French Baroque Era Painter, 1594-1665
French painter and draughtsman, active in Italy. His supreme achievement as a painter lies in his unrivalled but hard-won capacity to subordinate dramatic narrative and the expression of extreme states of human passions to the formal harmony of designs based on the beauty and precision of abstract forms. The development of his art towards this end was focused on the search for a point of equilibrium and synthesis between the forces of the Classical and the Baroque around which most critical debate in Rome was concentrated during the 1630s. Poussin did not aspire to the classicism of Raphael's idealized human forms or Michelangelo's re-embodiment of the physical splendours of the antique world, nor did he attempt to vie with the bravura and energy of Annibale Carracci's treatment of Classical mythology in the Galleria of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Equally he was not concerned with the illusionistic effects and heightened emotionalism of Baroque artists such as Pietro da Cortona and Lanfranco. He was concerned above all with interpreting his subject-matter, whether Classical or religious, and telling a story with the greatest possible concentration of emotional response, Related Paintings of POUSSIN, Nicolas :. | Venus Presenting Arms to Aeneas (detail) af | Bacchanal before a Statue of Pan zg | Tanecred and Erminia | The Triumph of Neptune (detail) af | L.Hiver ou Le deluge | Related Artists:
James BaynesJames Baynes (5 April 1766 ?C 12 May 1837) was an English watercolour painter and drawing-master.
Little is known of his family apart from the fact that he was born in Lancaster as the song of a local tradesman and was the eldest of six children, his grandfather being a Catholic priest in Kirkby Lonsdale where his father was born. As a boy he showed a love of the arts and had been employed to draw heads and work devices until Dr. Campbell, a local Physician, having seen some of these works sent some sketches to his friend George Romney. The young Baynes was then sent to London to study under Romney at the expense of Dr. Campbell.
In 1784, at the age of 18 he became a student at the Royal Academy. He wedded Mary Mann (1766-1845) in 1785 at Marylebone Church, London. Their son, Thomas Mann Baynes (1794-1854), was also became a noted watercolour artist.
Theo van DoesburgDutch
1883-1931
Dutch painter, architect, designer and writer. He was officially registered as the son of Wilhelm Kepper and Henrietta Catharina Margadant, but he was so convinced that his mother second husband, Theodorus Doesburg, was his father that he took his name. Little is known of his early life, but he began painting naturalistic subjects c. 1899. In 1903 he began his military service, and around the same time he met his first wife, Agnita Feis, a Theosophist and poet. Between about 1908 and 1910, much influenced by the work of Honor Daumier, he produced caricatures, some of which were later published in his first book De maskers af! (1916). Also during this period he painted some Impressionist-inspired landscapes and portraits in the manner of George Hendrik Breitner. Between 1914 and 1915 the influence of Kandinsky became clear in such drawings as Streetmusic I and Streetmusic II (The Hague, Rijksdienst Beeld. Kst) and other abstract works.
Thomas GirtinEnglish Romantic Painter, 1775-1802
English painter, draughtsman and printmaker. With his rival, J. M. W. Turner, he extended the technical possibilities of watercolour and in doing so demonstrated that watercolours could have the visual impact and emotional range of oils. Although close in style throughout the 1790s, by 1800 Turner and Girtin were beginning to diverge: whereas the former dissolved forms to express his idea of Nature in a state of flux, the latter sought out a landscape's underlying patterns to convey his awe of Nature's permanence as well as its grandeur. Girtin's reduction of landscape to simple and monumental forms