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 Straw Hat | The Artist and his Wife in a Honeysuckle Bower (mk01) | Christ and Saint John with Angels | Portrait of Susanna Fourment ('Le Chapeau de Paille') (mk27) | The Apotheosis of Fames I and Other Studies (mk01) |
Related Artists:
George Cattermole
1800-1868 English painter and illustrator. From the age of 14 Cattermole worked with his brother Richard (?1795-1858) for the antiquarian John Britton, producing architectural drawings. This training equipped him with a repertory of accurate architectural backgrounds, and from the later 1820s his work shifted from delineations of historic buildings to imaginative depictions in watercolour of episodes from literature and history and genre subjects with historical settings. He became the foremost historical watercolour painter, recreating the medieval, Elizabethan and 17th-century past. The intimate history pictures of Richard Parkes Bonington were undoubtedly influential, while Cattermole's bold and loose handling of watercolour owed much to David Cox, an admirer of his work. As an illustrator, his works included The Great Civil War of Charles I and Parliament (written by his brother Richard and published in two volumes in 1841 and 1855) and Evenings at Haddon Hall (1846).
Ernst Sigismund Kirchbach
painted The Forge of Vulcan in between 1869 and 1875
Franz von Stuck
German Symbolist/Expressionist Painter and Sculptor, 1863-1928 Stuck was born at Tettenweis, in Bavaria. From an early age he displayed an affinity for drawing and caricature. To begin his artistic education in 1878 he went to Munich, where he would settle for life. From 1881 to 1885 Stuck attended the Munich Academy. He first made a name with cartoons for Fliegende Blätter, and vignette designs for programmes and book decoration. In 1889 he exhibited his first paintings at the Munich Glass Palace, winning a gold medal for The Guardian of Paradise. In 1892 Stuck co-founded the Munich Secession, and also executed his first sculpture, Athlete. The following year he won further acclaim with the critical and public success of what is now his most famous work, The Sin. Also in 1893, Stuck was awarded a gold medal for painting at the Chicago World's Fair and was appointed to a royal professorship. In 1895 he began teaching painting at the Munich Academy. In 1897 Stuck married an American widow, Mary Lindpainter, and began work designing his own residence and studio, the Villa Stuck. His designs for the villa included everything from layout to interior decorations; for his furniture Stuck received another gold medal at the 1900 Paris World Exposition. Having attained a high degree of fame by this time, Stuck was elevated to the aristocracy on December 9, 1905 and would receive further public honours from around Europe during the remainder of his life. Even as new trends in art left Stuck behind, he continued to be highly respected among young artists in his capacity as professor at the Munich Academy. Notable students of his over the years include Paul Klee, Hans Purrmann, Wassily Kandinsky, and Josef Albers. Franz von Stuck died in 1928; his funeral address memorialized him as "the last prince of art of Munich's great days". He is buried in the Munich Waldfriedhof next to his wife Mary.