de Figueiredo e Melo (Areia, Brazil, 29 April 1843 - Florence, Italy, 7 October 1905) was one of the most important academic painters of Brazil. He was also a writer and a teacher. He moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1854, where he was granted a scholarship to study in the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes (Imperial Academy of Fine Arts). Later he furthered his studies in Europe, at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, being a pupil of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Hippolyte Flandrin and Carle-Horace Vernet, winning much praise for his paintings, and achieving the Doctorate in Sciences at the University of Brussels, in 1868. Returning to Brazil, he produced a great series of masterpieces, including one of the most well known works of art in Brazil: Independence or Death!, depicting the moment when Prince Peter declared the country independent from Portugal, a work that has illustrated History books for elementary schools in Brazil for decades. Living mostly in Florence, Italy but traveling extensively back and forth from Rio de Janeiro, Pedro Am??rico managed to work also as a lecturer and an art historian. He married Carlota de Ara??jo Porto-alegre (1844?C1918), daughter of painter and diplomat Manuel de Ara??jo Porto-alegre, and they had children. Knighted by the German Crown he was also Great Knight of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre. With the proclamation of the Republic in Brazil in 1889, he was elected a deputy of the National Assembly.   Related Paintings of Pedro Americo :. | Fala do Trono | Independency or death | The Emperor's speech | Dead horse | Peace and Concord |
Related Artists:
Polk, Charles Peale
American, 1767-1822 American painter. Orphaned as a child, he was raised in Philadelphia, PA, by his uncle, Charles Willson Peale, who taught him to paint. In 1791 Polk moved to Baltimore, MD, where he achieved limited success as a portrait painter. Seeking commissions, he moved to Frederick, MD, in 1796. Over the next five years during travels as an itinerant limner through western Maryland and Virginia he reached his mature style. Abandoning his academic training, Polk developed a distinctive but naive artistic vocabulary with a heightened palette, electric highlights and an exaggerated attenuation of the human form. The portraits of Isaac Hite and his wife Eleanor Madison Hite, as well as James Madison sr and Eleanor Conway Madison (all Middletown, VA, Belle Grove), were commissioned in 1799 and are accepted as his masterpieces. Isaac Hite also commissioned the quintessentially 'republican' portrait of Thomas Jefferson (New York, Victor Spark priv. col.), executed at Monticello in 1799. In 1801 Polk moved to Washington, DC, working as a clerk in the Treasury. During the next 16 years he painted few portraits in oil
HOOCH, Pieter de
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1629-1684 Dutch painter. He was one of the most accomplished 17th-century Dutch genre painters, excelling in the depiction of highly ordered interiors with domestic themes and merry companies and pioneering the depiction of genre scenes set in a sunlit courtyard. The hallmarks of his art are an unequalled responsiveness to subtle effects of daylight, and views to adjoining spaces, either through a doorway or a window,
Aleksander Kotsis
- born 1836 in Ludwinew (now one of parts of Krakew), died 1877 in Podgerze (also a part of Krakew now)- was a Polish painter renowned for his landscapes, portraits and genre depictions of contemporary rustic scenes. In 1850, he attended the Krakew College of Fine Arts, where he studied under Wojciech Stattler.