English 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 Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in his wife's grave at Highgate Cemetery, though he would later have them exhumed.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.  Related Paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti :. | cropped version of Veronica Veronese | Astarte Syriaca (mk28) | Veronica Veronese | Regina Cordium | Fazio's Mistress |
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Juan Bautista de Espinosa
(1590-1641, Madrid) was a Spanish still life painter. More paintings remain of him than biographical data and there is only one known painting remaining. It is only known that he worked in Toledo and Madrid from 1612 to 1626 and, judging by his style, he was trained in Holland. De Espinosa's style is judged to be the transition from Flemish Baroque to Spanish Baroque. Several mural paintings in Spanish churches are also attributed to him; one of these is in Alcaudete.
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.
MOREELSE, Paulus
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1571-1638 Dutch painter, draughtsman, architect and urban planner. He was from a well-to-do family, which settled in Utrecht c. 1568. According to van Mander, Paulus studied with the Delft portrait painter Michiel van Mierevelt and was in Italy before 1596, the year he became an independent master in the saddlemakers' guild, to which Utrecht painters then belonged. On 8 June 1602 he married Antonia Wyntershoven, by whom he had at least ten children. The most famous of his many pupils was Dirck van Baburen, who studied with him in 1611, when the Utrecht artists set up their own Guild of St Luke. Moreelse was instrumental in this and became its first dean. In 1618, after a series of political disagreements, a number of citizens, including Moreelse and the painter Joachim Wtewael, petitioned the town council to resign. When that occurred, Moreelse became a member of the new council and continued to hold various public offices until his death. He was a strong supporter of plans to found a university in Utrecht and was closely involved in the preparations and in its opening in 1636