1637-1712 Dutch Jan Van Der Heyden Gallery Van der Heyden grew up in Gorcum, but the family moved to Amsterdam around 1650. They lived on Dam Square. As a young guy he witnessed the fire in the old townhall which made a deep impression on him. He later would describe or draw 80 fires in almost any neighborhood of Amsterdam. When he married in 1661 the family was living on Herengracht, the most fashionable canal in Amsterdam. In 1668 Cosimo II de' Medici bought one of his paintings, a view of the townhall with a manipulated perspective. Van der Heyden often painted country estates, like Goudestein, owned by Joan Huydecoper II. He was not good in drawing figures and used for his paintings a metal plate for bricks, a sponge or moss for the leaves. Johannes Lingelbach, Adriaen van de Velde und Eglon van der Neer assisted him drawing the figures. Jan van der Heyden also introduced the lamp post and in 1672 impoved the design of the fire engine. He died in wealth as the superintendent of the lighting and director of the (voluntary) firemen's guild at Amsterdam. Van der Heyden was a contemporary of the landscape painters Hobbema and Jacob van Ruisdael, with the advantage, which they lacked, of a certain professional versatility; for, whilst they painted admirable pictures and starved, he varied the practice of art with the study of mechanics. Until 1672 he painted in partnership with Adriaen van de Velde. After Adrian's death, and probably because of the loss which that event entailed upon him, he accepted the offices to which allusion has just been made. At no period of artistic activity had the system of division of labour been more fully or more constantly applied to art than it was in Holland towards the close of the 17th century. Van der Heyden, who was perfect as an architectural draughtsman insofar as he painted the outside of buildings and thoroughly mastered linear perspective, seldom turned his hand to the delineation of anything but brick houses and churches in streets and squares, or rows along canals, or "moated granges," common in his native country. He was a travelled man, had seen The Hague, Ghent and Brussels, and had ascended the Rhine past Xanten to Cologne, where he copied over and over again the tower and crane of the great cathedral. But he cared nothing for hill or vale, or stream or wood. He could reproduce the rows of bricks in a square of Dutch houses sparkling in the sun, or stunted trees and lines of dwellings varied by steeples, all in light or thrown into passing shadow by moving cloud. He had the art of painting microscopically without loss of breadth or keeping. But he could draw neither man nor beast, nor ships nor carts; and this was his disadvantage. His good genius under these circumstances was Adrian van der Velde, who enlivened his compositions with spirited figures; and the joint labour of both is a delicate, minute, transparent work, radiant with glow and atmosphere.  Related Paintings of Jan van der Heyden :. | Scenic old church | Castle Garden in the rear | The Dam with the New Town Hall | The crossroads of the forest landscape | Canal house |
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Raphaelle Peale
1774-1825 Peale was born in Philadelphia as the son and first child of Rachel and Charles Willson Peale, a famous portraitist. Lived in Philadelphia, on a home at the corner of 3rd and Lombard. Married Martha (Patty) McGlathery at the age of 20. First first professional exhibition was in 1795 at the age of 21. Artist. Born Raphaelle Peale in Annapolis, Maryland on February 17, 1774, the fifth child, though eldest surviving, of Charles Willson Peale and his first wife Rachel Brewer. As with all the Peale children, Raphael was trained by his father as an artist. Early in his career, the pair collaborated on portraits. On some commissions, Raphael painted miniatures while his brother, Rembrandt, painted full size portraits. In 1792, he made a trip to South America in order to collect specimens for the Peale's Museum. In 1797, with his brother Rembrandt, he traveled to Charleston, South Carolina, where they attempted to establish another museum. The plan fell through, however, and Raphael returned to painting miniatures. He married Martha McGlathery at about that same time, and with her had eight children. For about two years beginning in 1803, Raphael toured Virginia with the ??physiognotrace,' a profile making machine, with which he was briefly successful. In August 1808, he was hospitalized with delirium tremens, exacerbated by severe gout. By 1813, he was unable to walk without crutches. After the downturn in his health, in an era when most artists considered still life a subject worthy only of amateurs, he devoted himself almost exclusively to still life painting. It is for these works he is best known. Raphael Peale is today considered the founder of the American Still Life school. His work was on frequent exhibit at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts between 1814 and 1818. After reportedly indulging in a night of heavy drinking, his health destroyed, Raphael died on March 3, 1825 at age 51 at his home in Philadelphia. Peale's tightly grouped still lifes are often permeated with a delicate melancholy akin to that which characterized the life of the artist; he was an alcoholic who suffered the effects of arsenic and mercury poisoning caused by his work as a taxidermist in his father's museum. His spare, essential style may have been influenced by the Spanish still lifes he studied in Mexico and by the works of Juan Sanchez Cotan, exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1818.
Pierre de Valenciennes
Toulouse 1750-Paris 1819 .French painter. He trained at the academy in Toulouse under the history painter Jean-Baptiste Despax (1709-73). In 1769 he went to Italy for the first time, with Mathias Du Bourg, a councillor at the Toulouse parliament. Du Bourg introduced him to Etienne-Fran?ois, Duc de Choiseul, a keen patron of the arts, who in turn recommended him to Gabriel-Fran?ois Doyen, one of the leading history painters in Paris, whose studio he entered in 1773. Doyen gave his pupil a sense of the elevated ideals of history painting but was also sympathetic to the lesser genre of landscape. Valenciennes presumably frequented Choiseul's country seat at Chanteloup, near Amboise, meeting there the landscape painters Hubert Robert and Jean Hoeel, both proteg's of Choiseul. His early interest in the native landscape can be seen in his sketchbooks (Paris, Louvre), especially one dated 1775 that contains drawings made at Amboise, Compiegne and Fontainebleau
Simone Dei Crocifissi
Italian Painter , 1330-1399