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 :. | Et in Arcadia Ego | Winter | The Adoration of the Golden Calf g | The Inspiration of the Poet (detail) af | Les aveugles de jericho | Related Artists:
Jose Mercedes Ortegapainted Dona Ines de Suarez in defending the city of Santiago in 1897
Cornelis BolDutch, born circa 1589-1666,Painter, etcher and draughtsman, active in London. He was probably from a family of painters originating in Mechelen who later settled in Antwerp. Bol and his wife were members of the Dutch Church in London in 1636. An etching of an Action between the Dutch and Spanish Fleets (Oxford, Bodleian Lib.) is signed and dated 1639, and a set of etchings by him after Abraham Casembrot ( fl c. 1650-75) includes a view of Lambeth Palace as well as four imaginary Mediterranean seaports. A signed drawing of the Blockhouse at Gravesend is in the British Museum, London. George Vertue saw at Wotton House, Bucks, 'three views of London from the River side Arundel House Somersett house Tower Lond. painted before the fire of London by Cornelius Boll: a good free taste'. They were probably commissioned by John Evelyn, the diarist, around 1660 and descended in the Evelyn family. Their attribution to Bol is confirmed by a signed version of Somerset House (London, Dulwich Pict. Gal.). Although Bol was only moderately accomplished, he was able to reproduce the distinctive light and character of the River Thames and to render the riverside and its landmarks with much topographical detail; his pictures make pleasing visual documents. The handling of the naval craft is identical in a small signed oil panel of an Action between Dutch and Spanish Ships (Amsterdam, Rijksmus.) and in other marine subjects that have appeared in London salerooms. According to Immerzeel, Bol was still working in London at the time of the Great Fire in 1666.
MANDER, Karel vanb. 1548, Meulebeke, d. 1606, Amsterdam
Dutch painter, poet, and writer. Born of a noble family, after much wandering he settled in Haarlem in 1583 and founded a successful academy of painting with Hendrik Goltzius and Cornelis Cornelisz (1562 C 1638). He is best known for The Book of Painters (1604), which contains about 175 biographies of Dutch, Flemish, and German painters of the 15th C 16th centuries; it became for the northern countries what Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Painters had been for Italy.