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 :. | Sitting old man | Underage Yisabela | Prince of Mantua | Isabella d'Este | Roman Charity |
Related Artists:
Melendez, Luis Eugenio
Spanish, born in Italy, approx. 1716-1780
Robert Dodd
English Painter, 1748-1816, English painter and engraver. He exhibited at the Society of Arts from 1780 and at the Royal Academy, London, from 1782 to 1809. He had gained some reputation as a landscape artist by 1771 but soon concentrated on marine scenes. He became a ship portraitist and above all a prolific recorder of naval actions in the American and French Revolutionary wars such as the Sinking of the 'Vengeur de Peuple' at the Battle of the Glorious First of June, 1794 (1795; London, N. Mar. Mus.). He was also praised for his handling of storm scenes, notably a series depicting the loss of the Ramillies in the West Indies hurricane of September 1782 (1783-5; London, N. Mar. Mus.). His work was engraved by others but he also executed over 100 plates himself, mostly in aquatint, including views of the naval dockyards at Chatham, Woolwich and Deptford and also of the Thames at Blackwall and Greenwich, the last-named based on his oil painting of 1792 (London, N. Mar. Mus.).
Theodoros Vryzakis
Thebes 19 October 1814 - Munich 6 December 1878) was a major Greek painter of the 19th century. Vryzakis's father died in the Greek War of Independence. He is the first Greek painter who studied in Munich and the main representative of the type of historical painting that was popular in Greece in the 18th century. He is considered the first painter of modern Greece, a recorder of the Greek War of Independence, which he viewed in a romantic and nostalgic way. His paintings' characters are pompous, theatrical and detached figures. His interest in the traditional costumes and the decoration and the absence of any individual facial expression is according to art critics the result of the eye of a "foreign" artist, who looks for the conventional element in another land. The monumental size of his pictures, the ceremonial and theatrical compositions, and the meticulous style of academic idealistic romanticism make his style unique for among Greek Artists. Today, many of his works are exhibited at the National Gallery of Athens and the Benaki Museum in Athens.