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 :. | Napoleon Bonaparte on the Bridge at Arcole (nn03) | Das RobMustapha Paschas | Sappho at Leucate | Bonaparte on the Arcole Bridge on 17 November 1796 | Napoleon at the Battlefield of Eylau |
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William Maw Egley
English painter , (1826-1916) was a British artist of the Victorian era. The son of the miniaturist William Egley, he studied under his father. His early works were illustrations of literary subjects typical of the period, such as Prospero and Miranda from The Tempest. These were similar to the work of The Clique. William Powell Frith, one of The Clique, hired Egley to add backgrounds to his own work. Egley soon developed a style influenced by Frith, including domestic and childhood subjects. Most of his paintings were humorous or "feelgood" genre scenes of urban and rural life, depicting such subjects as harvest festivals and contemporary fashions. His best known painting, Omnibus Life in London (Tate Gallery) is a comic scene of people squashed together in the busy, cramped public transport of the era. Egley always showed great interest in specifics of costume, to which he paid detailed attention, but his paintings were often criticised for their hard, clumsy style. In the 1860s Egley adopted the fashion for romanticised 18th century subjects.
Thomas Hickey
was an Irish painter. Born in Dublin, Hickey was the son of Noah, a confectioner in Capel Street, and Anne Hickey. A younger brother was John Hickey, the sculptor. He was trained at the Royal Dublin Society schools under Robert West. Hickey painted primarily portraits and genre scenes. He traveled widely, working in India, Portugal, Italy and England, residing in Bath between 1776 and 1780. On his voyage to India, the vessel in which he was travelling was captured by French and Spanish fleets which led him to Lisbon, where, after receiving a number of commissions, he remained for several years. He eventually reached Bengal and stayed there until 1791 when he returned to England. He then traveled as far as Peking, China with George Macartney, 1st Earl Macartney as the expedition's official portrait painter. He returned to Ireland shortly after the death of his brother John in January 1796. In 1797, he was commissioned by Dr. Robert Emmet, State Physician for Ireland, to paint a portrait of the doctor's son, Robert, and daughter, Mary. By 1798 he had returned to India where he landed just in time for the start of the Fourth Mysore War, which kept him engaged in painting. He resided in Madras until his death in 1824. In addition to his artistic talents, he is reputed to have been a sparkling conversationalist who rarely failed to charm his sitters. The Courtauld Institute of Art (London), the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the National Gallery of Ireland, the Tate and the Victoria Art Gallery (Bath, England) are among the public collections having paintings by Thomas Hickey.
August Hagborg
1852 - 1925,Swedish painter. He studied at the Konstakademi in Stockholm (1871-5), then went to Paris in the autumn of 1875, where he lived until 1909. He began to exhibit at the Salon as early as 1876 and became one of its most industrious contributors. In 1877 he showed at the Salon his painting Waiting (1877; priv. col., see S. Strembom: Konstnersferbundets historia [History of the Federation of Artists], i (Stockholm, 1945), pl. 35), developed from a study made in Bohuslen on the west coast of Sweden. It shows a young fisherman's wife, her child on her arm, gazing out over the sea and waiting for her husband. This introduced what was to become Hagborg's favourite subject-matter: the fishing community, mostly in Normandy and Brittany. Typical elements of his paintings are young women, depicted in idealized and heroic manner, in theatrical poses, and a realistic background, usually of shallow beaches at ebb tide; in his later works, he painted in more delicate and exquisite, silvery colours.