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 :. | No title | No title | Storm | Warship | The Saint Gotthard Pass (mk10) |
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Felice Boscarati
Italian Verona, 1721 - Venezia, 1807
Benvenuto Tisi
(1481 - September 6, 1559) was a Late-Renaissance-Mannerist Italian painter of the School of Ferrara. Garofalo's career began attached to the court of the Duke d'Este. His early works have been described as "idyllic", but they often conform to the elaborate conceits favored by the artistically refined Ferrarese court. Born in Ferrara, Tisi is claimed to have apprenticed under Panetti and perhaps Costa and was a contemporary, and sometimes collaborator with Dosso Dossi. In 1495 he worked at Cremona under Boccaccino, who initiated him into Venetian colouring. He may have spent three years (1509 - 1512), in Rome. This led to a stylized classical style, more influenced by Giulio Romano. Invited by a Ferrarese gentleman, Geronimo Sagrato, to Rome, he worked briefly under Raphael in the decoration of the Stanza della Segnatura. From Rome family affairs recalled him to Ferrara; there Duke Alfonso I commissioned him to execute paintings, along with the Dossi, in the Delizia di Belriguardo and in other palaces. Thus the style of Tisi partakes of the Lombard, the Roman and the Venetian modes. He painted extensively in Ferrara, both in oil and in fresco, two of his principal works being the "Massacre of the Innocents" (1519), in the church of S. Francesco, and his masterpiece "Betrayal of Christ" (1524). For the former he made clay models for study and a clay figure. He continued constantly at work until in 1550 blindness overtook him, painting on all feast-days in monasteries for the love of God. He had married at the age forty-eight, and died at Ferrara on the 6th (or 16th) of September 1559, leaving two children. Garofalo combined sacred inventions with some very familiar details. A certain archaism of style, with a strong glow of colour, suffices to distinguish from the true method of Raphael even those pictures in which he most closely resembles the great masterthis sometimes very closely; but the work of Garofalo is seldom free from a certain trim pettiness of feeling and manner.
william holman hunt,o.m.,r.w.s
1827-1910 English painter. He worked as an office clerk in London from 1839 to 1843, attending drawing classes at a mechanics' institute in the evenings and taking weekly lessons from the portrait painter Henry Rogers. Holman Hunt overcame parental opposition to his choice of career in 1843, and this determined attitude and dedication to art could be seen throughout his working life. In July 1844, at the third attempt, he entered the Royal Academy Schools. His earliest exhibited works, such as Little Nell and her Grandfather (exh. British Institution, 1846; Sheffield, Graves A.G.), reveal few traces of originality, but the reading of John Ruskin's Modern Painters in 1847 was of crucial importance to Holman Hunt's artistic development. It led him to abandon the ambitious Christ and the Two Marys (Adelaide, A.G. S. Australia) in early 1848, when he realized its traditional iconography would leave his contemporaries unmoved. His next major work, the Flight of Madeline and Porphyro during the Drunkenness Attending the Revelry (1848; London, Guildhall A.G.), from John Keats's 'Eve of St Agnes', though displaced into a medieval setting, dramatized an issue dear to contemporary poets and central to Holman Hunt's art: love and youthful idealism versus loyalty to one's family. His first mature painting, it focuses on a moment of psychological crisis in a cramped and shallow picture space.