1618-1680 Dutch (Resident In UK) Sir Peter Lely Art Locations Sir Peter Lely (14 September 1618 - 30 November 1680) was a painter of Dutch origin. He was the most popular portrait artist in England from soon after he arrived in the country in the 1640s to his death. He also owned a major collection of art, especially drawings by other artists. Lely was born Pieter van der Faes to Dutch parents in Soest in Westphalia,[1] where his father was an officer serving in the armed forces of the Elector of Brandenburg. Lely studied painting in Haarlem, where he may have been apprenticed to Pieter de Grebber. He become a master of the Guild of Saint Luke in Haarlem in 1637. He is reputed to have adopted the surname "Lely" (also occasionally spelled Lilly) from a heraldic lily on the gable of the house where his father was born in The Hague. He arrived in London in around 1641. His early English paintings, mainly mythological or religious scenes, or portraits set in a pastoral landscape, show influences from Anthony van Dyck and the Dutch baroque. Lely's portraits were well received, and he succeeded Anthony van Dyck as the most fashionable portrait artist in England. He became a freeman of the Painter-Stainers' Company in 1647 and was portrait artist to Charles I, but his talent ensured that his career was uninterrupted by Charles's execution, and he served Oliver Cromwell, whom he painted "warts and all", and Richard Cromwell. In the years around 1650 the poet Sir Richard Lovelace wrote two poems about Lely ?? Peinture and "See what a clouded majesty...." Two ladies from the Lake family, 1650. Held by the Tate Gallery.[1]After the English Restoration in 1660, Lely was appointed as Charles II's Principal Painter in Ordinary in 1661, with a stipend of £200 per year, as Van Dyck had enjoyed in the previous Stuart reign. Lely became a naturalised British subject in 1662. Demand was high, and Lely and his school were prolific. After Lely painted a sitter's head, Lely's pupils would often complete the portrait in one of a series of numbered poses. As a result Lely is the first English painter who has left "an enormous mass of work." Among his most famous paintings are a series of 10 portraits of ladies from the Royal court, known as the "Windsor Beauties", formerly at Windsor Castle but now at Hampton Court Palace; a similar series for Althorp; a series of 12 of the admirals and captains who fought in the Second Anglo-Dutch War, known as the "Flagmen of Lowestoft", now mostly owned by the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich; and his Susannah and the Elders at Burghley House. His most famous non-portrait work is probably Nymphs by a fountain in Dulwich Picture Gallery. Lely played a significant role in introducing the mezzotint to Britain, as he realized its possibilities for publicising his portraits. He encouraged Dutch mezzotinters to come to Britain to copy his work, laying the foundations for the English mezzotint tradition. Lely was knighted in 1680. He died soon afterwards at his easel in Covent Garden, while painting a portrait of the Duchess of Somerset. He was buried at St Paul's Church, Covent Garden. He collected Old Masters during his life, with examples by Veronese, Titian, Claude Lorrain and Rubens, and a fabulous collection of drawings. His collection was broken up and sold after his death, raising the immense sum of £26,000. Some items in it which had been acquired by Lely from the Commonwealth dispersal of Charles I's art collections, such as the Lely Venus, were re-acquired by the royal collection.  Related Paintings of Sir Peter Lely :. | A Boy as a Shepherd | Hnrietta Maria of France,Queen of England | Catherine of Braganza | Charles Dormer, 2nd Earl of Carnarvon | Portrait of Barbara Villiers. |
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Roger Van Der Weyden
c.1399-1464 Rogier van der Weyden was the son of Henri de le Pasture, a cutler in Tournai, and Agn?s de Watreloz. His birthdate is estimated from the facts that he was stated to be 35 in April 1435 and 43 in September 1441. Before or in 1427 he married Elisabeth Goffaert (c. 1405-77), whose father was a prosperous shoemaker in Brussels. Rogier may have lived for a time in Brussels: his eldest child Cornelis (b 1427) was sometimes referred to as 'de Bruxella' but was not necessarily a native of Brussels. On 5 March 1427 'Rogelet de le Pasture, natif de Tournai' was apprenticed to the Tournai painter Robert Campin. This Rogelet duly completed his apprenticeship in 1431 and on 1 August 1432 became a master of the Tournai guild. Despite much debate, it would appear that Rogelet was Rogier van der Weyden, though it has also been argued that in 1427 Rogier was a married man well past the normal age of apprenticeship and that Rogelet must have been a second Tournai painter of the same name. JACQUES DARET, however, was in his twenties when in 1428 he was apprenticed to Campin, and other instances can be cited of married apprentices. The political situation at Tournai in 1427-8 was unusual, and the guild system was not functioning normally.
Thomas Gainsborough
1727-1788 British Thomas Gainsborough Locations English painter, draughtsman and printmaker. He was the contemporary and rival of Joshua Reynolds, who honoured him on 10 December 1788 with a valedictory Discourse (pubd London, 1789), in which he stated: If ever this nation should produce genius sufficient to acquire to us the honourable distinction of an English School, the name of Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity, in the history of Art, among the very first of that rising name. He went on to consider Gainsborough portraits, landscapes and fancy pictures within the Old Master tradition, against which, in his view, modern painting had always to match itself. Reynolds was acknowledging a general opinion that Gainsborough was one of the most significant painters of their generation. Less ambitious than Reynolds in his portraits, he nevertheless painted with elegance and virtuosity. He founded his landscape manner largely on the study of northern European artists and developed a very beautiful and often poignant imagery of the British countryside. By the mid-1760s he was making formal allusions to a wide range of previous art, from Rubens and Watteau to, eventually, Claude and Titian. He was as various in his drawings and was among the first to take up the new printmaking techniques of aquatint and soft-ground etching. Because his friend, the musician and painter William Jackson (1730-1803), claimed that Gainsborough detested reading, there has been a tendency to deny him any literacy. He was, nevertheless, as his surviving letters show, verbally adept, extremely witty and highly cultured. He loved music and performed well. He was a person of rapidly changing moods, humorous, brilliant and witty. At the time of his death he was expanding the range of his art, having lived through one of the more complex and creative phases in the history of British painting. He painted with unmatched skill and bravura; while giving the impression of a kind of holy innocence, he was among the most artistically learned and sophisticated painters of his generation. It has been usual to consider his career in terms of the rivalry with Reynolds that was acknowledged by their contemporaries; while Reynolds maintained an intellectual and academic ideal of art, Gainsborough grounded his imagery on contemporary life, maintaining an aesthetic outlook previously given its most powerful expression by William Hogarth. His portraits, landscapes and subject pictures are only now coming to be studied in all their complexity; having previously been viewed as being isolated from the social, philosophical and ideological currents of their time, they have yet to be fully related to them. It is clear, however, that his landscapes and rural pieces, and some of his portraits, were as significant as Reynolds acknowledged them to be in 1788.
Martinus Rorbye
(17 May 1803 - 29 August 1848) was a Danish painter, known both for genre works and landscapes. He was a central figure of the Golden Age of Danish painting during the first half of the 19th century. The most traveled of the Danish Golden Age painters, he traveled both north to Norway and Sweden and south to Italy, Greece and Constantinople. He was also the first Danish painter to take to painting in Skagen at the northern top of Jutland, almost half a century before the thriving community of Skagen Painters formed and came to fame. Martinus Rørbye was born in Drammen in Norway to Danish parents Ferdinand Henrik Rørbye and his wife Frederikke Eleonore Catherine de Stockfleth. His father was a warehouse manager and later Superintendent of War, and had moved the family to Norway shortly before Martinus' birth. The family returned to Denmark when Martinus was 12 years old, shortly after the cession of Norway from Denmark in 1814. Martinus was not inclined to schooling, but in 1820 started his studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts at 17 years of age. He studied under Christian August Lorentzen and Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, a strong influence on a generation of artists during the Danish Golden Age. Rørbye was a favorite student of Eckersberg, and they formed a close association. He took to Eckersberges careful attention to nature and his strivings to capture details realistically. He was also greatly influenced by Lorentzenes use of color. He won the Academyes small silver medal in 1824, and the large silver medal in 1828. He competed for the gold medal and won a cash prize. In 1829 he won the small gold medal for his painting Christ healing the blind, which remains in the ownership of the Royal Danish Academy. He never won the large gold medal in spite of repeated attempts.