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 :. | Madonna Adored by Angels | Raub der Tochter des Leukippos | Adam and Eve (mk01) | The Fall of Phaeton | Portrat des Erzherzogs Albrecht VII., Regent der sudlichen Niederlande |
Related Artists:
Vasily Tropinin
1776-1857 Russian painter. He was born a serf and in 1790 was apprenticed to a pastrycook in St Petersburg. From 1793 he attended classes at the Academy of Art there, in 1799 becoming a pupil of the portrait painter Stepan Shchukin (1762-1828). In 1804 he was sent to work as a pastrycook and manservant on an estate in the Ukraine owned by his master, General Morkov. Tropinin's Ukrainian period (1804-21) was interrupted by frequent, often protracted, visits to Moscow. During these years he copied a great deal, drew landscapes from nature and also painted religious subjects. His early style is painterly and distinguished by freedom of execution and skill in the use of colour, but the compositions are derivative and the drawing weak: The Spinner (1820s), The Lacemaker (1823), Wedding in the Village of Kukavka, Podolsky Province and Girl with a Bird (all Moscow, Tret'yakov Gal.). Portraiture, however, began to take on a more important place in his work; the best of this period is the Portrait of Arseny, the Artist's Son (1818; Moscow, Tret'yakov Gal.), especially notable for its use of colour. Tropinin captured perfectly the child's spontaneous vision of the world, his sensitive spirit and openness. While in Moscow from 1813 to 1818, he portrayed a series of important cultural figures that brought him great popularity. He was freed from serfdom on 8 May 1823 and shortly thereafter he became a nominee to the Academy for his paintings The Lacemaker
George John Pinwell,RWS
1842-1875 English illustrator and painter. He was born in humble circumstances and was largely untrained. He was briefly a student at St Martin's Lane Art School and at Heatherley's. From 1863 he contributed woodblock illustrations to magazines, establishing his reputation in 1865 with the Dalziel brothers' editions of The Arabian Nights and The Works of Oliver Goldsmith. Pinwell's finest drawings were commissioned for the Dalziels' poetry gift-books. With another illustrator, John William North (1842-1924), he worked at Halsway Manor in Somerset in 1865, experimenting with formal effects based on the structure of stone farm buildings or on the wooden beams of barn interiors (his drawings do not seem to have survived). Some of the illustrations for A Round of Days (1866) and Wayside Posies (1867) present an ideal vision of the countryside, but a vein of social concern is also present. In The Journey's End, from Wayside Posies, a strolling player lies dead, worn out by hardship and hunger. For an illustrated edition of Jean Ingelow's Poems (1867),
Giovanni Battista Paggi
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1554-1627 Italian painter and theorist. As the son of a newly inscribed nobleman, he received a Renaissance gentleman's education, but as an artist he was it seems self-taught, despite the encouragement of Luca Cambiaso. The gentleman who then set up as a painter was obliged to give his work to patrons, sometimes expecting future remuneration; but when one patron reneged on payment in 1581, Paggi mortally wounded him and was banished from Genoa. He was given protection by Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and settled in Florence. A fresco of St Catherine Converting Two Criminals (1582), painted for Niccol? Gaddi's family chapel at S Maria Novella and thoroughly Florentine in manner, established Paggi's reputation at the Medici court. He painted ephemeral decorations, portraits (all untraced) and altarpieces for many Florentine churches and for the cathedrals of San Gimignano (c. 1590), Pistoia (1591-3) and Lucca (1597-8), having his studio in a house owned by Federico Zuccaro.