1869-1952 was an American painter. Gray was born into a San Francisco family endowed with a broad literary and artistic background. He studied under Arthur Frank Mathews at the San Francisco School of Design and later under William Merritt Chase. While he had some early Impressionistic tendencies, his primary expression was under the Tonalism Mathews had brought back from Paris. He is known for his extraction of beauty from the Northern California landscape. Alexander Gray, Percy's father, was born in England, but found his way to a successful insurance business in San Francisco. As the byproduct of a childhood illness, Percy realized he had talents in art. From 1886 to 1888 he attended the California School of Design, then led by Mathews. From there he went on to become a newspaper illustrator, obtaining a job with the New York Journal. In New York he also studied at the Art Students League. He was dispatched from New York to cover the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, but decided to remain in his native city where he would then take up his painting career. Gray's first pieces, headland seascapes, were exhibited in 1907; soon thereafter he addressed in watercolor eucalyptus groves and fields of California wildflowers. These subjects would become signatures of his work. Originally Gray's works were oils; however, he eventually developed an allergy to oil paints, and therefore switched to using watercolors as his primary medium. [1] From early on the critics marvelled at his ability to infuse realistic depictions of nature with a mystical and poetic quality. He was clearly applying the precepts of his mentor William Merritt Chase in exaggeration of light and color. From 1912 to 1923 Gray lived in Burlingame, California about twenty miles south of San Francisco, while keeping his studio in the city itself. At the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition he won a bronze medal for his watercolor Out of the Desert, Oregon. Having been a bachelor for 53 years, Gray surprised his friends by marrying. He and his bride moved to the Bonificio Adobe in Monterey, where seascapes and cypress dominated his later works.   Related Paintings of Percy Gray :. | Mandaro Posing as a Plainsman (mk42) | Monterey Dunes (mk42) | San Mateo Oaks (mk42) | Early Meadow Landscape (mk42) | Medicine Crow (mk42) |
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Vicente Lopez y Portana
(September 19, 1772, Valencia, Spain CJuly 22, 1850, Madrid, Spain) was a Spanish painter, considered the best portrait painter of his time. Vicente Lepez y Portaña was born in Valencia on September 19, 1772. His parents were Cristebal Lepez Sanchordi and Manuela Portaña Meer. Vicente Lepez began formally studying painting in Valencia at the age of thirteen, he was a disciple of father Antonio de Villanueva, a Franciscan monk, and he studied at the Academy of San Carlos in his native city. He was seventeen when he won first prize in drawing and coloring receiving a scholarship to study in the prestigious Academia Real de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. For the following three years in Madrid, he apprenticed with the Valencian painter, Mariano Salvador Maella. Vicente Lepez returned to Valencia in 1794 and subsequently became vice-director of painting at the Academy where he had studied as a boy. In 1795 he married Maria Piquer, they had two sons: Bernardo Lepez Piquer and Luis (1802-1865), who were also painters, following their father's style but with little accomplishments. In 1801 Lepez was named President of the Academy of San Carlos.
Henry F Darby
1820-1897
CERUTI, Giacomo
Italian Painter, 1698-1767 Italian painter. He was one of a group of artists working in Bergamo and Brescia who observed reality with an unusual freshness and directness. He painted religious subjects and portraits but was most distinguished as a painter of genre and low-life scenes. These included many pictures of beggars and vagabonds ( pitocchi), hence his nickname 'il Pitocchetto'. He married in Milan in 1717 but settled in Brescia in 1721. In 1723 he received a horse in payment for three altarpieces and four frescoes for the parish church of Rino di Sonico; they were mediocre works executed in an unadventurous blend of Lombard and Venetian traditions derived from contemporary Venetian painters working in Brescia. Ceruti's early portraits and genre scenes are less conventional and more intensely felt; in 1724 he signed and dated the strikingly naturalistic portrait of Giovanni Maria Fenaroli