Baron Antoine-Jean Gros
1771-1835
French
Baron Antoine-Jean Gros Galleries
The son of a painter, Antoine Jean Gros was born in Paris on March 16, 1771. At the age of 14 he entered the studio of Jacques Louis David, the acknowledged leader of the classical revival. Although his own work became radically different from David's, he maintained a lifelong respect for his teacher and envisioned himself as the upholder of the Davidian tradition.
In 1787 Gros entered the Acad??mie de Peinture, and when the Acad??mie dissolved in 1793 (a result of the French Revolution) he went to Italy. He met Josephine Bonaparte in Genoa in 1796, and she introduced him to Napoleonic society. Gros entered Napoleon's immediate entourage and accompanied him on several north Italian campaigns. Gros also became involved with Napoleon's program of confiscating Italian art for removal to France.
Gros returned to Paris in 1800 and began to show his Napoleonic paintings in the annual Salons. The most famous of these are the Pesthouse at Jaffa (1804) and Napoleon at Eylau (1808). These works served to deify Napoleon, showing him engaged in acts of heroism and mercy. Stylistically, the paintings were revolutionary:their exotic settings, rich color, agitated space, and general penchant for showing the gruesome specifics of war and suffering differed radically from the cool generalizations of Davidian classicism that Gros had learned as a student. The presentation of contemporary historical events was also new, a harbinger of the realism that developed steadily during the first half of the 19th century in French, American, and English painting. Finally, the emphatic emotionalism of Gros's art established the foundation of romantic painting that Th??odore G??ricault and Eug??ne Delacroix developed after him.
Unlike that of some of his countrymen (David is a case in point), Gros's position did not suffer after the fall of Napoleon. Gros painted for the restored monarchy, for instance, Louis XVIII Leaving the Tuileries (1817), and he decorated the dome of the Panth??on in Paris with scenes of French history (1814-1824). For this Charles X made him a baron in 1824. But these works lack the zest and commitment of Gros's Napoleonic period, perhaps because they were not based on the immediate kinds of historical experiences that had inspired the earlier paintings.
Although marked by considerable public success, Gros's later career was in many ways acutely troubled. Basically, he could not resolve his personal esthetic theories with his own painting or with the work of his younger contemporaries. To the end Gros wished to propagate the classicism of David, and he took over David's studio when the master was exiled in 1816. By the 1820s, however, the revolutionary romanticism of G??ricault and Delacroix, among others, had clearly begun to eclipse classicism, and Gros found himself fighting a lonely and losing battle for conservatism. Ironically, he was fighting a trend that his own best work had helped to originate. As he persisted, moreover, his own painting began to show a diffident mixture of classic and romantic attitudes. Thus, while he was inherently a romantic, he tragically came to doubt himself. Gros died on June 26, 1835, apparently a suicide. Related Paintings of Baron Antoine-Jean Gros :. | Bonaparte au pont d'Arcole. | Bonaparte on the Arcole Bridge on 17 November 1796 | Christine Boyer | Napoleon at the Battlefield of Eylau | Napolean at Jaffa | Related Artists: Herri met de Bles (also known as Herri de Dinant, Herry de Patinir, and Civetta) (c. 1510 - c. 1555 - 1560) was a Flemish Northern Renaissance and Mannerist landscape painter. He is also defined as a eeMosan landscape painter active during the second third of the 16thcentury (i.e., second generation of landscape painters).ee
Very little is positively known about the artist. He is believed to be a certain Herry de Patenir who joined Antwerp's Guild of St. Luke in 1535 as a painter and is also believed to be a court painter for the d'Este Dukes of Ferrara, where he ended his career known as "Il Civetta". He contributed, along with his possible-uncle Joachim Patinir, to a distinct style of Northern Renaissance landscape painting that combined small history or religious scenes into compositions defined by perspective and atmospheric effects. Also, along with a group of Antwerp-based followers of Hieronymus Bosch that included Jan Mandyn, Pieter Huys, and Jan Wellens de Cock, Met de Bles continued the tradition of fantastic imagery into northern Mannerism.
Henderson Frankb.1862 d.1885
Eduard von Grutzner (May 26, 1846 - April 2, 1925) was a German painter and professor of art especially noted for his genre paintings of monks.
Gretzner was born in 1846, the youngest of children, into a farming family in Groß-Karlowitz near Neisse, Upper Silesia in what is now Poland. The local pastor often visited his parents' home, as his father was a prominent member of the church. He recognized early on Eduard's talent and inclination for painting. Even as a child he drew on everything that fell into his hands. The administrator of a ducal country house in the neighborhood got him paper, and eventually the pastor gained him entrance to the Gymnasium (a university preparatory school) of Neisse, and brought him in 1864 with the help of an architect Hirschberg for art education at the private school of Herman Dyck in Munich.
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