1629-1684 Dutch Pieter de Hooch Galleries De Hooch was born in Rotterdam to Hendrick Hendricksz de Hooch, a bricklayer, and Annetge Pieters, a midwife. He was the eldest of five children and outlived all of his siblings. He studied art in Haarlem under the landscape painter, Nicolaes Berchem. Beginning in 1650, he worked as a painter and servant for a linen-merchant and art collector named Justus de la Grange. His service for the merchant required him to accompany him on his travels to The Hague, Leiden, and Delft, to which he eventually moved. It is likely that de Hooch handed over most of his works to la Grange during this period in exchange for board and other benefits, as this was a common commercial arrangement for painters at the time, and a later inventory recorded that la Grange possessed eleven of his paintings. De Hooch was married in Delft in 1654 to Jannetje van der Burch, by whom he fathered seven children. While in Delft, de Hooch is also believed to have learned from the painters Carel Fabritius and Nicolaes Maes, who were both early members of the Delft School. He became a member of the painters' guild of Saint Luke in 1655, and had moved to Amsterdam by 1661. The early work of de Hooch, like most young painters of his time, was mostly composed of scenes of soldiers in stables and taverns, though he used these to develop great skill in light, color, and perspective rather than to explore an interest in the subject matter. After beginning his family in the mid-1650s, he switched his focus to domestic scenes and family portraits. His work showed astute observation of the mundane details of everyday life while also functioning as well-ordered morality tales. These paintings often exhibited a sophisticated and delicate treatment of light similar to those of Vermeer, who lived in Delft at the same time as de Hooch. 19th century art historians had assumed that Vermeer had been influenced by de Hooch's work, but the opposite is now believed.   Related Paintings of Pieter de Hooch :. | Skittle Players in a Garden | The Courtyard of a House in Delft | The sandwich fur the school | Kartenspieler | Soldiers Playing Cards |
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George Stubbs
1724-1806 George Stubbs Galleries George Stubbs (born in Liverpool on August 25, 1724 ?C died in London July 10, 1806) was a British painter, best known for his paintings of horses. Stubbs was the son of a currier. Information on his life up to age thirty-five is sparse, relying almost entirely on notes made by fellow artist Ozias Humphry towards the end of Stubbs's life. Stubbs was briefly apprenticed to a Lancashire painter and engraver named Hamlet Winstanley, but soon left as he objected to the work of copying to which he was set. Thereafter as an artist he was self-taught. In the 1740s he worked as a portrait painter in the North of England and from about 1745 to 1751 he studied human anatomy at York County Hospital. He had had a passion for anatomy from his childhood, and one of his earliest surviving works is a set of illustrations for a textbook on midwifery which was published in 1751. In 1755 Stubbs visited Italy. Forty years later he told Ozias Humphry that his motive for going to Italy was, "to convince himself that nature was and is always superior to art whether Greek or Roman, and having renewed this conviction he immediately resolved upon returning home". Later in the 1754 he rented a farmhouse in the village of Horkstow,Lincolnshire, and spent 18 months dissecting horses. He moved to London in about 1759 and in 1766 published The anatomy of the Horse. The original drawings are now in the collection of the Royal Academy. Even before his book was published, Stubbs's drawings were seen by leading aristocratic patrons, who recognised that his work was more accurate than that of earlier horse painters such as James Seymour and John Wootton. In 1759 the 3rd Duke of Richmond commissioned three large pictures from him, and his career was soon secure. By 1763 he had produced works for several more dukes and other lords and was able to buy a house in Marylebone, a fashionable part of London, where he lived for the rest of his life. Whistlejacket. National Gallery, London.His most famous work is probably Whistlejacket, a painting of a prancing horse commissioned by the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, which is now in the National Gallery in London. This and two other paintings carried out for Rockingham break with convention in having plain backgrounds. Throughout the 1760s he produced a wide range of individual and group portraits of horses, sometimes accompanied by hounds. He often painted horses with their grooms, whom he always painted as individuals. Meanwhile he also continued to accept commissions for portraits of people, including some group portraits. From 1761 to 1776 he exhibited at the Society of Artists, but in 1775 he switched his allegiance to the recently founded but already more prestigious Royal Academy. Stubbs also painted more exotic animals including lions, tigers, giraffes, monkeys, and rhinoceroses, which he was able to observe in private menageries. He became preoccupied with the theme of a wild horse threatened by a lion and produced several variations on this theme. These and other works became well known at the time through engravings of Stubbs's work, which appeared in increasing numbers in the 1770s and 1780s. Mares and Foals in a Landscape. 1763-68.Stubbs also painted historical pictures, but these are much less well regarded. From the late 1760s he produced some work on enamel. In the 1770s Josiah Wedgwood developed a new and larger type of enamel panel at Stubbs's request. Also in the 1770s he painted single portraits of dogs for the first time, while also receiving an increasing number of commissions to paint hunts with their packs of hounds. He remained active into his old age. In the 1780s he produced a pastoral series called Haymakers and Reapers, and in the early 1790s he enjoyed the patronage of the Prince of Wales, whom he painted on horseback in 1791. His last project, begun in 1795, was A comparative anatomical exposition of the structure of the human body with that of a tiger and a common fowl, engravings from which appeared between 1804 and 1806. Stubbs's son George Townly Stubbs was an engraver and printmaker.
Richard Brakenburgh
(1650, Haarlem - 1702, Haarlem), was a Dutch Golden Age painter. According to Houbraken he was a light-hearted poet from Haarlem. He was the pupil of Hendrik Mommers who went on to paint clever genre scenes in the manner of Adriaen van Ostade. Though some said he was the pupil of Bernard Schendel, they were the same age and painted in similar styles. He was successful enough at his art that his Frisian widow was able to purchase an annuity after his death in Friesland. According to the RKD he is registered in Leeuwarden during the years 1670-1687.He is known for both Italianate landscapes and portraits. He painted similar subjects to those of Schendel, representing merry-makings and drunken assemblies. His pictures are ingeniously composed, and well coloured, something in the manner of Adriaan van Ostade, though greatly inferior. They are painted with facility, although they have the appearance of being very highly finished; and he perfectly understood the management of chiaroscuro. His greatest defect is his incorrect drawing of the figure, which he appears not to have studied from nature. The Vienna Gallery has two 'Peasant Scenes' by him, said to have been painted in 1690; the Berlin Museum one, and the Amsterdam Gallery one. In the Brussels Gallery is a 'Children's Feast,' signed and dated 1698; and the Rotterdam Museum has a 'Doctor's Visit,' signed and dated 1696. In Windsor Castle are two good 'Artists' Studios ' by him. He also sometimes practised the art of engraving. He was the teacher of Wigerus Vitringa, Abraham Pardanus, and Gillis de Winter. He was followed by Jan Steen and Bernardus van Schijndel. He died at Haarlem in December 1702 and was buried in January 1703.
Carl Rahl
Carl Rahl, sometimes spelled Karl Rahl (13 August 1812 - 9 July 1865), was an Austrian painter. Rahl was born in Vienna to Carl Heinrich Rahl (1779 - 1843), an engraver. He attended the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and won a prize at the age of 19. From there he traveled to Munich, Stuttgart, Hungary, and in 1836 to Italy. He remained in Italy from 1836 to 1843, where he in particular studied representatives of the Venetian and Roman schools of art, and painted die Auffindung von Manfreds Leiche (1836). Rahl's style, especially his views on color and perspective, were largely formed during his years in Rome. He returned after 1843 to Vienna for two years, and then led an itinerant life for the next five years, traveling through Holstein, Paris, Rome, Copenhagen, and Munich, making a living as a portrait painter. In this period he painted Manfreds Einzug in Luceria (1846), and die Christenverfolgung in den Katakomben. In 1850, he was appointed professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, but for political reasons he was soon dismissed from the position. He then opened a private art school, which expanded quickly into a studio that produced monumental-scale paintings and enjoyed considerable success. He was commissioned by Greek philanthropist Simon Sinas to paint a number of works for the facade and vestibule of Vienna's Fleischmarkt Greek Church (Ludwig Thiersch being commissioned for the remainder of the frescoes), which was then being rebuilt by architect Theophil Freiherr von Hansen. In addition, Sinas commissioned four paintings depicting heroes of the Greek War of Independence, and a further four paintings to decorate his residence. Rahl decorated the Heinrichshof in 1861 with personifications of Art, Friendship, and Culture, and the Palais Todesco with representations from the mythology of Paris. In 1864, he painted a number of allegorical figures in the stairway of the Waffenmuseum (now part of the Kunsthistorisches Museum). In this period he also painted several frescoes: Mädchen aus der Fremde (in a villa of Gmunden), a composition for a ballroom of a palace in Oldenburg, and a cycle from the tale of the Argonauts. Also, he painted the tympanum of the Athens Academy building, designed by Theophil von Hansen in 1859 and executed by Ernst Ziller (completed in 1885), and paintings in the portico of the Athens university, designed by Christian Hansen (Theophil Hansen's son). The central painting show Bavarian king Otto I surrounded by the Muses; the left hand fresco shows Prometheus bringing fire down from Mount Olympus.