French 1844-1910 Henri Rousseau Locations He was born in Laval in the Loire Valley into the family of a plumber. He attended Laval High School as a day student and then as a boarder, after his father became a debtor and his parents had to leave the town upon the seizure of their house. He was mediocre in some subjects at the high school but won prizes for drawing and music. He worked for a lawyer and studied law, but "attempted a small perjury and sought refuge in the army," serving for four years, starting in 1863. With his father's death, Rousseau moved to Paris in 1868 to support his widowed mother as a government employee. In 1871, he was promoted to the toll collector's office in Paris as a tax collector. He started painting seriously in his early forties, and by age 49 he retired from his job to work on his art. His wife died in 1888 and he later remarried. Rousseau claimed he had "no teacher other than nature", although he admitted he had received "some advice" from two established Academic painters, Felix Auguste-Clement and Jean-Leon Gerome. Essentially he was self-taught and is considered to be a naive or primitive painter.  Related Paintings of Henri Rousseau :. | Surprise | Algiers(General view) Engraving | Portrait of a Child | The Waterfall | The Sleeping Gypsy |
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Mary Beale
English Baroque Era Painter, 1633-1699 was an English portrait painter. She became one of the most important portrait painters of 17th century England, and has been described as the first professional female English painter. Beale was born in Barrow, Suffolk, the daughter of John Cradock, a Puritan rector. Her mother, Dorothy, died when she was 10. She married Charles Beale, a cloth merchant from London, in 1652, at the age of 18. Her father and her husband were both amateur painters, her father being a member of the Painter-Stainers' Company, and she was acquainted with local local artists, such as Nathaniel Thach, Matthew Snelling, Robert Walker and Peter Lely. She became a semi-professional portrait painter in the 1650s and 1660s, working from her home, first in Covent Garden and later in Fleet Street. The family moved to a farmhouse in Allbrook, Hampshire in 1665 due to financial difficulties, her husband having lost his position as a clerk of patents, and also due to the Great Plague in London. For the next five years, a 17th-century two storey timber-framed building was her family home and studio. She returned to London in 1670, where she established a studio in Pall Mall, with her husband working as her assistant, mixing her paints and keeping her accounts. She became successful, and her circle of friends included Thomas Flatman, poet Samuel Woodford, Archbishop of Canterbury John Tillotson, and Bishops Edward Stillingfleet and Gilbert Burnet. She became reacquainted with Peter Lely, now Court Artist to Charles II. Her later work is heavily influenced by Lely, being mainly small portraits or copies of Lely's work. Her work became unfashionable after his death in 1680.
Vicente Lopez
1772-1850 Spanish Vicente Lopez Gallery was an Argentine writer and politician who acted as interim President of Argentina from July 7, 1827 to August 18, 1827. He also wrote the lyrics of the Argentine National Anthem adopted in May 11, 1813. Lopez began his primary studies in the San Francisco School, and later studied in the Real Colegio San Carlos, today the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. He obtained a doctorate of laws in the University of Chuquisaca. He served as a captain in the Patriotic Regiment during the English invasions. After the Argentine victory he composed a poem entitled El triunfo argentino (The Argentine Triumph). He participated in the Cabildo Abierto of May 22, 1810 and supported the formation of the Primera Junta. He had good relations with Manuel Belgrano. When the royalist members of the city government of Buenos Aires were expulsed, he was elected mayor of the city; he was an enemy of the party of Cornelio Saavedra and one of the creators of the First Triumvirate, of which he was the Treasurer. Lopez was a member of the Constituent Assembly of year XIII, representing Buenos Aires. At the request of the Assembly, he wrote the lyrics to a "patriotic march", which eventually became the Argentine National Anthem. It was a military march, whose music was composed by the Catalan Blas Parera; it was approved on March 11, 1813. The first public reading was at a tertulia on May 7 in the house of Mariquita Sanchez de Thompson. It displaced a different march, written by Esteban de Luca, which would have been the hymn if not for the more militaristic Lopez.
Hendrik Willem Mesdag
Hendrik Willem Mesdag was born on February 23, 1831 in Groningen. His father, a merchant and banker, was an amateur painter who saw to it that his two sons were also educated in the art of painting. He was a Dutch marine painter. He was born in Groningen, the son of the banker Klaas Mesdag and his wife Johanna Wilhelmina van Giffen. Mesdag was encouraged by his father, an amateur painter, to study art. He married Sina van Houten in 1856, and when they inherited a fortune from her father, Mesdag retired from banking to pursue a career as a painter. He studied in Brussels with Willem Roelofs and in 1868 moved to The Hague to paint the sea. In 1870 he exhibited at the Paris Salon and won the gold medal for The Breakers of the North Sea. Preparations for departureIn 1880 he received a commission from a Belgian company to paint a panorama giving a view over the village of Scheveningen on the North Sea coast near The Hague .