French 1600-1682 Claude Lorrain Galleries In Rome, not until the mid-17th century were landscapes deemed fit for serious painting. Northern Europeans, such as the Germans Elsheimer and Brill, had made such views pre-eminent in some of their paintings (as well as Da Vinci in his private drawings or Baldassarre Peruzzi in his decorative frescoes of vedute); but not until Annibale Carracci and his pupil Domenichino do we see landscape become the focus of a canvas by a major Italian artist. Even with the latter two, as with Lorrain, the stated themes of the paintings were mythic or religious. Landscape as a subject was distinctly unclassical and secular. The former quality was not consonant with Renaissance art, which boasted its rivalry with the work of the ancients. The second quality had less public patronage in Counter-Reformation Rome, which prized subjects worthy of "high painting," typically religious or mythic scenes. Pure landscape, like pure still-life or genre painting, reflected an aesthetic viewpoint regarded as lacking in moral seriousness. Rome, the theological and philosophical center of 17th century Italian art, was not quite ready for such a break with tradition. In this matter of the importance of landscape, Lorrain was prescient. Living in a pre-Romantic era, he did not depict those uninhabited panoramas that were to be esteemed in later centuries, such as with Salvatore Rosa. He painted a pastoral world of fields and valleys not distant from castles and towns. If the ocean horizon is represented, it is from the setting of a busy port. Perhaps to feed the public need for paintings with noble themes, his pictures include demigods, heroes and saints, even though his abundant drawings and sketchbooks prove that he was more interested in scenography. Lorrain was described as kind to his pupils and hard-working; keenly observant, but an unlettered man until his death. The painter Joachim von Sandrart is an authority for Claude's life (Academia Artis Pictoriae, 1683); Baldinucci, who obtained information from some of Claude's immediate survivors, relates various incidents to a different effect (Notizie dei professoni del disegno). John Constable described Claude Lorrain as "the most perfect landscape painter the world ever saw", and declared that in Claude??s landscape "all is lovely ?C all amiable ?C all is amenity and repose; the calm sunshine of the heart"  Related Paintings of Claude Lorrain :. | Rome with St Peter's (mk17) | Figures behind Plants (mk17) | 2nd third of 17th century | Landscape with Cephalus and Procris Reunited by Diana sdf | Landscape with a Goatherd (mk17) |
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Jozsef Rippl-Ronai
Hungarian Painter, 1861-1927 After his studies at the highschool in Kaposvar he went to study to Budapest, where he got a degree in pharmacy. In 1884 he travels to Munich to study painting at the Academy. 2 years later he gets a grant and that makes him able to move to Paris and study by Munkacsy. In 1888 he meets with the members of Les Nabis and under their influence he paints his first important work The Inn at Pont-Aven, a very deep paining with dark atmosphere. His first big success was the paining My Grandmother (1894). Later he travels back to Hungary, first the critics does not accept him very warmly, but finally he celebrates a success with the exhibition Rippl-Ronai Impressions 1890-1900. He believes that for an artist there is important not only his work, but also how he lives and what he wears. That is why he becomes also a designer (Andrassy dining room and the window-pane in the Ernst Museum). His exhibitions in Frankfurt, Munich and Vienna have got a great success in 1911-1913. He paints his last big work in 1919 (portrait of his friend Zorka) and in 1927 dies in his villa Roma in Kaposvar.
Donato Creti
(1671-1749) was an Italian painter of the Rococo period, active mostly in Bologna. Born in Cremona, he moved to Bologna, where he was a pupil of Lorenzo Pasinelli. He is described by Wittkower as the "Bolognese Marco Benefial", in that his style was less decorative and edged into a more formal neoclassical style. It is an academicized grand style, that crystallizes into a manneristic neoclassicism, with crisp and frigid modeling of the figures. Among his followers were Aureliano Milani, Francesco Monti, and Ercole Graziani the Younger. Two other pupils were Domenico Maria Fratta and Giuseppe Peroni
georg pauli
1855-1935, youths bathing, 1914 nationalmuseum