French Rococo Era Painter, 1732-1806 was a French painter and printmaker whose late Rococo manner was distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism. One of the most prolific artists active in the last decades of the Ancien Regime, Fragonard produced more than 550 paintings , of which only five are dated. Among his most popular works are genre paintings conveying an atmosphere of intimacy and veiled eroticism. He was born at Grasse, Alpes-Maritimes, the son of François Fragonard, a glover, and Françoise Petit. He was articled to a Paris notary when his father's circumstances became strained through unsuccessful speculations, but showed such talent and inclination for art that he was taken at the age of eighteen to François Boucher, who, recognizing the youth's rare gifts but disinclined to waste his time with one so inexperienced, sent him to Chardin's atelier. Fragonard studied for six months under the great luminist, then returned more fully equipped to Boucher, whose style he soon acquired so completely that the master entrusted him with the execution of replicas of his paintings. Though not yet a pupil of the Academy, Fragonard gained the Prix de Rome in 1752 with a painting of "Jeroboam Sacrificing to the Golden Calf", but before proceeding to Rome he continued to study for three years under Charles-Andre van Loo. In the year preceding his departure he painted the "Christ washing the Feet of the Apostles" now at Grasse cathedral. On September 17, 1756, he took up his abode at the French Academy in Rome, then presided over by Charles-Joseph Natoire. While at Rome, Fragonard contracted a friendship with a fellow painter, Hubert Robert. In 1760, they toured Italy together, executing numerous sketches of local scenery. It was in these romantic gardens, with their fountains, grottos, temples and terraces, that Fragonard conceived the dreams which he was subsequently to render in his art. He also learned to admire the masters of the Dutch and Flemish schools (Rubens, Hals, Rembrandt, Ruisdael), imitating their loose and vigorous brushstrokes. Added to this influence was the deep impression made upon his mind by the florid sumptuousness of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, whose works he had an opportunity to study in Venice before he returned to Paris in 1761. In 1765 his "Coresus et Callirhoe" secured his admission to the Academy. It was made the subject of a pompous (though not wholly serious) eulogy by Diderot, and was bought by the king, who had it reproduced at the Gobelins factory. Hitherto Fragonard had hesitated between religious, classic and other subjects; but now the demand of the wealthy art patrons of Louis XV's pleasure-loving and licentious court turned him definitely towards those scenes of love and voluptuousness with which his name will ever be associated, and which are only made acceptable by the tender beauty of his color and the virtuosity of his facile brushwork;   Related Paintings of Jean-Honore Fragonard :. | The Happy Accidents of the Swing | The Stolen Kiss | Education is Everything | Recreation by our Gallery | The Lover Crowned |
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Kane Paul
Irish-born Canadian Painter b.1810 d.1871 was an Irish-Canadian painter, famous for his paintings of First Nations peoples in the Canadian West and other Native Americans in the Oregon Country. A largely self-educated artist, Kane grew up in Toronto (then known as York) and trained himself by copying European masters on a study trip through Europe. He undertook two voyages through the wild Canadian northwest in 1845 and from 1846 to 1848. The first trip took him from Toronto to Sault Ste. Marie and back. Having secured the support of the Hudson's Bay Company, he set out on a second, much longer voyage from Toronto across the Rocky Mountains to Fort Vancouver and Fort Victoria in the Columbia District, as the Canadians called the Oregon Country. On both trips Kane sketched and painted Aboriginal peoples and documented their lives. Upon his return to Toronto, he produced more than one hundred oil paintings from these sketches. Kane's work, particularly his field sketches, are still a valuable resource for ethnologists.
NEUREUTHER, Eugen
German painter b. 1806, Mnchen, d. 1882, Menchen,German lithographer, illustrator, decorative artist and painter. He was the son of the painter and printmaker Ludwig Neureuther (d 1832), and began his studies in Munich in 1823. His tutors included Peter von Cornelius, who enlisted him and several other young painters to help decorate the Glyptothek, and Wilhelm von Kobell. In 1830, fired with enthusiasm for the July Revolution in France, Neureuther went to Paris. He produced numerous studies from life (Munich, Staatl. Graph. Samml.), which are among his best works. From 1836-7 he was in Rome. From 1848 to 1856 he ran the Nymphenburg Porzellanmanufaktur, and for ten years from 1868 he taught decorative mural painting at the Munich Kunstgewerbeschule. Neureuther's principal importance lay in the field of book illustration. His reputation was established with the Vignettes for Goethe's Ballads and Romances (Randzeichnungen zu Goethes Balladen und Romanzen), published by J. G. Cotta in five booklets of 46 lithographic contour drawings in Munich, Stuttgart and Tebingen between 1829 and 1839. Goethe, to whom Cornelius had mentioned Neureuther, repeatedly spoke of these works in public, realizing their similarity to the prayer book of the Emperor Maximilian illustrated by Albrecht Derer, Lukas Cranach the elder, Hans Baldung, Albrecht Altdorfer and others. A new edition of this work, with lithographs by August Strixner (b 1820) had appeared in 1808. Neureuther later illustrated many other texts, but his approach became increasingly naturalistic and picturesque, and there was a notable decline in the artistic standard of the work.
Antoine de Favray
French, 1706-died circa 1791,French painter. He is not documented until 1738, when he was mentioned as a private pupil of Jean-Fran?ois de Troy (ii), who was then director of the Acad?mie de France in Rome; in 1739 he became an official student at the Acad?mie. Among his student works is a copy (untraced) of Raphael's Fire in the Borgo (Rome, Vatican, Stanza dell'Incendio), which was mentioned by Charles de Brosses and exhibited in Paris in 1741. In 1744, for reasons that are not clear, he left Rome for Malta, remaining there for much of the rest of his career and devoting himself primarily to portraiture and genre painting. His ambition as a history painter, however, was fulfilled to a certain extent as a result of the patronage of two Grand Masters of the Order of the Knights of Malta, Manoel Pinto da Fonseca and Emmanuel de Rohan. His first dated picture executed in Malta is a Portrait of a Maltese Lady (1745; Paris, Louvre).