Spanish 1561-1627 S??nchez Cot??n was born in the town of Orgaz, near Toledo. He was a friend and perhaps pupil of Blas de Prado, an artist famous for his still lifes whose mannerist style with touches of realism, the disciple developed further. Cot??n began by painting altar pieces and religious works. For approximately twenty years, he pursued a successful career in Toledo as an artist, patronized by the city??s aristocracy, painting religious scenes, portraits and still lifes. These paintings found a receptive audience among the educated intellectuals of Toledo society. S??nchez Cot??n executed his notable still lifes around the turn of the seventeenth century, before the end of his secular life. An example (seen above) is Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber (1602, in the San Diego Museum of Art). On August 10, 1603, Juan Sanchez Cotan, then in his forties, closed up his workshop at Toledo to renounce the world and enter the Carthusian monastery Santa Maria de El Paular. He continued his career painting religious works with singular mysticism. In 1612 he was sent to the Granada Charterhouse, he decided to become a monk, and in the following year he entered the Carthusian monastery at Granada as a laybrother. The reasons for this are not clear, though such action was not unusual in Cot??n??s day. Cotan was a prolific religious painter whose work, carried out exclusively for his monastery, reached its peak about 1617 in the cycle of eight great narrative paintings which he painted for the cloister of the Granada Monastery. These depict the foundation of the order of St. Bruno, and the prosecution of the monks in England by the Protestants. Although the painter??s religious works have an archaic air, they also reveal a keen interest in the treatment of light and volumes, and in some respect are comparable with certain works by the Italian Luca Cambiaso whom Cotan knew at the Escorial. While Cotan's religious works are unexceptional, as a still-life painter he ranks with the great names of European painting. In spite of his retreat from the world, Cotan??s influence remained strong. His concern with the relationships among objects and with achieving the illusion of reality through the use of light and shadow was a major influence on the work of later Spanish painters such as Juan van der Hamen, Felipe Ramirez, the brothers Vincenzo and Bartolomeo Carducci and, notably, Francisco de Zurbaran. Sanchez Cotan ended his days universally loved and regarded as a saint. He died in 1627 in Granada.  Related Paintings of Juan Sanchez-Cotan :. | Still Life (nn03) | Still Life jjghjgh | Still Life | still life with game fowl | Still life |
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Francois Barraud
14 November 1899 - 11 September 1934) was a Swiss painter. Barraud was the eldest of four brothers who all painted or sculpted at various points in their lives. The brothers, François, Aime, Aurele and Charles, were largely self-taught artists having been raised as professional plasterers and house painters.Barraud attended evening classes at the local art school in 1911 together with his brothers.In 1919, he exhibited his paintings in La Chaux-de-Fonds and participated in the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Basel.Encouraged by the success of the exhibitions he left Switzerland in 1922, and moved to Reims in France where he worked as a house painter for two years. He married Marie, a French woman, in 1924. Marie subsequently featured as a model in several of his paintings. Around 1924 or 1925, Barraud found work in Paris as an artist and craftsman. While living in Paris he studied painting at the Louvre. François Barraud painted mainly still lifes, female nudes and portraits, including several double portraits of himself and his wife, Marie His precise, realist style of painting developed under the influence of the old Flemish and French masters he had studied at the Louvre. Barraud suffered periods of illness throughout his life and died of tuberculosis in Geneva, in 1934, at the age of 34. Arthur Stoll held a major collection of François Barraud's works. His works are also held in the Musee des beaux-arts in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the Coninx Museum in Zurich and the Foundation for Art, Culture and History in Winterthur.
TORRENTIUS, Johannes
Dutch painter (b. 1589, Amsterdam, d. 1644, Amsterdam). Dutch painter. He was active in Amsterdam, Leiden and Haarlem. In Haarlem in 1627 he was condemned, after severe torture, to 20 years of imprisonment for impiety, blasphemy and his membership of the outlawed Society of Rosicrucians. After having been notified by Sir Dudley Carleton, the British ambassador in The Hague, Charles I of England intervened and brought about Torrentius's release in 1629. Torrentius was subsequently active from 1629 to 1632 in London, which he nevertheless had to leave, again on account of his purportedly immoral mode of life; he returned to Amsterdam. There he was again involved in a trial and died after suffering torture in 1644. His erotic pictures, some of which depicted masterful nudes in mythological settings and are now known only through literary sources, were publicly burnt. A few still-lifes (e.g. Emblematic Still-life, 1614; Amsterdam, Rijksmus.) have survived. These carefully composed works, mostly set before a dark background, recall the work of Jan van de Velde II and the circle of Willem Claesz. Heda.
Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson
(also given as Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Triosson, Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson) January 5, 1767 - December 9, 1824), was a French painter and pupil of Jacques-Louis David, who was part of the beginning of the Romantic movement by adding elements of eroticism through his paintings. Girodet is remembered for his precise and clear style and for his paintings of members of the Napoleonic family.