b.c. 1527, Milan, d.1593, Milan Italian Giuseppe Arcimboldo Galleries Arcimboldo was born in Milan in 1527, the son of Biagio, a painter who did work for the office of the Fabbrica in the Duomo.Arcimboldo was commissioned to do stained glass window designs beginning in 1549, including the Stories of St. Catherine of Alexandria vitrage at the Duomo. In 1556 he worked with Giuseppe Meda on frescoes for the Cathedral of Monza. In 1558, he drew the cartoon for a large tapestry of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, which still hangs in the Como Cathedral today. In 1562 he became court portraitist to Ferdinand I at the Habsburg court in Vienna, and later, to Maximilian II and his son Rudolf II at the court in Prague. He was also the court decorator and costume designer. King Augustus of Saxony, who visited Vienna in 1570 and 1573, saw Arcimboldo's work and commissioned a copy of his "The Four Seasons" which incorporates his own monarchic symbols. Arcimboldo's conventional work, on traditional religious subjects, has fallen into oblivion, but his portraits of human heads made up of vegetables, fruit and tree roots, were greatly admired by his contemporaries and remain a source of fascination today. Art critics debate whether these paintings were whimsical or the product of a deranged mind.. A majority of scholars hold to the view, however, that given the Renaissance fascination with riddles, puzzles, and the bizarre (see, for example, the grotesque heads of Leonardo da Vinci, a fellow Milanese), Arcimboldo, far from being mentally imbalanced, catered to the taste of his times. Arcimboldo died in Milan, to which he retired after leaving the Habsburg service. It was during this last phase of his career that he produced the composite portrait of Rudolph II (see above), as well as his self-portrait as the Four Seasons. His Italian contemporaries honored him with poetry and manuscripts celebrating his illustrious career. His hidden-face still-lives are a possible influence on his younger Lombard contemporary Caravaggio, whose painting of fruit in the Brera museum in Milan ranks as one of the earliest independent still-lives. When the Swedish army invaded Prague in 1648, during the Thirty Years' War, many of Arcimboldo's paintings were taken from Rudolf II's collection. His works can be found in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Habsburg Schloss Ambras in Innsbruck, the Louvre in Paris, as well as numerous museums in Sweden. In Italy, his work is in Cremona, Brescia, and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, the Denver Art Museum in Denver, Colorado, the Menil Foundation in Houston, Texas, and the Candie Museum in Guernsey also own paintings by Archimboldo.  Related Paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo :. | Spring | Erzherzogin Anna | Vegetables in a Bowl or The Vegetable Gardener | Summer | the jurist |
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Pierre Edouard Frere
(1819-1886), French painter, studied under Hippolyte Delaroche, entered the cole des Beaux-Arts in 1836 and exhibited first at the Salon in 1843. The marked sentimental tendency of his art makes us wonder at John Ruskin's enthusiastic eulogy which finds in Frere's work the depth of William Wordsworth, the grace of Joshua Reynolds, and the holiness of Fra Angelico. What we can admire in his work is his accomplished craftsmanship and the intimacy and tender homeliness of his conception. Among his chief works are the two paintings, Going to School and Coming from School, The Little Glutton (his first exhibited picture) and L'Exercice (in the 19th century this work was in John Jacob Astor's collection). A journey to Egypt in 1860 resulted in a small series of Orientalist subjects, but the majority of Frere's paintings deal with the life of the kitchen, the workshop, the dwellings of the humble, and mainly with the pleasures and little troubles of the young, which the artist brings before us with humor and sympathy. He was one of the most popular painters of domestic genre in the middle of the 19th century.
Thomas Hovenden
1840-1895 Thomas Hovenden Gallery Thomas Hovenden (December 28, 1840 ?C August 14, 1895), was an Irish-American artist and teacher. He painted realistic quiet family scenes, narrative subjects and often depicted African Americans. Hovenden was born in Dunmanway, Co. Cork, Ireland. His parents died at the time of the potato famine and he was placed in an orphanage at the age of six. Apprenticed to a carver and gilder, he studied at the Cork School of Design. In 1863, he immigrated to the United States. He studied at the National Academy of Design in New York City. He moved to Baltimore in 1868 and then left for Paris in 1874. He studied at the École des Beaux Arts under Cabanel, but spent most of his time with the American colony at Pont-Aven in Brittany led by Robert Wylie, where he painted many pictures of the peasantry. Returning to America in 1880, he became a member of the Society of American Artists and an Associate member of the National Academy of Design (elected Academician in 1882). He married Helen Corson in 1881, an artist he had met in Pont-Aven, and settled at her father's homestead in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia. She came from a family of abolitionists and her home was a stop on the underground railroad. Their barn, later used as Hovenden's studio, was known as Abolitionist Hall due to its use for anti-slavery meetings. He was commissioned to paint a historical picture of the abolitionist leader John Brown. He finished "The Last Moments of John Brown" (now in the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) in 1884. His "Breaking Home Ties", a picture of American farm life, was engraved with considerable popular success. In 1886, he was appointed Professor of Painting and Drawing at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, replacing Thomas Eakins who was dismissed due to his use of nude models. Among Hovenden's students were the sculptor Alexander Stirling Calder and the leader of the Ashcan School, Robert Henri. Hovenden was killed at the age of 54, along with a ten-year old girl, by a railroad locomotive at a crossing near his home in Plymouth Meeting. Newspaper accounts reported that his death was the result of a heroic effort to save the girl, while a coroner's inquest determined his death was an accident.
Julius Ludwig Friedrich Runge
painted Morgenstimmung an der Adria mit Fischerbooten und Langustenfischern. Im Vordergrund felsige Kuste in