Flemish Baroque Era Painter, 1577-1640 Peter Paul Rubens (June 28, 1577 ?C May 30, 1640) was a prolific seventeenth-century Flemish Baroque painter, and a proponent of an exuberant Baroque style that emphasized movement, color, and sensuality. He is well-known for his Counter-Reformation altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and history paintings of mythological and allegorical subjects. In addition to running a large studio in Antwerp which produced paintings popular with nobility and art collectors throughout Europe, Rubens was a classically-educated humanist scholar, art collector, and diplomat who was knighted by both Philip IV, king of Spain, and Charles I, king of England. Rubens was a prolific artist. His commissioned works were mostly religious subjects, "history" paintings, which included mythological subjects, and hunt scenes. He painted portraits, especially of friends, and self-portraits, and in later life painted several landscapes. Rubens designed tapestries and prints, as well as his own house. He also oversaw the ephemeral decorations of the Joyous Entry into Antwerp by the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand in 1635. His drawings are mostly extremely forceful but not detailed; he also made great use of oil sketches as preparatory studies. He was one of the last major artists to make consistent use of wooden panels as a support medium, even for very large works, but he used canvas as well, especially when the work needed to be sent a long distance. For altarpieces he sometimes painted on slate to reduce reflection problems. His fondness of painting full-figured women gave rise to the terms 'Rubensian' or 'Rubenesque' for plus-sized women. The term 'Rubensiaans' is also commonly used in Dutch to denote such women.  Related Paintings of Peter Paul Rubens :. | The Raishing of the Cross (mk01) | The Apotheosis of Fames I and Other Studies (mk01) | backanal pa andros | The Temle of Janus | Landscape with a Rainbow (mk01) |
Related Artists:
Johann Jakob de Lose
Johann Jakob de Lose (1755 - 1813), German painter, working in Frankfurt/Main.
Sebastien Bourdon
(2 February 1616 - 8 May 1671) was a French painter and engraver. His chef d'œuvre is The Crucifixion of St. Peter made for the church of Notre Dame. The Finding of Moses, c. 1650 (National Gallery of Art, Washington)Bourdon was born in Montpellier, France, the son of a Protestant painter on glass. He was apprenticed to a painter in Paris. In spite of his poverty he managed to get to Rome in 1636; there he studied the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain and Caravaggio among his eclectic selection of models, until he was forced to flee in 1638, to escape denunciation by the Inquisition for his Protestant faith. Bourdon's facility rendered him adept at portraiture, whether in a dashing Rubens manner or in intimate, sympathetic bust-length or half-length portraits isolated against plain backgrounds that set a formula for middle-class portraiture for the rest of the century, landscapes in the manner of Gaspar Dughet or cappricci of ruins, mythological "history painting" like other members of Poussin's circle or the genre subjects of the Dutch Bamboccianti who were working in Rome. His eclectic range of styles have given art historians exercise in tracing his adaptation of his models, while the lack of an immediately recognizable "Bourdon style" has somewhat dampened public appreciation. In 1652 Christina of Sweden made him her first court painter. Bourdon spent most of his working career outside France, where, though he was a founding member of the Academie de peinture et de sculpture (1648), he was for long largely dismissed as a pasticheur, a situation partly rebalanced by a comprehensive exhibition in 2000 of his work at the Musee Fabre, where the collection includes a fine Lamentation painted in the last years of his life. His success required the establishment of an extensive atelier, where, among his other pupils worked Nicolas-Pierre Loir and Pierre Mosnier. He died in Paris in 1671.
Lucas Horenbout
Lucas Horenbout, often called Hornebolte in England, (Ghent c. 1490 to 1495 - London 1544) was a Flemish artist who moved to England in the mid-1520s and worked there as "King's Painter" and court miniaturist to King Henry VIII from 1525 until his death. He was trained in the final phase of Netherlandish illuminated manuscript painting, in which his father Gerard was an important figure, and was the founding painter of the long and distinct English tradition of portrait miniature painting. He has often been suggested as the Master of the Cast Shadow Workshop, who produced royal portraits on panel in the 1520s or 1530s. Horenbout trained in Ghent with his father, Gerard Horenbout, becoming a Master of the local Guild of Saint Luke in 1512. Gerard was an important Flemish manuscript illuminator in the dying days of that art-form, who had been court painter, from 1515 to about 1522, to Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands. Margaret was twice sister-in-law to Catherine of Aragon, still Henry's (first) Queen when the Horenbouts came to England. Gerard is sometimes identified with the "Master of James IV of Scotland", one of the many artistic personalities identified as a significant illuminator in the Ghent-Bruges school of the period, to whom no historical person can be attached. Horenbout came over to England at an unknown date with, or perhaps before, his sister Susanna and his father. It has been suggested that their move was in connection with an attempt by the King, or possibly Cardinal Wolsey, to revive English manuscript illumination by establishing a workshop in London, but this is controversial. His father Gerard is first recorded in England in 1528, and later returned to the Continent, probably after 1531; he had died in Ghent by 1540. Susanna, who was also an illuminator, is recorded in 1529 as married to a John Palmer and in England. Lucas is documented in England from September 1525, when he was first paid by the King as "pictor maker". By 1531 he was described as the "King's Painter", and this appointment was confirmed for life in June 1534, when he became a "denizen" - effectively a naturalised citizen. Horenbout was very well paid, at sixty-two pounds and ten shillings (but only thirty-three pounds and six shillings according to Richard Gay) per year, a "huge" sum according to Strong, and better than Holbein's thirty pounds a year in his period as Henry's court painter. He was granted a "tenement" in Charing Cross, and permitted to take on four foreign journeyman. Lucas was buried at Saint Martin in the Fields and left a wife and daughter, Margaret and Jacquemine. Margaret was paid sixty shillings three years later by Queen Catherine Parr for some paintings.