English Baroque Era Painter, ca.1617-1694,was a British baroque portrait painter. Wright trained in Edinburgh under the Scots painter George Jamesone, and acquired a considerable reputation as an artist and scholar during a long sojourn in Rome. There he was admitted to the Accademia di San Luca, and was associated with some of the leading artists of his generation. He was engaged by Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria, the governor of the Spanish Netherlands, to acquire artworks in Oliver Cromwell's England in 1655. He took up permanent residence in England from 1656, and served as court painter before and after the English Restoration. A convert to Roman Catholicism, he was a favourite of the restored Stuart court, a client of both Charles II and James II, and was a witness to many of the political manoeuvrings of the era. In the final years of the Stuart monarchy he returned to Rome as part of an embassy to Pope Innocent XI. Wright is currently rated as one of the leading indigenous British painters of his generation and largely for the distinctive realism in his portraiture. Perhaps due to the unusually cosmopolitan nature of his experience, he was favoured by patrons at the highest level of society in an age in which foreign artists were usually preferred. Wright's paintings of royalty and aristocracy are included amongst the collections of many leading galleries today.   Related Paintings of John Michael Wright :. | Lely's Duchess of Cleveland as the penitent Magdalen | unknown scottish chieftain, c. | Sir Neil O'Neill | James Cecil by John Michael Wright | Charles II of England in Coronation robes |
Related Artists:
Vervloet Francois
Malines 1795-Venise 1872
Jean Jouvenet
Rouen 1644-Paris 1717
Ramon Casas
1866-1932 was a Catalan artist. Living through a turbulent time in the history of his native Barcelona, he was known as a portraitist, sketching and painting the intellectual, economic, and political elite of Barcelona, Paris, Madrid, and beyond; he was also known for his paintings of crowd scenes ranging from the audience at a bullfight to the assembly for an execution to rioters in the Barcelona streets. Also a graphic designer, his posters and postcards helped to define the Catalan art movement known as modernisme. Casas was born in Barcelona. His father had made a fortune in Matanzas, Cuba; his mother was from a well-off Catalan family. In 1877 he abandoned the regular course of schooling to study art in the studio of Joan Vicens. In 1881, still in his teens, he was a co-founder of the magazine L'Avenç; the 9 October 1881 issue included his sketch of the cloister of Sant Benet in Bages. That same month, accompanied by his cousin Miquel Carb i Carb, a medical student, he began his first stay in Paris, where he studied that winter at the Carolus Duran Academy and later at the Gervex Academy, and functioned as a Paris correspondent for L'Avenç. The next year he had a piece exhibited in Barcelona at the Sala Paris, and in 1883 in Paris the Salon des Champs Elysies exhibited his portrait of himself dressed as a flamenco dancer; the piece won him an invitation as a member of the salon of the Societe d'artistes françaises. The next few years he continued to paint and travel, spending most autumns and winters in Paris and the rest of the year in Spain, mostly in Barcelona but also in Madrid and Granada; his 1886 painting of the crowd at the Madrid bullfighting ring was to be the first of many highly detailed paintings of crowds. That year he survived tuberculosis, and convalesced for the winter in Barcelona.