1907-54 Mexican painter, b. Coyoacen. As a result of an accident at age 15, Kahlo turned her attention from a medical career to painting. Drawing on her personal experiences, her works are often shocking in their stark portrayal of pain and the harsh lives of women. Fifty-five of her 143 paintings are self-portraits incorporating a personal symbolism complete with graphic anatomical references. She was also influenced by indigenous Mexican culture, aspects of which she portrayed in bright colors, with a mixture of realism and symbolism. Her paintings attracted the attention of the artist Diego Rivera, whom she later married. Although Kahlo's work is sometimes classified as surrealist and she did exhibit several times with European surrealists, she herself disputed the label. Her preoccupation with female themes and the figurative candor with which she expressed them made her something of a feminist cult figure in the last decades of the 20th cent.   Related Paintings of Frida Kahlo :. | The self-Portrait of Emanation | Portrait of a Woman in White | Self-Portrait with Monkey | Two People | Self-Portrait |
Related Artists:
Sir William Beechey
1753-1839 British English painter. He was trained as a lawyer before entering the Royal Academy Schools, London, in 1772. He is thought to have studied under Johan Zoffany, and his earliest surviving portraits are small-scale full-lengths and conversation pieces in Zoffanys manner (e.g. The Custance Conversation Piece, c. 1786; priv. col.). Beechey first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1776. In 1782 he moved to Norwich, where he gained several commissions, but he was back in London by 1787. In 1789 he exhibited a portrait of John Douglas, Bishop of Carlisle (London, Lambeth Pal.) that is remarkable for its facility of handling. Beechey would occasionally paint similarly inspired works, but his career is marked by a succession of unflamboyant but competent portraits in the tradition of Joshua Reynolds.
MIGNARD, Pierre
French Baroque Era Painter , b. 1612, Troyes, d. 1695, Paris called "Le Romain" to distinguish him from his brother Nicolas, was a French painter. He was born at Troyes, and came of a family of artists; he also needs to be distinguished from his nephew Pierre (1640-1725), often called "Pierre II" or "Le Chevalier". In 1630 he left the studio of Simon Vouet for Italy, where he spent twenty-two years, and made a reputation which brought him a summons to Paris. Successful with his portrait of the king, and in favour with the court, Mignard pitted himself against Le Brun, declined to enter the Academy of which he was the head, and made himself the centre of opposition to its authority. The history of this struggle is most important, because it was identical, as long as it lasted, with that between the old gilds of France and the new body which Colbert, for political reasons, was determined to support. Portrait of Louise de Kerouaille, Duchess of PortsmouthShut out, in spite of the deserved success of his decorations of the cupola of Val de Grace (1664), from any great share in those public works, the control of which was the attribute of the new Academy, Mignard was chiefly active in portraiture. Turenne, Moliere, Bossuet, Maintenon (Louvre), La Valliere, Sevigne, Montespan, Descartes (Castle Howard), all the beauties and celebrities of his day, sat to him. His readiness and skill, his happy instinct for grace of arrangement,
Sir John Lavery
Irish Painter, 1856-1941 Irish painter. The son of an unsuccessful publican, he was orphaned at the age of three and was brought up by relatives, initially in the north of Ireland and then in Ayrshire. He became an apprentice retoucher to a Glasgow photographer and attended the Haldane Academy, Glasgow, in the 1870s. After spending a winter term at Heatherley's School of Art, London, he moved in 1881 to Paris where he studied at the Acad?mie Julian. At this time he was influenced by Jules Bastien-Lepage and painted in a plein-air naturalist style