Flemish Baroque Era Painter, 1577-1640 Peter Paul Rubens (June 28, 1577 ?C May 30, 1640) was a prolific seventeenth-century Flemish Baroque painter, and a proponent of an exuberant Baroque style that emphasized movement, color, and sensuality. He is well-known for his Counter-Reformation altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and history paintings of mythological and allegorical subjects. In addition to running a large studio in Antwerp which produced paintings popular with nobility and art collectors throughout Europe, Rubens was a classically-educated humanist scholar, art collector, and diplomat who was knighted by both Philip IV, king of Spain, and Charles I, king of England. Rubens was a prolific artist. His commissioned works were mostly religious subjects, "history" paintings, which included mythological subjects, and hunt scenes. He painted portraits, especially of friends, and self-portraits, and in later life painted several landscapes. Rubens designed tapestries and prints, as well as his own house. He also oversaw the ephemeral decorations of the Joyous Entry into Antwerp by the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand in 1635. His drawings are mostly extremely forceful but not detailed; he also made great use of oil sketches as preparatory studies. He was one of the last major artists to make consistent use of wooden panels as a support medium, even for very large works, but he used canvas as well, especially when the work needed to be sent a long distance. For altarpieces he sometimes painted on slate to reduce reflection problems. His fondness of painting full-figured women gave rise to the terms 'Rubensian' or 'Rubenesque' for plus-sized women. The term 'Rubensiaans' is also commonly used in Dutch to denote such women.  Related Paintings of Peter Paul Rubens :. | Helen and her children | Die Flucht nach Agypten | The Coronation of Marie de Medici | Portrait of A Young Man (mk27) | Tournament in front of Castle Steen |
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ROMNEY, George
English Painter, 1734-1802 The son of a cabinetmaker, George Romney was born in Dalton, Lancashire. He was apprenticed in 1755 to Christopher Steele, a provincial portrait painter, but was largely self-taught. Romney's ambition was to become a history painter. In 1762 he moved to London, where he studied the Duke of Richmond's collection of casts of antique sculpture and established himself as a portraitist. He went to Italy in 1773, and after his return in 1775 he became the favorite painter of high society. Morbidly sensitive and retiring, Romney kept aloof from the social world of his sitters and from the Royal Academy. By 1782 he was under the spell of Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton and the mistress of Nelson, who sat for him as Circe, a Bacchante, Cassandra, the Pythian Priestess, Joan of Arc, St. Cecilia, Mary Magdalene, and other impersonations he suggested. In the 1780s he executed a number of Eton leaving portraits, which established him as the supreme interpreter of aristocratic adolescence in his age. For much of his life in London, Romney was under the wing of the poet William Hayley, who encouraged him in the choice of subjects from Milton and Shakespeare as well as the Bible and Greek tragedy. Romney's history paintings are today chiefly known from engravings, like the dramatic Tempest (1787-1790) commissioned for John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. A large number of drawings for these projects survive. Romney had married early in life an uneducated woman whom he did not bring to London but to whom he returned when his health finally gave way. Ill health and the facility with which he converted his early realistic style into a fashionable sketchlike formula for idealizing his sitters probably account for an unevenness of execution that has partially justified his critics. Unlike Joshua Reynolds, Romney did not enter into the character of his sitters, unless they possessed nervous traits like his own, for example, the moving portrait William Cowper. But he was psychologically involved with the generalized charms of youth, beauty, and breeding that he admired in his aristocratic sitters, and by combining a neoclassic purity of line with free but masterly brushwork he achieved a number of incomparable images which transcend the realism of portraiture.
Bela Ivanyi-Grunwald
(6 May 1867 - 24 September 1940) was a Hungarian painter, a leading member of the Nagybenya artists' colony and founder of the Kecskemet artists' colony. Born in Som, Ivenyi-Grenwald began his artistic studies under Bertalan Szekely and Keroly Lotz at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest (1882-86) and continued them at Munich in 1886-87 and at the Academie Julian in Paris from 1887 to 1890. From 1891 he again worked in Munich; in 1894 he travelled with Ferenc Eisenhut to Egypt, where he painted several oriental-themed works. Beginning in 1889 he had regular exhibitions at the Palace of Art in Budapest. Characteristic of his early pictures is A Hader kardja ("The Warrior's Sword", 1890), a proto-Symbolist treatment of rural genre showing the influence of Jules Bastien-Lepage. After his return to Munich, Ivenyi-Grenwald painted a large-scale genre painting entitled Nihilistek sorsot heznak ("Nihilists Drawing Lots", 1893), a work as notable for its dramatic use of chiaroscuro as for its deeply felt subject-matter. In response to a state commission for the 1896 Millennium Exhibition in Budapest he produced an enormous academic history painting.
Noel Halle
Noël Halle (2 September 1711, Paris - 5 June 1781, Paris) was a French painter, draftsman and printmaker. He was born into a family of artists, the son of Claude-Guy Halle. Halle took the Prix de Rome in 1736. Among his works are Ancient Rome-related The Death of Seneca, Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi and The Justice of Trajan.