English Romantic Painter, 1775-1851 Joseph Mallord William Turner (23 April 1775 ?C 19 December 1851) was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker, whose style is said to have laid the foundation for Impressionism. Although Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, he is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting. Turner's talent was recognised early in his life. Financial independence allowed Turner to innovate freely; his mature work is characterised by a chromatic palette and broadly applied atmospheric washes of paint. According to David Piper's The Illustrated History of Art, his later pictures were called "fantastic puzzles." However, Turner was still recognised as an artistic genius: the influential English art critic John Ruskin described Turner as the artist who could most "stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of Nature." (Piper 321) Suitable vehicles for Turner's imagination were to be found in the subjects of shipwrecks, fires (such as the burning of Parliament in 1834, an event which Turner rushed to witness first-hand, and which he transcribed in a series of watercolour sketches), natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. He was fascinated by the violent power of the sea, as seen in Dawn after the Wreck (1840) and The Slave Ship (1840). Turner placed human beings in many of his paintings to indicate his affection for humanity on the one hand (note the frequent scenes of people drinking and merry-making or working in the foreground), but its vulnerability and vulgarity amid the 'sublime' nature of the world on the other hand. 'Sublime' here means awe-inspiring, savage grandeur, a natural world unmastered by man, evidence of the power of God - a theme that artists and poets were exploring in this period. The significance of light was to Turner the emanation of God's spirit and this was why he refined the subject matter of his later paintings by leaving out solid objects and detail, concentrating on the play of light on water, the radiance of skies and fires. Although these late paintings appear to be 'impressionistic' and therefore a forerunner of the French school, Turner was striving for expression of spirituality in the world, rather than responding primarily to optical phenomena. Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway painted (1844).His early works, such as Tintern Abbey (1795), stayed true to the traditions of English landscape. However, in Hannibal Crossing the Alps (1812), an emphasis on the destructive power of nature had already come into play. His distinctive style of painting, in which he used watercolour technique with oil paints, created lightness, fluency, and ephemeral atmospheric effects. (Piper 321) One popular story about Turner, though it likely has little basis in reality, states that he even had himself "tied to the mast of a ship in order to experience the drama" of the elements during a storm at sea. In his later years he used oils ever more transparently, and turned to an evocation of almost pure light by use of shimmering colour. A prime example of his mature style can be seen in Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway, where the objects are barely recognizable. The intensity of hue and interest in evanescent light not only placed Turner's work in the vanguard of English painting, but later exerted an influence upon art in France, as well; the Impressionists, particularly Claude Monet, carefully studied his techniques.  Related Paintings of Joseph Mallord William Turner :. | Undine Giving the Ring to Massaniello, Fisherman of Naples | Musikgesellschaft, Petworth | Moore Park | Canal Grande in Venedig | Church |
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Johnson, Frank Tenney
American Painter, 1874-1939 was a painter of the american west, and he popularized a style of painting cowboys which became known as "The Johnson Moonlight Technique". Somewhere on the Range is an example of Johnson's moonlight technique. To paint his paintings he used knives, fingers and brushes. Johnson was born in Pottawattamie County, Iowa, on his family's farm along the old Overland Trail near a town then called Big Grove and now known as Oakland. Johnson's mother died in December 1886, and by 1888 the family had moved to Milwaukee. There, in 1893, he enrolled in the Milwaukee School of Art (absorbed by Milwaukee State Normal School in 1913), where he studied with a well-known painter of western subjects, Richard Lorenz.
Franz Roubaud
was a Russian painter who created some of the largest and best known panoramic paintings. Roubaud was born on 15 June 1856 in Odessa and attended an art school there. In 1877 he went to Munich, where he studied at the Munich Academy. He then settled in Saint Petersburg, working in the Imperial Academy of Arts and painting huge panorams of historical battles - Storm of Achulgo (1896, Tiflis, now under the restoration in the museun of graphic arts in Makhachkala), Siege of Sevastopol (1854) (unveiled in 1905, damaged during the Siege of Sevastopol (1942), restored in the 1950s), Battle of Borodino (1911, moved to Poklonnaya Hill in Moscow in 1962) and the Russo-Persian War (1804-1813). His works were so large that they had to be exhibited in pavilions specially built for that purpose. In 1913, Roubaud left Russia for Munich, where he died on 13 March 1928.
Johan Christoffer Boklund
(15 July 1817 - 9 December 1880) was a Swedish history, genre, and portrait painter from Kulla-Gunnarstorp in Scania.He was the son of a gardener. At the age of fifteen, Boklund came to Lund, where he worked on illustrations for Sven Nilsson's works on Scandinavian fauna (under the supervision of Magnus Körner). He then became a student at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen where J. L. Lund was his teacher. In 1837, Boklund went to Stockholm and began studying at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts. He made a living as a lithograph and drawing teacher, and produced several small genre paintings of the everyday life (such as Flicka med blomster (English: Girl with flowers) and Köksinteriör (English: Kitchen interior)) and history paintings of the 17th century (such as Gustaf Adolfs afsked från Maria Eleonora (English: Gustaf Adolf's farewell from Maria Eleonora), which was awarded with a medal at the academy). Together with fellow Swedish painter Johan Fredrik Höckert, Boklund traveled to Munich in Germany in 1846 and stayed there for eight years. During the summers he went on study trips to Bavaria, Tyrol, and northern Italy. During this period, Boklund primarily devoted his painting to the history genre with subjects from the 17th century, but he also made some paintings depicting picturesque and architectural interior. In 1853, he sent his painting Den nyfikne trumpetaren (English: The curious trumpet player) home to Sweden and it earned him a scholarship from the government. This allowed Boklund to move to Paris, where he worked at Thomas Couture's atelier from 1854 to 1855. In December 1855 he returned to Sweden.