Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1596-1656 Jan van Goyen was born in Leiden on Jan. 13, 1596. Apprenticed from the age of 10, he had several masters. About 1617 he went to Haarlem to study with Esaias van de Velde, an important innovator in the Haarlem movement of realistic landscape painting. Van Goyen's works between 1621 and 1625 are sometimes hard to distinguish from those of his teacher. They are colorful, detailed views of villages and roads, usually busy with people, as in Winter (1621). It was Van Goyen's usual practice to sign or monogram and date his paintings. He traveled extensively through the Netherlands and beyond, recording his impressions in sketchbooks, occasionally with dates and often depicting recognizable scenes. Thus the chronology of his development is clear. His paintings of the late 1620s show a steady advance from the strong colors and scattered organization of his early works toward tonality and greater simplicity and unity of composition. By 1630 he was painting monochromes in golden brown or pale green; he played a leading part in the tonal phase of Dutch landscape painting. In 1631 Van Goyen settled in The Hague, where he became a citizen in 1634. The simplicity, airiness, and unification of his compositions continued to increase in his abundant production of dune landscapes, river views, seascapes, town views, and winter landscapes. The River View (1636) displays a river so open and extensive as to suggest the sea, with reflections that prolong the vast and luminous sky. In its monumentalization of humble structures and its composition built on a firm scaffolding of horizontal and vertical forces, it forecast at this early date developments that dominated landscape painting in the 1650s and later. In the Village and Dunes (1647) the traditional double-diagonal composition still exists, but it is dominated by horizontal and vertical accents. Stronger contrasts of light and dark replace the earlier tonality. In the last year of his life Van Goyen produced an eloquent new style, in which powerful forms stand out against the radiant sky and water in an exquisitely balanced composition (Evening Calm; 1656). The commission in 1651 to paint a panoramic view of The Hague for the Burgomaster's Room shows the high regard in which Van Goyen was held. He was enormously productive; well over 1,000 of his paintings still exist, and almost as many drawings.   Related Paintings of Jan van Goyen :. | Winter Landscape with Farmhouses along a Ditch. | River Scene | Village at the River | Horse Cart on a Bridge | Landscape with Dunes |
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Frank Bramley
English Painter, 1857-1915 was a British post-impressionist painter of the Newlyn School. Bramley studied at the Lincoln School of Art from 1873 to 1878, later at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp from 1879 to 1882. After staying in Venice from 1882 to 1884, he moved to the Newlyn School artist colony in Cornwall. Bramley worked on combining natural and artificial light in his paintings. His A Hopeless Dawn (1888) was bought by the Tate gallery. He married artist Katherine Graham in 1891.
Thomas Luny
(1759-1837), born in Cornwall, probably at St Ewe, was an English artist and painter, mostly of seascapes and other marine-based works. At the age of eleven, Luny left Cornwall to live in London. There he became the apprentice of Francis Holman, a marine painter who would have a great and long lasting artistic influence on Luny: Luny remained until 1780 in Holman's London studio, which, was first situated in Broad Street, St. George, and later relocated to Old Gravel Lane. In September 1777, Luny left Holman's studio for a while, to journey to France. During this particular expedition, Luny almost certainly strayed from France itself; his first exhibited picture in London, seen at the Society of Artists that same year, was given the title A distant view of the island of Madeira and Porto Santo, suggesting that an engraving had inspired his choice of subject. Similarly, it is unlikely that Luny was on hand for the Battle of the Nile, 1798, and the bombardment of Algiers, 1816, both of which he illustrated with dramatic atmosphere and credible realism. After leaving Holman's studio in 1780, Luny moved to Leadenhall Street during 1783. It was around this time that Luny was frequently exhibiting at the Royal Academy, in a total of twenty-nine exhibitions between 1780 and 1802. In Leadenhall Street, Luny became acquainted with a "Mr. Merle", a dealer and framer of paintings who promoted Luny's paintings for over twenty years, to great success. Luny also found a wealthy source of business in Leadenhall Street, where the British East India Company had their headquarters; their officers commissioned many paintings and portraits from Luny. This relationship between the Company and Luny also had several non-monetary benefits for Luny; it seems probable that, considering the great detail and realistic look of many of his sketches of locations such as Naples, Gibraltar, and Charleston, South Carolina, Luny was occasionally invited as a guest on the Company's ships on special occasions and voyages.
Frans de Momper
Flemish Baroque Era Painter, 1603-1660 Painter and draughtsman, nephew of (1) Josse de Momper II. In 1629 he became a master in the Antwerp Guild of St Luke. He left Antwerp for the northern Netherlands, working initially at The Hague; by 1647 he was in Haarlem and the following year Amsterdam, where he married in 1649. In 1650 Frans returned to Antwerp, where he painted numerous monochrome landscapes in the manner of Jan van Goyen. Paintings such as the Valley with Mountains (c. 1640-50; Philadelphia, PA, Mus. A.) prefigure the imaginative landscapes of Hercules Segers. The impression of vast panoramic spaces in Frans's work is adopted from his uncle's art. Frans executed a number of variations on the theme of a river landscape with boats and village (e.g. pen-and-ink drawing, Edinburgh, N.G.). In the late painting Landscape with a Ch?teau Encircled by Doves (Bordeaux, Mus. B.-A.), the low horizon and light-filled sky are adopted from the new Dutch school of tonal landscape painting, while the delicacy of the figures, feathery trees and buildings are features of the Italo-Flemish tradition exemplified by his uncle. Similar qualities of refinement and luminosity characterize the Winter Landscape (c. 1650; Prague, N.G., Sternberk Pal.),