Belgian Painter, 1806-1865 Belgian painter and sculptor. He was from very humble origins, but his talent for drawing was detected at an early age. He was sent to the Antwerp Academie, where he attended classes given by W. J. Herreyns (1743-1827) and Mathieu Ignace Van Br?e. During a stay in Paris from 1829 to 1832 he came into contact with the Romantic painters, in particular Th?odore G?ricault, who fostered his admiration for Rubens. In 1832 he won the Belgian Prix de Rome and in 1834 left for Italy where the works of Raphael and, above all, Michelangelo made an overwhelming impression on him. In Rome he abandoned the landscapes and scenes from Roman life, for which he showed a certain talent, and embarked on a much more ambitious work, the Greeks and the Trojans Contesting the Body of Patroclus (1835; Brussels, Mus. Wiertz.). The painting proved the turning-point in Wiertz's career. Its frenzied composition and violently contorted figures excited considerable interest in Rome.  Related Paintings of Antoine Wiertz :. | The Premature Burial | The Lovely Rosine (mk22) | Antoine Wiertz s | The Reader of Novels | Autoportrait a lage de 18 ans |
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Louis-Marin Bonnet
French, 1736 - 1793 French engraver and publisher. He came from a family of artisans and owed his training in engraving to his brother-in-law, the engraver Louis Legrand (1723-1808). Through Legrand, Bonnet became the pupil of Jean-Charles Francois in 1756, a year before the latter discovered the CRAYON MANNER technique of engraving, designed to reproduce the effect of a coloured-chalk drawing. Around the end of 1757 Bonnet used the new technique to engrave a Cupid after Francois Eisen. Gilles Demarteau, a rival of Jean-Charles Francois
Lorenzo Tiepolo
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Arnold Bocklin
Swiss 1827-1901 Arnold Bocklin Locations Arnold Bocklin was born on Oct. 16, 1827, in Basel. He attended the Dusseldorf Academy (1845-1847). At this time he painted scenes of the Swiss Alps, using light effects and dramatic views subjectively to project emotional moods into the landscape. In 1848 this romantic introspection gave way to plein air (open-air) objectivity after he was influenced by Camille Corot, Eugene Delacroix, and the painters of the Barbizon school while on a trip to Paris. But after the February and June revolutions Bocklin returned to Basel with a lasting hatred and disgust for contemporary France, and he resumed painting gloomy mountain scenes. In 1850 Bocklin found his mecca in Rome, and immediately his paintings were flooded by the warm Italian sunlight. He populated the lush southern vegetation, the bright light of the Roman Campagna, and the ancient ruins with lonely shepherds, cavorting nymphs, and lusty centaurs. These mythological figures rather than the landscapes became Bocklins primary concern, and he used such themes as Pan Pursuing Syrinx (1857) to express the polarities of life: warm sunshine contrasts with cool, moist shade, and the brightness of womans spirituality contrasts with mans dark sensuality. When Bocklin returned to Basel with his Italian wife, he completed the painting which brought him fame when the king of Bavaria purchased it in 1858: Pan among the Reeds, a depiction of the Greek phallic god with whom the artist identified. He taught at the Academy of Art in Weimar from 1860 to 1862, when he returned to Rome. Called to Basel in 1866, he painted the frescoes and modeled the grotesque masks for the facade of the Basel Museum. Bocklin resided in Florence from 1874 until 1885, and this was his most active period. He continued to explore the male-female antithesis and painted religious scenes, allegories of Natures powers, and moody studies of mans fate. He ceased working with oils and began experimenting with tempera and other media to obtain a pictorial surface free of brushstrokes. Bocklin spent the next 7 years mostly in Switzerland, with occasional trips to Italy; he devoted much of his energy to designing an airplane. Following a stroke in 1892, he returned to Italy, bought a villa in Fiesole, and died there on Jan. 16, 1901. Many of his late works depict nightmares of war, plague, and death.