Dutch 1872-1944 Piet Mondrian Location was a Dutch painter. He was an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neo-Plasticism. This consisted of a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines and the use of the three primary colours. When 47-year-old Piet Mondrian left his artistically conservative native Holland for unfettered Paris for the second and last time in 1919, he set about at once to make his studio a nurturing environment for paintings he had in mind that would increasingly express the principles of Neo-Plasticism about which he had been writing for two years. To hide the studio's structural flaws quickly and inexpensively, he tacked up large rectangular placards, each in a single color or neutral hue. Smaller colored paper squares and rectangles, composed together, accented the walls. Then came an intense period of painting. Then again he addressed the walls, repositioning the colored cutouts, adding to their number, altering the dynamics of color and space, producing new tensions and equilibrium. Before long, he had established a creative schedule in which a period of painting took turns with a period of experimentally regrouping the smaller papers on the walls, a process that directly fed the next period of painting. It was a pattern he followed for the rest of his life, through wartime moves from Paris to London??s Hampstead in 1938 and 1940, across the Atlantic to Manhattan. At 71 in the fall of 1943, Mondrian moved into his second and final New York studio at 15 East 59th Street, and set about again to create the environment he had learned over the years was most congenial to his modest way of life and most stimulating to his art. He painted the high walls the same off-white he used on his easel and on the seats, tables and storage cases he designed and fashioned meticulously from discarded orange and apple-crates. He glossed the top of a white metal stool in the same brilliant primary red he applied to the cardboard sheath he made for the radio-phonograph that spilled forth his beloved jazz from well-traveled records, Visitors to this last studio seldom saw more than one or two new canvases, but found, often to their astonishment, that eight large compositions of colored bits of paper he had tacked and re-tacked to the walls in ever-changing relationships constituted together an environment that, paradoxically and simultaneously, was both kinetic and serene, stimulating and restful. It was the best space, Mondrian said, that he had ever inhabited. Tragically, he was there for only a few months: he died of pneumonia in February 1944.  Related Paintings of Piet Mondrian :. | Piet Mondrian, View from the Dunes with Beach and Piers | Chrysanthemum | Conformation with yellow | Dune | Conformation |
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Jacques-Laurent Agasse
1767-1849 Swiss Jacques-Laurent Agasse Galleries (b Geneva, 24 March 1767; d London, 27 Dec 1849). English painter of Swiss birth. Born into a wealthy and politically influential Huguenot family, Agasse spent his early childhood at the country estate of Cravin, where he may have developed the interest in animals and natural history that was to guide his later career as an artist in England. Agasse trained first at the Ecole du Colibri in Geneva and subsequently in Paris under Jacques-Louis David (beginning in 1787) and possibly under Horace Vernet. His early artistic output consisted chiefly of unpretentious silhouette cut-outs in the style of Jean-Daniel Huber. At this time he also undertook a serious study of dissection and veterinary science.
Frans Snyders
Belgian 1579-1657 Frans Snyders Gallery Frans Snyders (1579 - 1657), or Snijders, was a Flemish painter of animals and still life. Snyders was born and died at Antwerp. He is recorded as a student of Pieter Brueghel the Younger in 1593, and subsequently received instruction from Hendrick van Balen, the first master of Van Dyck. He was a friend of Van Dyck who painted Snyders and his wife more than once (Frick Collection, Kassel etc). He became a master of the Antwerp painters guild in 1602. He visited Italy in 1608-9, visiting Rome, and working for Cardinal Borromeo in Milan. In 1611 he married Margaretha, the sister of Cornelis de Vos and Paul de Vos (another animal painter), in Antwerp. Jan Fyt was a student, and then assistant of his from 1629. Snyders initially devoted himself to painting flowers, fruit and subjects of still life, but later turned to painting animals, and executed with the greatest skill and spirit hunting pieces and combats of wild animals. He was one of the earliest specialist animaliers. Snyders and his wife, by Van Dyck, KasselHis composition is rich and varied, his drawing correct and vigorous, his touch bold and thoroughly expressive of the different textures of furs and skins. His excellence in this department excited the admiration of Rubens, who frequently employed him to paint animals, fruit and still life in his own pictures, and he assisted Jacob Jordaens, Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert and other artists in a similar manner. In the lion and boar hunts which bear the name of Snyders the hand of Rubens sometimes appears. He was one of the executors of Rubens's will. He was appointed principal painter to the Archduke Albert of Austria, governor of the Low Countries, for whom he executed some of his finest works. One of these, a Stag-Hunt was presented to Philip III of Spain, who together with his successor Philip IV of Spain, commissioned the artist to paint several subjects of the chase, which are still preserved in Spain. He also worked for Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria, when he became Governor.
DROST, Willem
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, ca.1630-1680 Dutch painter, draughtsman and printmaker, possibly of German origin. According to Houbraken, he was a pupil of Rembrandt, possibly in or shortly before 1650. An early etching signed w drost 1652 is probably a self-portrait, in which Drost portrayed himself as a young man drawing. His earliest dated paintings are two pendants of 1653: the Portrait of a Man (New York, Met.) and the Portrait of a Woman (The Hague, Mus. Bredius). The man's portrait is signed Wilhelmus Drost F. Amsterdam 1653