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 :. | Beach at Scheveningen | View of Dordrecht | Winter Landscape With Figures On Ice | River Landscape with Ferry and cottages | River Scene |
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R. v. Bohnlich
R v Bohnlich (fl.c.1880) 19th Century Paintings and Watercolours
George Henry Durrie
American Painter, 1820-1863,American painter. Durrie and his older brother John (1818-98) studied sporadically from 1839 to 1841 with the portrait painter Nathaniel Jocelyn. From 1840 to 1842 he was an itinerant painter in Connecticut and New Jersey, finally settling permanently in New Haven. He produced c. 300 paintings, of which the earliest were portraits (e.g. Self-portrait, 1839; Shelburne, VT, Mus.); by the early 1850s he had begun to paint the rural genre scenes and winter landscapes of New England that are considered his finest achievement. His landscapes, for example A Christmas Party (1852; Tulsa, OK, Gilcrease Inst. Amer. Hist. & A.), are characterized by the use of pale though cheerful colours and by the repeated use of certain motifs: an isolated farmhouse, a road placed diagonally leading the eye into the composition, and a hill (usually the West or East Rocks, New Haven) in the distance. By the late 1850s Durrie's reputation had started to grow, and he was exhibiting at prestigious institutions, such as the National Academy of Design. In 1861 the firm of Currier & Ives helped popularize his work by publishing prints of two of his winter landscapes,
Baron Gerard
There have been three baronies created for descendants of the Gerard family who resided at Bryn, Ashton in Makerfield, Lancashire and Kingsley, Cheshire in the 13th century. The title Baron Gerard of Gerards Bromley, was created in the Peerage of England on 21 July 1603 for Sir Thomas Gerard (d. 1617), son of Sir Gilbert Gerard (d. 1593) Attorney General between 1559 and 1581 and Master of the Rolls in 1581, who acquired estates at Gerards Bromley and Hilderstone, Staffordshire. The first Baron was Lord President of Wales between 1610 and 1617. The barony passed in direct line of succession until the death of the fifth Baron in 1684 when it passed to his second cousin Charles, and upon his death without a male heir , to his brother Philip Gerard, a Jesuit priest who died childless in 1773 when the barony expired. The title of Baron Gerard of Bryn in the County Palatine of Lancaster, was created in the Peerage of the United Kingdom in 1876 for Sir Robert Gerard, 13th Baronet. The title followed the line of the first Baron's eldest son until the death of the latter's grandson, the fourth Baron, in 1992. He was succeeded by his second cousin once removed, the fifth and present holder of the barony. He is the great grandson of Captain the Hon. Robert Joseph Gerard-Dicconson, second son of the first Baron. A Gerard Baronetcy had been created in the Baronetage of England in 1611 for Thomas Gerard, Member of Parliament for Liverpool, Lancashire, and Wigan who was a direct descendant of the family of Bryn. He was succeeded by his son, the second Baronet. He also represented Liverpool in the House of Commons. His son, the third Baronet, was a Royalist during the Civil War and spent a large part of his estate in in his support for King Charles I. His great-great-great-grandson was the aforementioned thirteenth Baronet, who was elevated to the peerage in 1876. For the title Baron Gerard of Brandon, in the County of Suffolk, created in 1645 for a great-grandson of Sir Gilbert Gerard (mentioned above), see Earl of Macclesfield.