1725-1805 French Jean Baptiste Greuze Galleries French painter and draughtsman. He was named an associate member of the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, Paris, in 1755 on the strength of a group of paintings that included genre scenes, portraits and studies of expressive heads (t?tes d'expression). These remained the essential subjects of his art for the next 50 years, except for a brief, concentrated and unsuccessful experiment with history painting in the late 1760s, which was to affect his later genre painting deeply. Though his art has often been compared with that of Jean-Simeon Chardin in particular and interpreted within the context of NEO-CLASSICISM in general, it stands so strikingly apart from the currents of its time that Greuze's accomplishments are best described, as they often were by the artist's contemporaries, as unique. He was greatly admired by connoisseurs, critics and the general public throughout most of his life. His pictures were in the collections of such noted connoisseurs as Ange-Laurent de La Live de Jully, Claude-Henri Watelet and Etienne-Francois, Duc de Choiseul. For a long period he was in particular favour with the critic Denis Diderot, who wrote about him in the Salon reviews that he published in Melchior Grimm's privately circulated Correspondance litteraire. His reputation declined towards the end of his life and through the early part of the 19th century, to be revived after 1850, when 18th-century painting returned to favour, by such critics as Th?ophile Thore, Arsene Houssaye and, most notably, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt in their book L'Art du dix-huiti?me siecle. By the end of the century Greuze's work, especially his many variations on the Head of a Girl, fetched record prices, and his Broken Pitcher (Paris, Louvre) was one of the most popular paintings in the Louvre. The advent of modernism in the early decades of the 20th century totally obliterated Greuze's reputation. It was only in the 1970s, with Brookner's monograph, Munhall's first comprehensive exhibition of the artist's work, increased sale prices, important museum acquisitions and fresh analyses of his art by young historians, that Greuze began to regain the important place that he merits in the history of French art of the 18th century.  Related Paintings of Jean Baptiste Greuze :. | A Student | The Punishment of Filial Ingratitude (mk05) | L'Accordee du Village (mk08) | Inconsolable Widow | L-Accordee de Village |
Related Artists:
Adrian Scott Stokes
RA (1854-1935) was an English landscape painter. Born in Southport, Lancashire, he became a cotton broker in Liverpool, where his artistic talent was noticed by John Herbert RA, who advised him to submit his drawings to the Royal Academy. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1872 and exhibited at the Academy from 1876. In that year went to France where he lived for 10 years, settling back in England in 1886, at Carbis Bay and joining the artists' colony at St Ives. Adrian Stokes was a landscape painter, concerned most with atmospheric effects, and later with decorative landscapes. He was the author of 'Landscape Painting' (1925). He became ARA in 1909 and RA in 1919, won medals at the Paris Exhibition and Chicago World Fair (1889), became first President of the St Ives Society of Arts (1890) and Vice President of the Royal Watercolour Society (1932). He married Marianne Preindlesberger of Graz, Austria, in 1884, while living in France. She became a well known artist under her married name of Marianne Stokes. An obituary of Adrian Stokes was published in The Times Monday 2 December 1935
Castello Nativity, Master of the
Italian Early Renaissance Painter, active ca.1450-1475
Johann Gottfried Steffan
1815-1905 Swiss painter. He moved to Munich in 1833 after an apprenticeship as a lithographer in Wedenswil. He studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Kenste and the Polytechnikum in Munich. He was impressed by Carl Rottmann's Italian landscapes and decided to devote himself to landscape painting. He travelled to Italy in 1845 and to Paris in 1855; he subsequently began to concentrate on painting lake and mountain scenes, for example Lake Starnberg in a Storm (1873; Zurich, Ksthaus), at which he was highly successful. He undertook numerous study-visits to Bavaria and Switzerland, often accompanied by his pupils Traugott Schiess (1834-69) and Otto Frölicher. In Munich Steffan became friendly with Rudolf Koller, Johann Caspar Bosshardt (1823-87) and Arnold Becklin, and under his leadership the 'Schweizer', as these artist-friends were known collectively, formed their own group.