French Baroque Era Painter, 1594-1665 French painter and draughtsman, active in Italy. His supreme achievement as a painter lies in his unrivalled but hard-won capacity to subordinate dramatic narrative and the expression of extreme states of human passions to the formal harmony of designs based on the beauty and precision of abstract forms. The development of his art towards this end was focused on the search for a point of equilibrium and synthesis between the forces of the Classical and the Baroque around which most critical debate in Rome was concentrated during the 1630s. Poussin did not aspire to the classicism of Raphael's idealized human forms or Michelangelo's re-embodiment of the physical splendours of the antique world, nor did he attempt to vie with the bravura and energy of Annibale Carracci's treatment of Classical mythology in the Galleria of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Equally he was not concerned with the illusionistic effects and heightened emotionalism of Baroque artists such as Pietro da Cortona and Lanfranco. He was concerned above all with interpreting his subject-matter, whether Classical or religious, and telling a story with the greatest possible concentration of emotional response,  Related Paintings of POUSSIN, Nicolas :. | Landscape with Polyphemus af | Venus Presenting Arms to Aeneas f | The Institution of the Eucharist af | The Triumph of Neptune sg | The Triumph of Neptune (detail) af |
Related Artists:
August Strindberg
1849-1912 Swedish painter, sculptor and playwright. He had no art training, but learnt from artist friends after abandoning his studies at the University of Uppsala in 1872. The chief influence on him was Per Ekström, whose broken colour-spot technique he attempted to copy during his initial painting period in 1872-4 in Stockholm and on the skerry-islands Kymmendö and Sandhamn. Very little of Strindberg's early painting survives, but he had already found his special motifs: the sea, usually with turbulent waves; solitary trees or flowers on bare cliffs or sandy beaches in the outermost fringe of the skerries. After he stopped painting in 1874 he became Sweden's leading art critic, as well as the ideological leader of the radical Swedish artists' movement, which in 1884 formed the Konstnärsförbund (the Artists' Association) in protest against the Academy of Art. Prominent among the members were the painters Carl Olof Larsson, Karl Nordström and Richard Bergh. During this period, however, he produced sketches in words and pictures as illustrations to his own writings, which Carl Larsson was commissioned to do thereafter. From 1883 he stayed abroad, primarily in France and Switzerland, and belonged during a couple of long periods to the Scandinavian artists' colony in Grez-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau in France. In 1886 in Switzerland he started photography and took a series of self-portraits that were intended for publication
Arthur Melville
British Painter, 1858-1904, Scottish painter. He was trained in Edinburgh under James Campbell Noble (1846-1913) and at the Royal Scottish Academy Schools. His early works are peasant subjects in a subdued tonal style. While at the Acad?mie Julian in Paris and at Grez-sur-Loing (1878-81) he developed a colouristic watercolour style with strong chiaroscuro. This was consolidated during his journey in 1881 to Egypt and Constantinople, and on trips between 1890 and 1893 to Spain (with Frank Brangwyn) and North Africa. Contrasts of strong sunlight and coloured shadows were created in his 'blottesque' technique of colour droplets on paper saturated with Chinese white: sponge and brushwork were used to clarify form, as in Little Bullfight: 'Bravo Toro' (c. 1888-9; London, V&A). He was associated with the Glasgow Boys and influenced their development of colour and design. His closest contact with them came during outdoor sketching trips in Scotland between 1882 and 1889, and in Paris in 1886 and 1889. In 1886 he became an Associate of the Royal Scottish Academy and developed a strongly decorative oil style, seen in Audrey and her Goats (1884-9; London, Tate).
Douglas Morison
1814-1847