Italian 1494-1557 Jacopo Pontormo Galleries Italian painter and draughtsman. He was the leading painter in mid-16th-century Florence and one of the most original and extraordinary of Mannerist artists. His eccentric personality, solitary and slow working habits and capricious attitude towards his patrons are described by Vasari; his own diary, which covers the years 1554-6, further reveals a character with neurotic and secretive aspects. Pontormo enjoyed the protection of the Medici family throughout his career but, unlike Agnolo Bronzino and Giorgio Vasari, did not become court painter. His subjective portrait style did not lend itself to the state portrait. He produced few mythological works and after 1540 devoted himself almost exclusively to religious subjects. His drawings, mainly figure studies in red and black chalk, are among the highest expressions of the great Florentine tradition of draughtsmanship; close to 400 survive, forming arguably the most important body of drawings by a Mannerist painter. His highly personal style was much influenced by Michelangelo, though he also drew on northern art, primarily the prints of Albrecht Derer.  Related Paintings of Jacopo Pontormo :. | Joseph in Egypt | Punishment of the Baker | Annen Altar | Joseph in Egypt | Venus and Cupid |
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Hippolyte Boulenger
(1837 - 1874) was a Belgian landscape painter influenced by the French Barbizon school, considered to be "the Belgian Corot". Hippolyte Boulenger was born to French parents in Tournai in 1837. He spent his youth in Tournai and lived in Paris between 1850 and 1853, where he studied drawing. In 1853, after he became an orphan, he went to Brussels to work at a design atelier. In the evening, he studied at the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts with Joseph Quinaux, a landscape painter. He met portrait painter Camille Van Camp in 1863, who became a mentor and mecenas. He showed his first painting in the Brussels Salon the same year. Boulenger went to Tervuren in 1864, and called round him a group of likeminded painters gathered there, the School van Tervuren, a Belgian version of the Barbizon school, of which he became the leading artist. At the time, his leading model was Jean-François Millet, although his later work was closer to that of Corot. By 1866, he was famous in Belgian art circles. He married in 1868 and moved to Zaventem, but returned to Tervuren in 1870. These years were his best and most fruitful period, with e.g. the painting De oude Haagbeukdreef. Tervuren, which won him the Gold Medal of the 1872 Salon of Brussels. In this period, he travelled in Belgium and abroad, painting along the River Meuse. It was his suggestion that led to the creation of the Societe Libre des Beaux-Arts, an art circle of young Belgian artists, including Alfred Verwee, Felicien Rops, and Constantin Meunier, with honorary members from abroad like Corot and Millet, but also Honore Daumier, Gustave Courbet and Willem Maris. By 1869, he began to suffer from epilepsy. Coupled with alcohol abuse, this led to an early death, in 1874 in a hotel in Brussels.
Isaac Israels
Dutch, 1865-1934 Son of Jozef Israëls. He was largely self-taught, showing precocious talent and attending the Academie in The Hague in 1878-80. His first paintings date from 1880-84 and include a self-portrait, portraits of women and military subjects such as Bugle Practice. They were composed in the studio in a precise style, soft grey and brown tones predominating, showing the influence of the Hague school. In 1887 Israels moved to Amsterdam, where he was at the centre of the Tachtigers of writers and painters. Among his friends were George Hendrik Breitner, Lodewijk van Dyssel, Frans Erens, Max Liebermann, Jan Pieter Veth and Jan Voerman. In Amsterdam, after a brief and abortive period at the Rijksacademie, he sought a more fluent technique with which to record contemporary life. His drawings and watercolours are predominantly of cafes, cabarets, dance halls and the street life of Amsterdam. In 1889 he visited Paris, where he met St phane Mallarm, Berthe Morisot, Odilon Redon and Emile Zola. In 1894 he painted Three Servant Girls, the first of his plein-air pictures. From then on he applied transparent colours to capture the fleeting effects of light in oil, watercolour and pastel. His oils were painted in flat broad strokes. For the rest of his life he employed his very personal Impressionist style, which emphasized the interplay of light, colour, line and movement. His favourite subjects were beach, street and park scenes
Thomas Waterman Wood
1823-1903 It may be that his reputation as an artist will rest upon his figure pictures, although his very numerous portrait paintings involved much of the effort of his life and are most certainly characterized but simple and strong composition, great technical execution and a masterful use of colors. It may also follow that he will yet achieve his most memorable honors from the interpretations which he has made of great paintings, but from the stand point of those whose minds and hearts are won by considerations of local history the highest interest will be assigned to works in which Wood included characters from his native place. As examples of his work in this direction the following may be mentioned: The Yankee Pedlar had for its model a tin peddler known as "Snapping Tucker", a resident of Calais, Vermont. When this work was sold for a large sum, Tucker promptly claimed his share upon the grounds of his intrinsic worth and natural capacity as a poser. The Village Post Office was taken from the interior of the old Ainsworth store in Williamstown, Vermont, but the figures were mostly taken from Montpelier people. Wood's uncle Zenas was the postmaster and the group around the store, Boyden, Whittier and Bullock, were old-time residents. Their clerk was Horace Scribner, long esteemed as a generous country musician and as the organist of Christ Church. This painting was bought by Mr. Charles Stewart Smith, ex-president of the New York Chamber of Commerce. The scene for the The Quack Doctor was located in front of the old arch which once spanned the head of State Street leading to East State. The old brick building, the home of Montpelier Book Bindery, still stands. This picture was bought by Mr. George I. Seneg for $2,000 and after his death was included in the sale of his entire collection. Another successful painting was The Country Doctor. The artist found the proper model for this work with the aid of the Secretary of State, Dr. George Nichols, in the person of an actual country doctor, then representing the town of Jamaica in the legislature. This doctor bore upon his face the impress of his beneficent labors for more than 40 years in a back country town. Wood himself told the writer, in speaking of this painting, that many a person had said to him, "That doctor is the exact image of my father, who was also a country doctor." This saying he regarded not so much as proof that he had achieved a concrete likeness but as an evidence of having successfully handed down the particular class idea of the old-fashioned country physician, as truly different in type from the city practitioner as was the country lawyer of former days from his brother in the city. In 1891, Wood exhibited at the Academy a picture entitled A Cogitation, for which one of his Montpelier friends, Mr. George Ripley, posed. The composition is extremely simple, a farmer in his barn, leaning upon his pitchfork, his countenance thoughtful. This picture was bought by Mr. Harper and published as a full-page engraving in Harper's Weekly during the Greeley campaign over the title "Is Greeley a Fool or a Knave?". The humorous side of this incident consists in the fact that Mr. Ripley was the model was an ardent supporter of Mr. Greeley in that campaign, while the artist himself, so far as we know, never dabbled in politics. These few examples sufficiently illustrate the influence which the place of his birth had upon Wood. He was not only a Vermonter but a great painter of Vermont ideas, conditions and character. Nor did foreign travel nor city residence nor any influence of professional connections ever tend to diminish the deep and abiding interest in his early home. The subjects of his works, his selection of characters, his yearly pilgrimage to Vermont, all demonstrate his filial loyalty and he gave to this sentiment of his heart its final expression in the establishment, as a gift to Montpelier, of its Gallery of Art. But, apart from this, the homes, offices and institutions of Montpelier and without are filled with the affectionate and great evidences of his work. The Vermont Historical Society possesses several excellent examples of his portraiture, all of great historic value and preserved in the Cedar Creek Reception Room at the Vermont State House: Samuel Prentiss (1881), United States Senator; Mrs. Samuel Prentiss (1895) and Dr. Edward Lamb (1895), gifts to the Society by the family of Mr. Prentiss. In 1896, the Society unveiled a life-size portrait of the distinguished publicist, the Hon. E. P. Walton, the gift of his wife and sister. Wood's personal donations include portraits of the Rev. William A. Lord, D.D. (1874), minister of Bethany Congregational Church of this city, Daniel Pierce Thompson (1880), novelist and author of "The Green Mountain Boys", and Justin S. Morrill, United States Senator, father of tariff legislation, promoter of agricultural colleges and chief up builder of the Library of Congress. One of the noblest paintings now existing in the state is the artist's beautiful translation of Bartolom?? Esteban Murillo's "La Madonna del Rosario". This work, submitting the original with infinite tenderness and feeling, was painted in 1896 in the Dulwich Gallery and was consecrated by Bishop de Goesbriand for the service of Saint Augustine's Church on July 26, 1897. The essential force of this sacred painting is its actual power to impress the beholder with a profound sense of the sacredness of motherhood and the worth and lasting values of purity and religious faith. In accepting this donation from Wood the Reverend Bishop said: "You have made a great Murillo of the seventeenth century our contemporary," an expression not only true of itself but one which defines the special value of the truly great copies of great paintings.