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 | Portrait painter | The Family of Sir Robert Vyner seated before the garden at Swakeleys | Painting by John Michael Wright of Catherine Cecil and James Cecil, | Elizabeth Claypole |
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Robert Whale
Born in Alternun, England in 1805. Died in Brantford, Ontario in 1887
Anton Domenico Gabbiani
1652-1726 Italian Anton Domenico Gabbiani Gallery Italian painter. He first trained with the Medici court portrait painter Giusto Suttermans and then with the painter Vincenzo Dandini. On 20 May 1673 he arrived in Rome, where he studied for three years under Ciro Ferri and Ercole Ferrata at the Accademia Fiorentina. He responded in particular to the paintings of Pietro da Cortona and Carlo Maratti who were both to be important influences on him. Though not precocious, Gabbiani became one of the most noted painters from the Accademia. After a period in Venice (1678-9) with the portrait painter Sebastiano Bombelli, he was in Florence in 1680. By 1684, the year in which he executed an Annunciation (destr.) for the Palazzo Pitti, he was an independent painter. His first important public commission, the St Francis de Sales in Glory (1685) for the church of SS Apostoli, Florence (in situ), shows the influence of Maratti in its grandiose composition and that of Dandini in the treatment of figures. In Prince Ferdinando de Medici Gabbiani found a particularly loyal patron, and he painted his portrait, Ferdinando de Medici and his Musicians (c. 1685; Florence, Pitti). One of the works executed for Ferdinando was possibly a portrait of his sister, which Chiarini has identified with the painting of Anna Maria Luisa de Medici (c. 1685; Florence, Pitti). Further works from this period are the group portrait of Three Musicians (Florence, Pitti) at Ferdinando court and a Group of Courtiers (1685-90; Florence, Uffizi).
Bertel Thorvaldsen
1770-1844 Copenhagen, He was a Danish/Icelandic sculptor. Thorvaldsen was born in Copenhagen in 1770 (according to some accounts, in 1768), the son of an Icelander who had settled in Denmark and there carried on the trade of a wood-carver. This account is disputed by some Icelanders, who claim Thorvaldsen was born in Iceland. Young Thorvaldsen attended Copenhagen's Royal Danish Academy of Art (Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi), winning all the prizes including the large Gold Medal. As a consequence, he was granted a Royal stipend, enabling him to complete his studies in Rome, where he arrived on 8 March 1797. Since the date of his birth had never been recorded, he celebrated this day as his "Roman birthday" for the rest of his life. Thorvaldsen's first success was the model for a statue of Jason, which was highly praised by Antonio Canova, the most popular sculptor in the city. In 1803 he received the commission to execute it in marble from Thomas Hope, a wealthy English art-patron. From that time Thorvaldsen's success was assured, and he did not leave Italy for sixteen years. In 1819 he visited his native Denmark. Here he was commissioned to make the colossal series of statues of Christ and the twelve Apostles for the rebuilding of Vor Frue Kirke (from 1922 known as the Copenhagen Cathedral) between 1817 and 1829, after its having been destroyed in the British bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807.