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 :. | Garden of Love | Crocodile and Hippopotamus Hunt | Perseus Freeing Andromeda | Ceres and Pan | Tournament in front of Castle Steen |
Related Artists:
CARPACCIO, Vittore
Italian High Renaissance Painter, ca.1450-1525
Pieter Codde
1599-1678 Dutch Pieter Codde Locations ), was a Dutch painter of genre works and portraits, also known to be a poet. He is said to have studied with Frans Hals, but it is more likely that his training was with a portrait painter, Barent van Someren (1572 ?C 1632) or possibly with Cornelis van der Voort (1576 ?C 1624). His earliest work is known to be a piece from 1626, Portrait of a Young Man, now in the Ashmolean. Most of his best remembered works were executed in Amsterdam and were small-scale paintings. They were distinctive in their silvery-gray tonalities, and many were musically themed, such as his first known genre work, Dancing Lesson (Louvre) from 1627, Musical Company of 1639, The Lute Player (Philadelphia Museum of Art) and, Concert, a piece now in the Uffizi Gallery. The other piece by Codde in the Uffizi is a genre work, Conversation. Codde also painted historical religious works, such as his Adoration of the Shepherds, from 1645, in the Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam. Though it is unknown whether he studied with Frans Hals, his style is undoubtedly similar in some respects. He was commissioned in 1637 to complete an unfinished work of Hals, Officers of the Company of the Amsterdam Crossbow Civic Guard Under Captain Reynier Reael and Lieutenant Cornelis Michielsz Blaeuw. While the choice of Codde to complete this work by Hals was not an obvious selection at the time, Codde work in the portrait matched the original so well that it is uncertain who painted what, although the Rijksmuseum, which now houses the work, states that Codde??s style is recognizable smoother.
Jacob Philipp Hackert
(September 15, 1737 - April 28, 1807) was a landscape painter from Brandenburg, who did most of his work in Italy. Hackert was born in 1737 in Prenzlau in the Margraviate of Brandenburg (now in Germany). He trained with his father Philipp (a portraitist and painter of animals) and his uncle, before going to the Akademie der Kenste in Berlin in 1758. Later he traveled to Swedish Pomerania and Stockholm, where he painted murals. He spent from 1765 to 1768 in Paris, with the Swiss Artist, Balthasar Anton Dunker, where he focused on painting in gouache. He met and was inspired by Claude Joseph Vernet, who was already famous as a painter of landscapes and seascapes, and the German engraver Johann Georg Wille. In 1768 Hackert left Paris with his brother Georg, and went to Italy, basing himself mainly in Rome and Naples, where he produced many works for Sir William Hamilton. He travelled all over Italy, gaining a reputation as a talented landscape painter. In 1786 he went to work for Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies in Naples. He advised on the creation of a painting restoration laboratory at the Museo di Capodimonte, and supervised the transfer of the Farnese collections from Rome to Naples. By this time he had an international reputation, and won commissions from empress Catherine II of Russia, king Louis XVI of France and others. When Goethe visited Naples in 1786, he and Hackert became friends.