1609-60
Dutch painter. She painted genre scenes, portraits and still-lifes, and she may also have made small etchings; no drawings by her are known. She specialized in small intimate genre scenes, usually with women seated by candlelight, and single half-length figures set against a neutral background. Related Paintings of Judith leyster :. | The Happy Couple | A Game of Tric-Trac | Flowers in a vase | Alternate title | Merry Trio | Related Artists:
Sebastiaen Vrancx (22 January 1573 - 19 May 1647) was a Flemish Baroque painter and etcher of the Antwerp school.
He was an apprentice in the workshop of Adam van Noort, who also trained many illustrious painters such as Peter Paul Rubens, Jacob Jordaens and Hendrik van Balen. He also visited the workshop of the Antwerp painter Paul Bril in Rome around 1600.
He was esteemed as one of the main painters of battle scenes, and works by Vranckx were in the collection of Peter Paul Rubens. As a collaborator he worked at times with Jan Brueghel the Elder. and together with Rubens, Frans Francken the Younger, van Balen, Frans Snyders and Joos de Momper the Younger on the Allegory of the Senses, two works commissioned on the occasion of the archduke Albert of Austria's visit to Antwerp. His best-known student is Pieter Snayers.
Most of his pictures represent biblical scenes or scenes of war, such as the sack of towns, cavalry combats, genre paintings and allegorical subjects. Though occasionally vigorous in drawing, his paintings are dull and heavy in tone.
He was at the same time a writer of poetry, comedies and tragicomedies for the chamber of rhetoric De Violieren. He was served as dean of the Antwerp painters' Guild of St. Luke, and was a district head and captain of the militia.
His works can be found in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Groeninge Museum in Bruges (both in Belgium) and the Noordbrabants museum in 's-Hertogenbosch and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (the Netherlands). He is also represented with several drawings or paintings at the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, the Harvard University Art Museums, the Louvre, Paris and several other museums.
GIRARDON, FrancoisFrench Baroque Era Sculptor, 1628-1715
François Girardon was born at Troyes on March 17, 1628. He studied in Rome for an undetermined period of time between 1645 and 1650. He then studied at the Royal Academy in Paris and was admitted to the academy as a member in 1657. Much of Girardon's most important work was executed for King Louis XIV and consisted of major commissions for the palace and gardens of Versailles. One of Girardon's most famous productions is Apollo and the Nymphs of Thetis in Versailles (1666-1672), originally designed for a grotto there. This elaborate project of seven separate marble statues depicts the god Apollo surrounded by nymphs, and it exemplifies with exceptional clarity the French interpretation of the baroque style in sculpture, an interpretation that rejected the fluid, dramatic, and emotional Italian baroque in favor of a cooler, more sober approach based upon the sculpture of antiquity. The Apollo group is filled with references to Hellenistic and Roman sculpture, and while Girardon was working on the commission he made a second trip to Rome for inspiration from antique sources. The ancient world, however, had never attempted to assemble several large pieces of free-standing sculpture into one unified composition, and in solving this problem Girardon had recourse to the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, the great French baroque classicist. The classicism of the Apollo group conformed fully to the official style of the French Academy and the personal taste of Louis XIV, but the composition has many baroque elements. The vigor and variety in the movement of the figures, the rich textural contrasts, the grand scale of the project, and the dramatic use of space are all stylistic qualities that firmly link the work to the international baroque style. One of Girardon's most important works is the tomb of Cardinal Richelieu in the church of the Sorbonne, Paris (1675-1677). This monument shows the dying prelate in a semireclining position, his vestments falling in broad curves that are echoed in the draperies of the allegorical figures at the head and foot of the tomb. As originally placed in the church, the monument was freestanding so that the spectator was compelled to enter into the action of the work - a typical baroque compositional device. Girardon's most significant late work was a majestic bronze equestrian statue of Louis XIV (1683-1692) executed for the Place Vendôme in Paris and based upon the famous Roman equestrian monument of the emperor Marcus Aurelius.
Julius LeBlanc Stewart (September 6, 1855, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - January 5, 1919, Paris, France), was an American artist who spent his career in Paris. A contemporary of fellow expatriate painter John Singer Sargent, Stewart was nicknamed "the Parisian from Philadelphia."
His father, the sugar millionaire William Hood Stewart, moved the family to Paris in 1865, and became a distinguished art collector and an early patron of Fortuny and the Barbizon artists. Julius studied under Eduardo Zamacois as a teenager, under Jean-Leo Grôme at the École des Beaux Arts, and later was a pupil of Raymondo de Madrazo.
Stewart's family wealth enabled him to live a lush expatriate life and paint what he pleased, often large-scaled group portraits. The first of these, After the Wedding (1880), showed the artist's brother Charles and his bride Mae, daughter of financier Anthony J. Drexel, leaving for their honeymoon.