(born Niko Pirosmanashvili; May 5, 1862-1918) was a Georgian primitivist painter. Pirosmani was born in the Georgian village of Mirzaani to a pleasant family in the Kakheti province. His family owned a small vineyard. He was later orphaned and put in the care of his two elder sisters. He moved with them to Tbilisi in 1870. In 1872 he worked as a servant for wealthy families and learned to read and write Russian and Georgian. In 1876 he returned to Mirzaani and worked as a herdsman. Pirosmani gradually taught himself to paint. One of his specialties was painting directly into black oilcloth. In 1882 he opened a workshop in Tbilisi which was unsuccessful. In 1890 he worked as a railroad conductor, and in 1895 worked creating signboards. In 1893 he co-founded a dairy farm in Tbilisi which he left in 1901. Throughout his life Pirosmani, who was always poor, was willing to take up ordinary jobs including housepainting and whitewashing buildings. Although his paintings had some local popularity (about 200 survive) his relationship with professional artists remained uneasy; making a living was always more important to him than abstract aesthetics.  Related Paintings of Niko Pirosmanashvili :. | A Family Celebration | A Nurse with a Baby | A Shepherd with His Flock | Brooder with Chicks | Shepherd in a Sheepskin Cloak on a Red Background |
Related Artists:
Giuseppe Abbati
Italian, 1836-1868 Abbati was born in Naples and received early training in painting from his brother Vincenzo. He participated in Garibaldi 1860 campaign, suffering the loss of his right eye at the Battle of Capua. Afterwards he moved to Florence where, at the Caffe Michelangiolo, he met Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega, and the rest of the artists who would soon be dubbed the Macchiaioli. While his early paintings were interiors, he quickly became attracted to the practice of painting landscapes en plein air. His activity as a painter was interrupted during 1866 when he enlisted again in the army for the Third Independence War, during which he was captured by the Austrians and held in Croatia. Returning to civilian life at the end of the year, he moved to Castelnuovo della Misericordia and spent the final year of his life painting in the countryside. Abbati died at the age of thirty-two in Florence after his own dog bit him, infecting him with rabies. Giuseppe Abbati, The Tower of the Palazzo del Podesta, 1865, oil on wood, 39 x 32 cm.His paintings are characterized by a bold treatment of light effects. He often painted a luminous landscape scene as seen through the doorway of a darkened interior, as in the View from the Wine Cellar of Diego Martelli (1866). Some of his late landscapes are in the greatly elongated horizontal format often favored by the Macchiaioli.
John Peter Russell
(16 June 1858 -22 April 1930) was an Australian impressionist painter. John Peter Russell was born at the Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst, the eldest of four children of John Russell, a Scottish engineer, his wife Charlotte Elizabeth, nee Nicholl, from London. J. P. Russell was a nephew of Sir Peter Nicol Russell. After his father's death J. P. Russell enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London, on 5 January 1881 and studied under Alphonse Legros for three years.Russell then went to Paris to study painting under Fernand Cormon. (His fellow students there included Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Émile Bernard.) Russell was a man of means and having married a beautiful Italian, Mariana Antoinetta Matiocco, he settled at Belle Île off the coast of Brittany, where he established an artists' colony. He would have 11 children with Matiocco, of whom six survived. John Peter Russell: Vincent van Gogh, 1886, Van Gogh Museum, AmsterdamRussell had met Vincent van Gogh in Paris and formed a friendship with him. Van Gogh spoke highly of Russell's work, and after his first summer in Arles in 1888 he sent twelve drawings of his paintings to Russell, to inform him about the progress of his work. Claude Monet often worked with Russell at Belle Île and influenced his style, though it has been said that Monet preferred some of Russell's Belle Île seascapes to his own.
Gerrit Bakhuizen
c.1700-60