Greek-born Spanish Mannerist Painter, 1541-1614 Considered a representative of late Renaissance Spanish art, El Greco was actually born in Greece, on the island of Crete. After studying in Venice under Titian, El Greco settled in Toledo, Spain in 1577. At the time he was wildly popular, his emotionally religious paintings being just the ticket for the hometown of the Spanish Inquisition. After his death his work was largely ignored until the beginning of the 20th century; now he considered one of the inspired geniuses of Western art. His distinctive style features bold shapes and colors, with elongated and slightly distorted figures. In Toledo El Greco was in constant demand and liked living large: he maintained a private orchestra to accompany his meals.  Related Paintings of El Greco :. | St Luke | Mary Magdalen in Penitence | cleansing of the temple | baptism of christ | The Holy Trinity |
Related Artists:
Michael Conrad Hirt
painted Portrait of Anna Rosina Tanck, wife of the mayor of Lubecker in1642
Pekka Halonen
Pekka Halonen (23 September 1865 - 1 December 1933) was a painter of Finnish landscapes and people. He was born in Lapinlahti. He lived with his family in a home and studio on Lake Tuusula in Järvenpää, Finland that he, himself, designed and named Halosenniemi. The beautiful and serene building is now a museum that includes original furnishings and Halonenes own art on the walls. There, on the shores of Lake Tuusula where Pekka Halonen resided, an artistse community developed and flourished, helping to develop a sense of Finnish national identity. Halosenniemi was designed with the two story studios of Paris in mind with high ceilings and tall windows in the studio and second floor living quarters accessible by a set of stairs and a balcony that overlooked the studio. Adjacent to the house, Halonen built a sauna and, in typical Finnish tradition, the sauna also served as a laundry. Halonen stated that he never painted for anyone but himself. He felt that eArt should not jar the nerves like sandpaper - it should produce a feeling of peace.e His father was a peasant from Lapinlahti. Halonen studied at the Art Society's drawing school in Helsinki. In 1890 he moved to Paris where he studied at the Academie Julian and later under Paul Gauguin. He died in Tuusula. There is a painting by Pekka Halonen in the post-impressionist section of the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, Hungary. Until May 2013 in the Groninger Museum, the Netherlands: Pekka Halonen, Eero Järnefeldt, Helene Schjerfbeck and Akseli Gallen Kallela in the exhibition 'Nordic Art: The Modern Breakthrough'.
Francis Danby
Irish Painter, 1793-1861 was a British painter of the Romantic eraBorn in the south of Ireland, he was one of a set of twins; his father, James Danby, farmed a small property he owned near Wexford, but his death, in 1807, caused the family to move to Dublin, while Francis was still a schoolboy. He began to practice drawing at the Royal Dublin Society's schools; and under an erratic young artist named James Arthur O'Connor he began painting landscapes. Danby also made acquaintance with George Petrie, and all three left for London together in 1824. This expedition, undertaken with very inadequate funds, quickly came to an end, and they had to get home again by walking. At Bristol they made a pause, and Danby, finding he could get trifling sums for water-color drawings, remained there working diligently and sending to the London exhibitions pictures of importance. There his large oil paintings quickly attracted attention. Danby painted "vast illusionist canvases" comparable to those of John Martin of "grand, gloomy and fantastic subjects which chimed exactly with the Byronic taste of the 1820s."The Upas Tree (1820) and The Delivery of the Israelites (1825) brought him his election as an Associate Member of the Royal Academy. He left Bristol for London, and in 1828 exhibited his Opening of the Sixth Seal at the British Institution, receiving from that body a prize of 200 guineas; and this picture was followed by two others on the theme of the Apocalypse. In 1829 Danby's wife deserted him, running off with the painter Paul Falconer Poole Danby left London, declaring that he would never live there again, and that the Academy, instead of aiding him, had, somehow or other, used him badly. For a decade he lived on the Lake of Geneva in Switzerland, becoming a Bohemian with boat-building fancies, painting only now and then. He later moved to Paris for a short period of time. He returned to England in 1840, when his sons, James and Thomas, both artists, were growing up. Danby exhibited his large (15 feet wide) and powerful The Deluge that year; the success of that painting, "the largest and most dramatic of all his Martinesque visions, revitalized his reputation and career. Other pictures by him were The Golden Age (c. 1827, exhibited 1831), Rich and Rare Were the Gems She Wore (1837), and The Evening Gun (1848). Some of Danby's later paintings, like The Woodnymph's Hymn to the Rising Sun (1845), tended toward a calmer, more restrained, more cheerful manner than those in his earlier style; but he returned to his early mode for The Shipwreck (1859).