Dutch Post-Impressionist Painter, 1853-1890 Vincent Willem van Gogh (30 March 1853 ?C 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist artist. Some of his paintings are now among the world's best known, most popular and expensive works of art. Van Gogh spent his early adult life working for a firm of art dealers. After a brief spell as a teacher, he became a missionary worker in a very poor mining region. He did not embark upon a career as an artist until 1880. Initially, Van Gogh worked only with sombre colours, until he encountered Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism in Paris. He incorporated their brighter colours and style of painting into a uniquely recognizable style, which was fully developed during the time he spent at Arles, France. He produced more than 2,000 works, including around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches, during the last ten years of his life. Most of his best-known works were produced in the final two years of his life, during which time he cut off part of his left ear following a breakdown in his friendship with Paul Gauguin. After this he suffered recurrent bouts of mental illness, which led to his suicide. The central figure in Van Gogh's life was his brother Theo, who continually and selflessly provided financial support. Their lifelong friendship is documented in numerous letters they exchanged from August 1872 onwards. Van Gogh is a pioneer of what came to be known as Expressionism. He had an enormous influence on 20th century art, especially on the Fauves and German Expressionists.  Related Paintings of Vincent Van Gogh :. | Der Park des Spitals St-Paul in Saint-Remy | bottles and white bowl | Still life:Glass with Wild Flowers (nn04) | Still life with Basket of Apples (nn04) | The Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum,Arles,at Night (nn04) |
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Gunnar Berg
(21 May 1863 - 23 December 1893) was a Norwegian painter, known for his paintings of his native Lofoten. He principally painted memorable scenes of the everyday life of the local fishermen. Gunnar Berg was born on Svinøya in Svolvær on Lofoten, Nordland County, Norway. He was the oldest of 12 siblings born to a landlord and merchant, Lars Thodal Walnum Berg (1830-1903) and Lovise Johnsen (1842-1921). From 1875-81, he attended Cathedral School in Trondheim, and also took private lessons in drawing and painting by the artist H. J. Johannessen. He later attended a trade school in Bergen. He was first employed as a merchant. He later studied to became an artist.
Jacob Philipp Hackert
(September 15, 1737 - April 28, 1807) was a landscape painter from Brandenburg, who did most of his work in Italy. Hackert was born in 1737 in Prenzlau in the Margraviate of Brandenburg (now in Germany). He trained with his father Philipp (a portraitist and painter of animals) and his uncle, before going to the Akademie der Kenste in Berlin in 1758. Later he traveled to Swedish Pomerania and Stockholm, where he painted murals. He spent from 1765 to 1768 in Paris, with the Swiss Artist, Balthasar Anton Dunker, where he focused on painting in gouache. He met and was inspired by Claude Joseph Vernet, who was already famous as a painter of landscapes and seascapes, and the German engraver Johann Georg Wille. In 1768 Hackert left Paris with his brother Georg, and went to Italy, basing himself mainly in Rome and Naples, where he produced many works for Sir William Hamilton. He travelled all over Italy, gaining a reputation as a talented landscape painter. In 1786 he went to work for Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies in Naples. He advised on the creation of a painting restoration laboratory at the Museo di Capodimonte, and supervised the transfer of the Farnese collections from Rome to Naples. By this time he had an international reputation, and won commissions from empress Catherine II of Russia, king Louis XVI of France and others. When Goethe visited Naples in 1786, he and Hackert became friends.
Giorgione
Italian 1476-1510 Giorgione Galleries For his home town of Castelfranco, Giorgione painted the Castelfranco Madonna, an altarpiece in sacra conversazione form ?? Madonna enthroned, with saints on either side forming an equilateral triangle. This gave the landscape background an importance which marks an innovation in Venetian art, and was quickly followed by his master Giovanni Bellini and others.Giorgione began to use the very refined chiaroscuro called sfumato ?? the delicate use of shades of color to depict light and perspective ?? around the same time as Leonardo. Whether Vasari is correct in saying he learnt it from Leonardo's works is unclear ?? he is always keen to ascribe all advances to Florentine sources. Leonardo's delicate color modulations result from the tiny disconnected spots of paint that he probably derived from manuscript illumination techniques and first brought into oil painting. These gave Giorgione's works the magical glow of light for which they are celebrated. Most entirely central and typical of all Giorgione's extant works is the Sleeping Venus now in Dresden, first recognized by Morelli, and now universally accepted, as being the same as the picture seen by Michiel and later by Ridolfi (his 17th century biographer) in the Casa Marcello at Venice. An exquisitely pure and severe rhythm of line and contour chastens the sensuous richness of the presentment: the sweep of white drapery on which the goddess lies, and of glowing landscape that fills the space behind her, most harmoniously frame her divinity. The use of an external landscape to frame a nude is innovative; but in addition, to add to her mystery, she is shrouded in sleep, spirited away from accessibility to her conscious expression. It is recorded by Michiel that Giorgione left this piece unfinished and that the landscape, with a Cupid which subsequent restoration has removed, were completed after his death by Titian. The picture is the prototype of Titian's own Venus of Urbino and of many more by other painters of the school; but none of them attained the fame of the first exemplar. The same concept of idealized beauty is evoked in a virginally pensive Judith from the Hermitage Museum, a large painting which exhibits Giorgione's special qualities of color richness and landscape romance, while demonstrating that life and death are each other's companions rather than foes. Apart from the altarpiece and the frescoes, all Giorgione's surviving works are small paintings designed for the wealthy Venetian collector to keep in his home; most are under two foot (60 cm) in either dimension. This market had been emerging over the last half of the fifteenth century in Italy, and was much better established in the Netherlands, but Giorgione was the first major Italian painter to concentrate his work on it to such an extent ?? indeed soon after his death the size of such paintings began to increase with the prosperity and palaces of the patrons.