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 :. | Napolean at Jaffa | Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Stricken at Jaffa on 11 March (mk05) | Portrait de Gerard-Christophe-Michel Duroc, duc de Frioul | Battle of Aboukir, 25 July 1799 | Christine Boyer |
Related Artists:
Pieter Gysels
1621-1691 Flemish Pieter Gysels Gallery Flemish painter. He began his training in 1641, when he was already 20, with Antwerp painter Jan Boots. Houbraken assumed he was also apprenticed to Jan Breughel II, whose diary describes a painting completed in 1638 as a 'small wild boar somewhat touched up by Gys' ('een klein wilt verxken voor Gys wat geretosieert'). But it seems highly doubtful that, as van der Sanden claimed (Denuce, p. 155), 'Gys' refers to Pieter Gysels. In 1649 or 1650 he became a master in Antwerp's Guild of St Luke. It is not known whether he took on any pupils. On 13 November 1650 he married Joanna Huybrecht, who bore him six children.
Giovanni Battista Ortolano
Ferrara ca 1487-after 1524
Willem Maris
Dutch Painter, 1844-1910 Brother of Jacob Maris. He received his training as a painter from his brothers, Jacob Maris and Matthijs Maris. Although he briefly attended evening classes at the Academie in The Hague and was advised by the animal painter Pieter Stortenbeker (1828-98), he was basically self-taught; he was the only self-made man in the circle of Hague school artists. In 1862 he visited Oosterbeek where he met Anton Mauve, with whom he established a long friendship. In the same year he first entered a painting, Cows on the Heath (untraced), in the Tentoonstellung van Levende Meesters in Rotterdam. The themes of cows at pasture and ducks by the side of a ditch, which characterized the Dutch polder landscape in summer, became his hallmark. In the following year he exhibited Cows by a Pool (The Hague, Gemeentemus) in The Hague; it received discouraging reviews, as did the picture entered by his brother Matthijs. Painted in 1863, this work already employs Willem main motif and shows his attention to the handling of light (with effects of haze and backlighting).