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 :. | Helene Fourment and her Eldest Son Frans | Venus at a Mirror | Portrait of Yissabale | A Peasant Kermis (mk01) | The Judgement of Paris |
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CHRISTUS, Petrus
Netherlandish Northern Renaissance Painter, ca.1410-1473
ANDREA DA MURANO
Italian painter, Venetian school (known 1462-1502) Italian painter. He is first recorded working as a gilder at S Zaccaria, Venice, in 1463-5. He was one of a number of artists from the island of Murano. Among these he is closest to Bartolomeo Vivarini, whose pupil he may have been. The two collaborated in 1468 on a narrative canvas (destr.) for the Scuola di S Marco, Venice, which probably depicted scenes from the Life of Abraham. The rather harsh sculptural quality of his forms owes much to the influence of Mantegna and Donatello in Padua, and his work has often been associated (and sometimes confused) with that of Andrea del Castagno. He did not, however, ignore the more recent developments of Giovanni Bellini. His triptych depicting SS Vincent Ferrer, Roch, Sebastian and Peter Martyr, with a lunette of the Madonna of Mercy and Four Saints (Venice, Accad.), probably painted in the late 1470s, shows a real concern with light and colour. By the mid-1480s Andrea had settled in Castelfranco on the mainland, chiefly painting altarpieces in the (by then well established) Venetian sacra conversazione form. The altarpiece (1484-1502) in the parish church at Trebaseleghe, nr Padua, is a variation on the form, with Christ embracing the plague saints Sebastian and Roch above and other saints and musicians below, all showing the high degree of expression characteristic of his works. It is one of his finest paintings and also perhaps the most expensive Venetian altarpiece of its day. The altarpiece depicting the Virgin Enthroned with SS Peter, Nicholas of Bari, John the Baptist and Paul (1502; Mussolente, Santuario della Madonna dell' Acqua) is typical of Andrea's work and shows both the strengths and limitations of his art: firm draughtsmanship and expressive qualities combined with a rather conservative composition and somewhat ungainly figures.
Franz von Lenbach
Shrobenhausen 1836-Munich 1904 German painter. The son of a master builder, he trained for his father's profession at the Kenigliche Landwirtschafts- und Gewerbeschule in Landshut, also working from 1851 in the sculpture studio of Anselm Sickinger (1807-73) in Munich. His elder brother, Karl August Lenbach (1828-47), had already become involved with painting, and it was through him that Franz Lenbach met Johann Baptist Hofner (1832-1913), an artist who had studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Kenste in Munich. They went on sketching expeditions together, and Hofner introduced him to plein-air painting. After spending two semesters at the Polytechnische Schule in Augsburg (1852-3), and some months in the studio of Albert Grefle (1807-89), a portrait painter in Munich, Lenbach entered the Akademie in Munich in 1854. In 1857 he attended the classes of Karl Theodor Piloty (later von Piloty), who was renowned for his history paintings. Lenbach produced his first important painting, the Angel Appearing to Hagar in the Desert (1858; destr.), while in this class, followed by Peasants Trying to Take Shelter from a Thunderstorm in a Chapel (1858; destr.; oil sketch, Schweinfurt, Samml. Schefer). The sale of this picture, together with a scholarship, enabled him to accompany Piloty on a journey to Rome with Ferdinand von Piloty (1828-95),