(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 :. | The Russo-Japanese War | Shepherd in a Sheepskin Cloak on a Red Background | Giorgi Saakadze | A Shepherd with His Flock | A Peasant with His Grandson |
Related Artists:
C. G. hellquist

Johann Wilhelm Preyer
painted A Still Life with Peaches and Grapes on a Marble Ledge in 1803-1889
William Ritschel
1864-1949 William Frederic Ritschel (1864-1949) was an impressionist painter who was born in Nuremberg, Germany on July 11, 1864. As a youth, he worked as a sailor and began sketching seascapes. He studied art under Karl Raupp (1837-1918) and Wilhelm von Kaulbach (1805-1874) at the Royal Academy in Munich before immigrating to New York City in 1895. In 1911, he settled in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California and began painting Monterey Peninsula. He died in Carmel in 1949. The Arizona State University Art Museum (Tempe, Arizona), the Art Institute of Chicago, the Crocker Art Museum (Monterey, California), the Davenport Museum of Art (Davenport, Iawa), Fisher Gallery (University of Southern California, Los Angeles), the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Irvine Museum (Irvine, California), the Monterey Museum of Art (Monterey, California), the Museum of Art at Brigham Young University (Provo, Utah), the Newark Museum (Newark, New Jersey), the Oakland Museum of California (Oakland, California), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Philadelphia), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D. C.), Springville Museum of Art (Springville, Utah), and the University of Arizona Museum of Art (Tucson, Arizona) are among the public collections holding works by William Frederic Ritschel