Italian painter , (b. 1707, Verona, d. 1762, St. Petersburg) Italian painter. His artistic career began as a youthful distraction, but his talent quickly became apparent, and he entered the studio of Antonio Balestra in Verona, remaining there until he was 18. He spent the years 1725-7 in Venice and then moved c. 1728 to Rome, where he stayed for four years as a student of Francesco Trevisani. Between 1731 and 1734 he studied with Francesco Solimena in Naples before returning to Verona, where he set up his own studio and school. His most notable early independent works are multi-figured altarpieces (e.g. the Four Martyrs, 1745; Verona, church of the Ospedale di S Giacomo), which emulate 17th-century Roman and Neapolitan works. However, he also studied the smaller, more intimate paintings of Roman Baroque artists, and these influenced his later works. He fell victim to the wanderlust that appears to have been endemic to 18th-century Venetian painters, and c. 1751 he travelled to Vienna, where he was able to study works by Jean-Etienne Liotard, whose clean pictorial smoothness impressed him. He later moved to Dresden  Related Paintings of Pietro Antonio Rotari :. | Portrait of a Young Girl | Sleeping Girl | Portrait of Grand Duchess Yekaterina Alexeyevna | Portrait of Grand Duchess Yekaterina Alexeyevna | Countess A.M. Vorontsova |
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Samuel Butler
British author , (1835 - 1902) Samuel Butler was born on Dec. 4, 1835, in Langar, near Bingham, Nottinghamshire, the son of the local vicar. In a time of common paternal absolutism, his childhood seems to have been bleak and graceless. After taking a degree at Cambridge, he came into open conflict with his father over the question of his future profession, and at last he emigrated to New Zealand to become a sheep farmer. But though free of his father, he was not free of revolt, and the spirit of resentful rebelliousness marked much of his later life. In New Zealand he read Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and wrote a series of newspaper articles setting forth Darwin's ideas and ingeniously applying the evolutionary hypothesis to machines. Having made a modest fortune, he returned to England in 1864. Erewhon (1872), Butler's first book, is a mixture of satire, utopian theories, and serious speculation masked as whimsy. Set in the frame of a trip to an unknown land (Erewhon is an anagram of "no-where"), it has no real plot but is rather a description and discussion of the customs and institutions of Erewhon. In this land moral failings are treated as mental illness and cured by a "straightener," but physical illness and misfortune are considered crimes and severely punished. Children sign certificates absolving their parents of responsibility for their birth, and education is carried on in the College of Unreason. Butler's reflections on orthodox religion, begun in New Zealand, issued in The Fair Haven (1873), an ironic attempt to reconcile the New Testament with rationalistic criticism. In Life and Habit he returned to the question of evolution. In Evolution Old and New (1879), Unconscious Memory (1880), and Luck, or Cunning? (1887), he developed his ideas with an increasingly self-righteous resentment of what he conceived to be the Darwinians' deliberate concealment of the truth. Butler hoped to be able to restore will, intelligence, and design to a universe apparently made meaningless by the blind process of natural selection. The novel The Way of All Flesh, Butler's most famous work, was written between 1872 and 1885. It is the supposed biography of Ernest Pontifex, narrated by an older friend with an unrelenting candor deliberately affronting conventional pieties.
Karl Bodmer
Swiss Painter, 1809-1893,Swiss painter and graphic artist, active in the USA and France. His earliest exposure to art probably came from his uncle, the landscape painter and engraver Johann Jakob Meyer (1787-1858). When he was 22, Bodmer moved to Paris, where he studied art under Sebastien Cornu. In Paris he met his future patron, Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, who was planning an ambitious scientific expedition to North America. Bodmer was engaged to accompany the expedition and to provide sketches of the American wilderness. After touring the East Coast, the party made their way westward via the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to St Louis, MO, and in 1833 travelled up the Missouri River into country scarcely inhabited by white men. On the journey north to Ft MacKenzie, WY, Bodmer recorded the landscape and the groups of Indians they encountered. Having wintered in Ft Clark, ND, they returned to New York and then Europe in 1834.
CALRAET, Abraham van
Dutch painter, Dordrecht school (b. 1642, Dordrecht, d. 1722, Dordrecht) Dutch painter. He was the eldest son of Pieter Jansz. van Calraet (c. 1620-81), a sculptor from Utrecht. According to Houbraken, Abraham was taught by the Dordrecht sculptors Aemilius and Samuel Huppe, although nothing is known of his activity as a sculptor. Houbraken also stated that Abraham learnt to paint figures and fruit and that his brother Barent van Calraet (1649-1737), who specialized at first in horse paintings but later imitated the Rhine landscapes of Herman Saftleven, was a pupil of Aelbert Cuyp (see CUYP, (3)). The known signed works by Barent confirm this. A painting of two horses in a stable, initialled APK (Rotterdam, Mus. Boymans-van Beuningen), indicates that Abraham, too, must have been well acquainted with Cuyp and provides the basis for identifying Abraham's painting style. A large number of landscapes with horses, paintings of livestock in stables and still-lifes, all initialled A.C. and formerly attributed to Aelbert Cuyp,