Paris 1754-1829
French painter. His first teacher was the history painter Jean Bardin, who took him to Rome in 1768. Back in Paris in 1772, he transferred to the studio of Nicolas-Bernard Lepicie. In 1776 he won the Prix de Rome with Alexander and Diogenes (Paris, Ecole N. Sup. B.-A.) and returned to Rome, where he was to spend the next four years at the Academie de France in the company of Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Francois-Pierre Peyron. While witnessing at first hand Peyron's development of a manner indebted to Poussin and David's conversion to Caravaggesque realism, Regnault inclined first towards a Late Baroque mode in a Baptism of Christ (untraced; recorded in two sketches and an etching), then, in Perseus Washing his Hands (1779; Louisville, KY, Speed A. Mus.), to the static Neo-classicism of Anton Raphael Mengs. Related Paintings of Baron Jean-Baptiste Regnault :. | Socrate arrachant Alcibiade du sein de la Volupte | Portrait of Jean-Pierre Bachasson, comte de Montalivet | L ORIGINE DE LA SCULPTURE OU PYGMALION PRIANT VENUS D ANIMER SA STATUE | Achilles educated by Chiron | The judement of Paris | Related Artists:
Dante Gabriel RossettiEnglish Pre-Raphaelite Painter, 1828-1882
Rossetti's first major paintings display some of the realist qualities of the early Pre-Raphaelite movement. His Girlhood of Mary, Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini both portray Mary as an emaciated and repressed teenage girl. His incomplete picture Found was his only major modern-life subject. It depicted a prostitute, lifted up from the street by a country-drover who recognises his old sweetheart. However, Rossetti increasingly preferred symbolic and mythological images to realistic ones. This was also true of his later poetry. Many of the ladies he portrayed have the image of idealized Botticelli's Venus, who was supposed to portray Simonetta Vespucci.
Although he won support from the John Ruskin, criticism of his clubs caused him to withdraw from public exhibitions and turn to waterhum, which could be sold privately.
In 1861, Rossetti published The Early Italian Poets, a set of English translations of Italian poetry including Dante Alighieri's La Vita Nuova. These, and Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, inspired his art in the 1850s. His visions of Arthurian romance and medieval design also inspired his new friends of this time, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Rossetti also typically wrote sonnets for his pictures, such as "Astarte Syraica". As a designer, he worked with William Morris to produce images for stained glass and other decorative devices.
Both these developments were precipitated by events in his private life, in particular by the death of his wife Elizabeth Siddal. She had taken an overdose of laudanum shortly after giving birth to a stillborn child. Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in his wife's grave at Highgate Cemetery, though he would later have them exhumed. He idealised her image as Dante's Beatrice in a number of paintings, such as Beata Beatrix.
These paintings were to be a major influence on the development of the European Symbolist movement. In these works, Rossetti's depiction of women became almost obsessively stylised. He tended to portray his new lover Fanny Cornforth as the epitome of physical eroticism, whilst another of his mistresses Jane Burden, the wife of his business partner William Morris, was glamorised as an ethereal goddess.
Cornelius GijsbrechtsFlemish Baroque Era Painter, ca.1630-1675
Constantin HansenDanish
1804-1880
Constantin Hansen Galleries
Danish painter. In 1816 he entered the Kongelige Akademi for de Sk?nne Kunster, Copenhagen, intending to study architecture; however he later became attracted to painting and worked under C. W. Eckersberg from 1828 to 1833. Around the middle of the 1820s he started developing an individual style of portraiture, which had matured by 1830. He often used his sisters and friends as models; using simple costumes, poses and compositions, he managed to endow his pictures with the intimacy and warmth that mark the Danish Golden Age. The Artist's Sisters Signe and Henriette Reading a Book (1826; Copenhagen, Stat. Mus. Kst) is a fine example of his combination of natural observation with Neo-classical idealization. Under Eckersberg, who encouraged both, he strengthened his natural flair for painting serene architectural views of Copenhagen.