, which had matured by 1830. He often used his sisters and friends as models; using simple costumes, poses and compositions, he managed to endow his pictures with the intimacy and warmth that mark the Danish Golden Age. The Artist's Sisters Signe and Henriette Reading a Book (1826; Copenhagen, Stat. Mus. Kst) is a fine example of his combination of natural observation with Neo-classical idealization. Under Eckersberg, who encouraged both, he strengthened his natural flair for painting serene architectural views of Copenhagen.
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz
Polish Painter, 1885-1939 .Polish writer, art theorist, painter and photographer. He was the son of the architect, painter and critic Stanislaw Witkiewicz (1851-1915), creator of the 'Zakopane style'
DOLCI, Carlo
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1616-ca.1686 was an Italian painter of the Baroque period, active mainly in Florence, known for highly finished religious pictures, often repeated in many versions. He was born in Florence, on his mother's side the grandson of a painter. Although he was precocious and apprenticed at a young age to Jacopo Vignali, Dolci was not prolific. "He would take weeks over a single foot", according to his biographer Baldinucci.His painstaking technique made him unsuited for large-scale fresco painting. He painted chiefly sacred subjects, and his works are generally small in scale, although he made a few life-size pictures. He often repeated the same composition in several versions, and his daughter, Agnese Dolci, also made excellent copies of his works. Dolci was known for his piety. It is said that every year during Passion Week he painted a half-figure of the Saviour wearing the Crown of Thorns. In 1682, when he saw Giordano,