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 Yissabale | Self-portrait with a Hat | The Prodigal Son | The Flagellation of Christ |
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Spanish Baroque Era Painter, ca.1612-1667
Pierre Edouard Frere
(1819-1886), French painter, studied under Hippolyte Delaroche, entered the cole des Beaux-Arts in 1836 and exhibited first at the Salon in 1843. The marked sentimental tendency of his art makes us wonder at John Ruskin's enthusiastic eulogy which finds in Frere's work the depth of William Wordsworth, the grace of Joshua Reynolds, and the holiness of Fra Angelico. What we can admire in his work is his accomplished craftsmanship and the intimacy and tender homeliness of his conception. Among his chief works are the two paintings, Going to School and Coming from School, The Little Glutton (his first exhibited picture) and L'Exercice (in the 19th century this work was in John Jacob Astor's collection). A journey to Egypt in 1860 resulted in a small series of Orientalist subjects, but the majority of Frere's paintings deal with the life of the kitchen, the workshop, the dwellings of the humble, and mainly with the pleasures and little troubles of the young, which the artist brings before us with humor and sympathy. He was one of the most popular painters of domestic genre in the middle of the 19th century.
Julia Margaret Cameron
British Photographer, 1815-1879,English pioneer photographer, b. Calcutta (now Kolkata). Born and married into the high ranks of the British civil service, Cameron became an intimate of many of the most famous people of her day. In 1864 she became an ardent amateur photographer, demanding long, arduous sittings from her illustrious friends. She sought to illuminate the inner person of her subject, and her celebrated portraits, including those of Tennyson, Carlyle, Ellen Terry, Browning, Darwin, and Longfellow, are remarkably spontaneous. She also pioneered the use of closeups,