(born Niko Pirosmanashvili; May 5, 1862-1918) was a Georgian primitivist painter. Pirosmani was born in the Georgian village of Mirzaani to a pleasant family in the Kakheti province. His family owned a small vineyard. He was later orphaned and put in the care of his two elder sisters. He moved with them to Tbilisi in 1870. In 1872 he worked as a servant for wealthy families and learned to read and write Russian and Georgian. In 1876 he returned to Mirzaani and worked as a herdsman. Pirosmani gradually taught himself to paint. One of his specialties was painting directly into black oilcloth. In 1882 he opened a workshop in Tbilisi which was unsuccessful. In 1890 he worked as a railroad conductor, and in 1895 worked creating signboards. In 1893 he co-founded a dairy farm in Tbilisi which he left in 1901. Throughout his life Pirosmani, who was always poor, was willing to take up ordinary jobs including housepainting and whitewashing buildings. Although his paintings had some local popularity (about 200 survive) his relationship with professional artists remained uneasy; making a living was always more important to him than abstract aesthetics.  Related Paintings of Niko Pirosmanashvili :. | Giraffe | A Ram | Lion | A Black Wild Boar | Lion |
Related Artists:
giorgio de chirico
Giorgio de Chirico (Italian pronunciation: [ˈdʒɔrdʒo deˈkiriko]; July 10, 1888 ?C November 20, 1978) was a pre-Surrealist and then Surrealist Italian painter born in Volos, Greece, to a Genoese mother and a Sicilian father. He founded the scuola metafisica art movement. His surname is traditionally written De Chirico (capitalized De) when it stands alone
Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld
1794-1872 Painter and draughtsman, brother of Ludwig Ferdinand Schnorr von Carolsfeld. He was taught engraving by his father and then trained under Heinrich Feger at the Akademie in Vienna (1811-15). Though not particularly excited by the curriculum, he was inspired by his friendship with Ferdinand Olivier and Joseph Anton Koch and the circle around A. W. Schlegel to an interest in both landscape sketching and in old German and Netherlandish art, as reflected in the style of the detailed pen drawing of the Prodigal Son (1816; Dresden, Kupferstichkab.). From 1815 to 1818 he lived in the house of Ferdinand Olivier, whose step-daughter, Marie Heller, he later married. A painting of 1817, St Roch Distributing Alms
Pieter van der Werff
(1665 - September 26, 1722) was a Dutch Golden Age painter. He assisted his older brother, Adriaen van der Werff. He learned to paint from his brother Adriaen and according to the RKD, he spent most of his life working in Rotterdam, where he painted the rich and famous