1635-1695 Dutch Melchior de Hondecoeter Gallery Melchior d'Hondecoeter (c. 1636 ?C April 3, 1695), Dutch animalier painter, was born at Utrecht, and died in Amsterdam. After the start of his career, he painted virtually exclusively bird subjects, usually exotic or game, in a park-like landscapes. Being the grandson of Gillis d'Hondecoeter and son of Gijsbert d'Hondecoeter, as well as nephew of Jan Baptist Weenix, he was brought up by the last to the profession of painting, when his father died. Of Weenix we know that he married Gilles daughter Josina in 1638. Melchior was, therefore, also related to Jan Weenix. The latter told Arnold Houbraken, in his youth Melchior was extremely religious, praying very loud, so his mother and uncle doubted if they would have him trained as a painter. In 1659 he was working in the Hague and became a member of the painters' academy at the Hague. In 1663 Hondecoeter married Susanne Tradel in Amsterdam. While she was captious and having her sisters living in their house, Hondecoeter spent much time in his garden or drinking in the tavern in the Jordaan. On the Lauriergracht, where he used to live, he was surrounded by art dealers and various painters. Later he moved to a house on Prinsengracht. In 1686 he bought a small countryhouse in Vreeland. Hondecoeter died in the house of his daughter Isabel in Warmoesstraat but was buried in Westerkerk near his house. His inventory lists a small gallow, to keep birds in the right position, and several paintings of Frans Snyders. Melchior began his career with a different speciality from that by which he is usually known. Mr de Stuers affirms that he produced sea-pieces. One of his earliest works is a "Tub with Fish," dated 1655, in the gallery of Brunswick. But Melchior soon abandoned fish for fowl. He acquired celebrity as a painter of birds only, which he represented not exclusively, like Johannes Fyt, as the gamekeeper's perquisite after a day's shooting, or stock of a poulterer's shop, but as living beings with passions, joys, fears and quarrels, to which naturalists will tell us that birds are subject. Without the brilliant tone and high finish of Fyt, his Dutch rival's birds are full of action; and, as Burger truly says, "Hondecoeter displays the maternity of the hen with as much tenderness and feeling as Raphael the maternity of Madonnas."  Related Paintings of Melchior de Hondecoeter :. | Still life with birds | Das Vogelkonzert | Floating Feather | Birds in a Park | The Floating Feather |
Related Artists:
Frederick Remington
1861-1909 Frederic Sackrider Remington (October 4, 1861 - December 26, 1909) was an American painter, illustrator, sculptor, and writer who specialized in depictions of the Old American West, specifically concentrating on the last quarter of the 19th century American West and images of cowboys, American Indians, and the U.S. Cavalry. Remington was the most successful Western illustrator in the ??Golden Age?? of illustration at the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th Century, so much so that the other Western artists such as Charles Russell and Charles Schreyvogel were known during Remington??s life as members of the ??School of Remington??. His style was naturalistic, sometimes impressionistic, and usually veered away from the ethnographic realism of earlier Western artists such as George Catlin. His focus was firmly on the people and animals of the West, with landscape usually of secondary importance, unlike the members and descendants of the Hudson River School, such as Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Moran, who glorified the vastness of the West and the dominance of nature over man. He took artistic liberties in his depictions of human action, and for the sake of his readers?? and publishers?? interest. Though always confident in his subject matter, Remington was less sure about his colors, and critics often harped on his palette, but his lack of confidence drove him to experiment and produce a great variety of effects, some very true to nature and some imagined. His collaboration with Owen Wister on The Evolution of the Cowpuncher, published by Harper??s Monthly in September 1893, was the first statement of the mythical cowboy in American literature, spawning the entire genre of Western fiction, films, and theater that followed. Remington provided the concept of the project, its factual content, and its illustrations and Wister supplied the stories, sometimes altering Remington??s ideas. (Remington??s prototype cowboys were Mexican rancheros but Wister made the American cowboys descendants of Saxons??in truth, they were both partially right, as the first American cowboys were both the ranchers who tended the cattle and horses of the American Revolutionary army on Long Island and the Mexicans who ranched in the Arizona and California territories).
Francesco di Giorgio Martini
Italian Early Renaissance Painter and Sculptor, 1439-ca.1501 was an Italian painter of the Sienese School, a sculptor, an architect and theorist, and a military engineer who built almost seventy fortifications for the Duke of Urbino. Born in Siena, he apprenticed as a painter with Vecchietta. In panels painted for cassoni he departed from the traditional representations of joyful wedding processions in frieze-like formulas to express visions of ideal, symmetrical, vast and all but empty urban spaces rendered in perspective. Francesco di Giorgio is also known for architectural designs and sculptural work for Federico III da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, for whom he built star-shaped fortifications. He composed an architectural treatise Trattato di architettura, ingegneria e arte militare that he worked on for decades and finished sometime after 1482;
Johann Jakob Ulrich
impression atist 28 Feb 1798 -- 17 March 1877. Swiss painter. He first studied under his father and then in Paris in 1822 in the studio of Jean-Victor Bertin. As a student he concentrated on unusual lighting effects in his landscape paintings well before they became a hallmark of the precursors of the Impressionists. In 1824 at the Salon in Paris he first saw paintings by Constable. On a trip to Italy in 1828 he did studies en plein air as preliminary sketches for his studio paintings. His early paintings emphasize brilliant colour, low horizons and scientific observation of cloud formations in a manner similar to Constable's studies, which he actually saw on visits to England in 1832 and 1835. Like Eugene Boudin, Ulrich was interested in poetic evocations of sun, water and effects of atmosphere rather than in the precise delineations of topography typical of Swiss art of that period. From 1824 he showed regularly at the Salons in Paris and in 1837 he returned to Zurich. Because the Swiss public was reluctant to accept his freer,