1814-1875 French Jean Francois Millet Galleries Millet was the first child of Jean-Louis-Nicolas and Aim??e-Henriette-Adelaide Henry Millet, members of the peasant community in the village of Gruchy, in Gr??ville-Hague (Normandy). Under the guidance of two village priests, Millet acquired a knowledge of Latin and modern authors, before being sent to Cherbourg in 1833 to study with a portrait painter named Paul Dumouchel. By 1835 he was studying full-time with Lucien-Th??ophile Langlois, a pupil of Baron Gros, in Cherbourg. A stipend provided by Langlois and others enabled Millet to move to Paris in 1837, where he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with Paul Delaroche. In 1839 his scholarship was terminated, and his first submission to the Salon was rejected. After his first painting, a portrait, was accepted at the Salon of 1840, Millet returned to Cherbourg to begin a career as a portrait painter. However, the following year he married Pauline-Virginie Ono, and they moved to Paris. After rejections at the Salon of 1843 and Pauline's death by consumption, Millet returned again to Cherbourg. In 1845 Millet moved to Le Havre with Catherine Lemaire, whom he would marry in a civil ceremony in 1853; they would have nine children, and remain together for the rest of Millet's life. In Le Havre he painted portraits and small genre pieces for several months, before moving back to Paris. It was in Paris in the middle 1840s that Millet befriended Constant Troyon, Narcisse Diaz, Charles Jacque, and Theodore Rousseau, artists who, like Millet, would become associated with the Barbizon school; Honor?? Daumier, whose figure draftsmanship would influence Millet's subsequent rendering of peasant subjects; and Alfred Sensier, a government bureaucrat who would become a lifelong supporter and eventually the artist's biographer. In 1847 his first Salon success came with the exhibition of a painting Oedipus Taken down from the Tree, and in 1848 his Winnower was bought by the government.  Related Paintings of Jean Francois Millet :. | Weave class | Spring,haymow | First step | Shepherdess | Country yard |
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Aristide Maillol
1861-1944 Banyuls-sur-Mer,was a French Catalan sculptor and painter. Maillol was born in Banyuls-sur-Mer, Roussillon. He decided at an early age to become a painter, and moved to Paris in 1881 to study art. After several applications, his enrollment in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts was accepted in 1885, and he studied there under Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. His early paintings show the influence of his contemporaries Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Paul Gauguin. Gauguin encouraged his growing interest in decorative art, an interest that led Maillol to take up tapestry design. In 1893 Maillol opened a tapestry workshop in Banyuls, producing works whose high technical and esthetic quality gained him recognition for renewing this art form in France. He began making small terra cotta sculptures in 1895, and within a few years his concentration on sculpture led to the abandonment of his work in tapestry. The subject of nearly all of Maillol's mature work is the naked female body, treated with a classical emphasis on stable forms. The figurative style of his large bronzes is perceived as an important precursor to the greater simplifications of Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti, and his serene classicism set a standard for European (and American) figure sculpture until the end of World War II. His important public commissions include a 1912 commission for a monument to Cezanne, as well as numerous war memorials commissioned after World War I. He died in Banyuls at the age of eighty-three, in an automobile accident.
PANTOJA DE LA CRUZ, Juan
Spanish Painter, 1553-1608 Spanish painter. He must have moved to Madrid when he was very young, receiving his training in the workshop of Alonso S?nchez Coello, painter to Philip II. On numerous occasions he declared himself to be a follower of S?nchez Coello, in whose workshop he was an oficial, and he probably collaborated to a considerable degree on many of his master's mature works. There are very few signed works by Pantoja from before the death of S?nchez Coello, although some anonymous paintings from the workshop are probably by him. In Madrid in 1587 Pantoja married a woman of some means, and by the following year, when S?nchez Coello died, he was an independent painter, aspiring to his master's position. Documentation exists from 1590 concerning portraits by Pantoja of members of the royal family including one of Don Felipe, the future Philip III (1593; Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.). On Philip's accession to the throne in 1598 Pantoja painted another portrait of him (Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.) and became the official portrait painter for the court and for the nobility of Madrid; there is detailed documentation for his work from this time. He painted clothing and jewels with precision, in minute detail and with a dry objectivity in the Flemish tradition. His treatment of faces, however, clearly reveals his study of Venetian portraiture, and in particular that of Titian, as well as sharp psychological penetration. In his portraits of royal children he maintained, albeit with a certain rigidity, the charm that S?nchez Coello in his paintings had given these infant figures tightly swathed in official robes
Francesco Coleman
Italian, 1851-1918