1649-1723 Dutch (Resident in UK) Sir Godfrey Kneller Galleries was the leading portrait painter in England during the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and was court painter to British monarchs from Charles II to George I. His major works include The Chinese Convert (1687); a series of four portraits of Isaac Newton painted at various junctures of the latter's life; a series of ten reigning European monarchs, including King Louis XIV of France; over 40 "Kit-cat portraits" of members of the Kit-Cat Club; and ten "beauties" of the court of William III, to match a similar series of ten beauties of the court of Charles II painted by his predecessor as court painter, Sir Peter Lely. Sir John Vanbrugh in Godfrey Kneller's Kit-cat portrait, considered one of Kneller's finest portraits.Kneller was born Gottfried Kniller in L??beck, Germany. Kneller studied in Leiden, but became a pupil of Ferdinand Bol and Rembrandt in Amsterdam. He worked in Rome and Venice in the early 1670s, painting historical subjects and portraits, and later moved to Hamburg. He came to England in 1674, at the invitation of the Duke of Monmouth, accompanied by his brother, John Zacharias Kneller, who was an ornamental painter. He was introduced to, and painted a portrait of, Charles II. In England, Kneller concentrated almost entirely on portraiture. He founded a studio which churned out portraits on an almost industrial scale, relying on a brief sketch of the face with details added to a formulaic model, aided by the fashion for gentlemen to wear full wigs. His portraits set a pattern that was followed until William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds. Nevertheless, he established himself as a leading portrait artist in England. When Sir Peter Lely died in 1680, Kneller was appointed Principal Painter to the Crown by Charles II. In the 1690s, Kneller painted the Hampton Court Beauties depicting the most glamorous ladies-in-waiting of the Royal Court for which he received his knighthood from William III. He produced a series of "Kit-cat" portraits of 48 leading politicians and men of letters, members of the Kit-Cat Club. Created a baronet by King George I, he was also head of the Kneller Academy of Painting and Drawing 1711-1716 in Great Queen Street, London. His paintings were praised by Whig luminaries such as John Dryden, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Alexander Pope. Kneller died of fever in 1723 and his remains were interred in Twickenham Church (he was a churchwarden there when the 14th century nave collapsed in 1713 and was involved in the plans for its reconstruction). The site of the house he built in 1709 in Whitton near Twickenham is now occupied by the mid-19th century Kneller Hall, home of the Royal Military School of Music   Related Paintings of Sir Godfrey Kneller :. | Sir Isaac Newton | Margaret Cecil Countess of Ranelagh (mk25 | Queen Anne | Charles Montagu | Self Portrait |
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Joseph-Siffred Duplessis
(22 September 1725 - 1 April 1802) was a French painter, known for the clarity and immediacy of his portraits. He was born in Carpentras, near Avignon, into a family with an artistic bent and received his first training from his father, a surgeon and talented amateur, then with Joseph-Gabriel Imbert (1666-1749), who had been a pupil of Charles Le Brun. From 1744-47 or later he worked in Rome, in the atelier of Pierre Subleyras, who was also from the south of France, who died in 1749. In Italy Duplessis became fast friends with Joseph Vernet, another Occitan. He returned to Carpentras, spent a brief time in Lyon then arrived about 1752 in Paris, where he was accepted into the Academie de Saint-Luc and exhibited some portraits, which were now his specialty, in 1764, but did not achieve much notice until his exhibition of ten paintings at the Paris salon of 1769, very well received and selected for special notice by Denis Diderot; the Academie de peinture et de sculpture accepted him in the category of portraitist, considered a lesser category at the time. He continued to exhibit at the Paris salons, both finished paintings and sketches, until 1791, and once more, in 1801. His portrait of the Dauphine in 1771 and his appointment as a peintre du Roi assured his success: most of his surviving portraits date from the 1770s and 1780s. He received privileged lodgings in the Galeries du Louvre. In the Revolution, he withdrew to safe obscurity at Carpentras during the Reign of Terror. Afterwards, from 1796, he served as curator at the newly-founded museum formed at Versaillles, so recently emptied of its furnishings at the Revolutionary sales. His uncompromising self-portrait at this time of his life is at Versailles, where he died.
e. j. f. bendemann
Eduard Julius Friedrich Bendemann (3 December 1811, Berlin - 27 December 1889, Dusseldorf) was a German painter. Bendemann was born in Berlin. His father, Anton Heinrich Bendemann, a Jewish banker, monitored his education closely; it was one that would have naturally led him to some sort of technical occupation, but his talent and propensity towards art resulted in his being allowed to pursue other interests. His mother Fanny Eleonore Bendemann nee von Halle, also a daughter of the Jewish banker Joel Samuel von Halle. After he completed elementary school he enrolled in the Wilhelm von Schadow's School in Dusseldorf. In 1830 he went on a school trip to Italy. After a series of jobs, among them with Boas and Ruth, his talent as an artist began to show, especially with his very large 1832 painting titled, The Sad Jews of Babylon which was featured in the Berlin art exhibition. The picture garnered a great deal of attention, which was in part due to the deep and simple feeling and the noble composition of the piece (museum in Cologne). Bendemanns second picture: The Two Girls at the Well (1832), was acquired by the North Rhine-Westphalia art association. Soon thereafter followed Jeremias on the Ruins of Jerusalem for which the artist received a medal in Paris in 1837. This painting was for the most part about the progress of the Jews in Babylon. (Royal Palace in Hanover). His best known work is The Harvest. The artist's first fresco was a symbolic representation of the art at the Poetry Well at the house of his parents-in-law in Berlin. In the year 1838 he was appointed professor of the academy of arts in Dresden, where he had the opportunity to paint even larger frescos. Bendemann was given the task to decorate three halls of the Dresden royal palace, the throne room, the tower room, and the tower hall with wall paintings. In the throne room, on both sides of the throne, there are representations of important rulers and legislators in gold leaf with smaller representations in relief form below, from Moses up to Albrecht III, the King at the time. On the wall facing the throne there are four paintings depicting events from the life of King Heinrich I each with other pictures attached which explain each of the four events. Bendemann died in Dusseldorf.
Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait
(February 5, 1819 -April 28, 1905) was an American artist who is known mostly for his paintings of wildlife. During most of his career, he was associated with the New York City art scene. Tait was born in Lively Hall near Liverpool, England. At eight years old, because his father went bankrupt he was sent to live with relatives in Lancaster. It is during that time that he became attached to animals. Later on, in Manchester, England, Agnew & Zanetti Repository of Art acquired Arthur Tait who began self-learning to paint, as a twelve-year-old boy.