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 :. | Bathsheba at the Fountain | Portrait of a man as the god Mars | Portrait of Louis XIII of France | Peter Paul Rubens and Frans Snyders, Prometheus Bound, | Christ |
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fredrika bremer
was a Swedish writer and a feminist activist. Fredrika Bremer was born in Åbo (Turku) in Finland but moved with her family to Stockholm when she was three years old. She grew up in Stockholm and in the manor Årsta outside Stockholm. Her father was described as somewhat of a house tyrant, and her mother was a socialite, and she and her sisters where brought up to marry in to the aristocracy; a trip on the continent 1821-1822 was the finishing touch of her upbringing before her debute. Bremer was not comfortable with this role, and was inflicted by a crisis, which she overcame by charitable work in the country around Årsta. In 1828, she debuted as a writer, anonomously, with a series of novels published until 1831, and was soon followed by others. Her novels were romantic stories of the time and concentrates on women in the marriage market; either beautiful and superficial, or unattractive with no hope of joining it, and the person telling the story and watching them is often an independent woman. She wanted a new kind of family life, not focused only on the men of the family, that would allow for women to develop their own talents and personality. By the 1840s, she was an acknowledged part of the culture life in Sweden and was translated to many languages. Politically, she was a liberal, but also felt symphaty for the socialism of the English working class movement
Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin
Russian Painter, 1878-1939 Russian painter. He began his studies in the drawing and painting classes of F. Burov (1843-95) in Samara (1893-5), and he attended Baron Stieglitz's school in St Petersburg from 1895 to 1897. He studied under Abram Arkhipov, Nikolay Kasatkin and Valentin Serov at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture from 1897 to 1905 and at Anton Azb?'s school in Munich (1901). After working in various private studios in Paris between 1905 and 1908, he travelled to Constantinople (now Istanbul), Greece and Italy in 1905 and to Algiers in 1906. On his return to Russia, he held an exhibition in the editorial offices of the magazine Apollon in St Petersburg (1909). From 1911 to 1924 he exhibited with the WORLD OF ART group and from 1925 to 1928 with the FOUR ARTS SOCIETY OF ARTISTS. From the early 1910s Petrov-Vodkin's work was influential in the artistic life of St Petersburg. He attempted to reconcile classical and modern trends. His style was formed under a wide range of influences, often seemingly incompatible: 19th-century Russian painters such as Aleksey Venetsianov,
Reinier Nooms
(c. 1623 - c. 1667), also known as Zeeman (Dutch for "sailor"), was a maritime painter known for his highly detailed paintings and etchings of ships. Nooms was born and died in Amsterdam. He started painting and drawing in his later years, following a rough, drunken life as a sailor. It is not known how he acquired his skill as an artist. His knowledge of ships is evident from his work: ships and foreign locations are depicted with high accuracy and in great detail, and served as an example to other artists of how to depict ships. A widely traveled artist, Nooms visited Paris, Venice and possibly Berlin, and also journeyed along the coast of North Africa. A favourite subject of his paintings were the Dutch victories in the Anglo-Dutch Wars. For instance, he painted the Amalia, the flagship of admiral Maarten Tromp, before the Battle of the Downs in 1639. This painting now hangs in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, UK. His painting of the Battle of Leghorn in 1653 is in the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. In the 1650s, Nooms made a series of etchings of ships and topographical views characterized by a high degree of detail and precision. These etchings served as an example to many artists. The 19th century French etcher Charles Meryon was highly influenced by Noom, whose etchings of Paris cityscapes inspired Meryon to his own series of Paris etchings. Meryon even dedicated some of this work to Nooms in poetic form.