English Painter, 1734-1802 The son of a cabinetmaker, George Romney was born in Dalton, Lancashire. He was apprenticed in 1755 to Christopher Steele, a provincial portrait painter, but was largely self-taught. Romney's ambition was to become a history painter. In 1762 he moved to London, where he studied the Duke of Richmond's collection of casts of antique sculpture and established himself as a portraitist. He went to Italy in 1773, and after his return in 1775 he became the favorite painter of high society. Morbidly sensitive and retiring, Romney kept aloof from the social world of his sitters and from the Royal Academy. By 1782 he was under the spell of Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton and the mistress of Nelson, who sat for him as Circe, a Bacchante, Cassandra, the Pythian Priestess, Joan of Arc, St. Cecilia, Mary Magdalene, and other impersonations he suggested. In the 1780s he executed a number of Eton leaving portraits, which established him as the supreme interpreter of aristocratic adolescence in his age. For much of his life in London, Romney was under the wing of the poet William Hayley, who encouraged him in the choice of subjects from Milton and Shakespeare as well as the Bible and Greek tragedy. Romney's history paintings are today chiefly known from engravings, like the dramatic Tempest (1787-1790) commissioned for John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. A large number of drawings for these projects survive. Romney had married early in life an uneducated woman whom he did not bring to London but to whom he returned when his health finally gave way. Ill health and the facility with which he converted his early realistic style into a fashionable sketchlike formula for idealizing his sitters probably account for an unevenness of execution that has partially justified his critics. Unlike Joshua Reynolds, Romney did not enter into the character of his sitters, unless they possessed nervous traits like his own, for example, the moving portrait William Cowper. But he was psychologically involved with the generalized charms of youth, beauty, and breeding that he admired in his aristocratic sitters, and by combining a neoclassic purity of line with free but masterly brushwork he achieved a number of incomparable images which transcend the realism of portraiture.   Related Paintings of ROMNEY, George :. | The Leigh Family d | Lady in a Brown Robe s | Miss Constable | Miss Constable dg | Sidonian Recollections |
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Master of the Legend
active in Cologne ca 1490/1500 Austrian painter and woodcutter. He is named after two altarpiece wings with three scenes from the Legend of SS Cosmas and Damian: the Miraculous Healing of the Leg, A Husband Commending his Wife to the Saints and the Delivery of the False Message by the Devil (Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.). He is thought to have been the earliest disciple of Lucas Cranach the elder in Austria and to have been later influenced by both Albrecht Altdorfer and J?rg Breu the elder. His rather stately figures are in splayed-out, often affected poses, with the feet and knees twisted outwards, appearing almost dislocated.
Jan Both
Jan Dirksz Both (between 1610 and 1618 - August 9, 1652) Jan Both was a Dutch painter, draughtsman, and etcher, who made an important contribution to the development of Dutch Italianate landscape painting. Both was born in Utrecht, and was the brother of Andries Both. According to Houbraken, the brothers first learned to paint from their father, who was a glass-painter or glazier there. Later Jan was a pupil of Abraham Bloemaert and still later the brothers traveled together to Rome via France. Gerrit van Honthorst has also been suggested as a teacher. By 1638 Jan and his brother Andries were in Rome where Andries concentrated on genre works in the manner of Pieter van Laer, while Jan concentrated on landscapes in the manner of Claude Lorrain.[1] In 1639 Jan collaborated with Herman van Swanevelt and Claude Lorrain on a project for the Buen Retiro Palace in Madrid. Certainly by 1646 Jan had returned to Utrecht, where he refined further his expansive, imaginary landscapes drenched with a Mediterranean golden light. In Landscape with Bandits Leading Prisoners (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) the sandy road makes a sweeping diagonal from the left. Touches of realism in the down-to-earth figures and detailed vegetation of the foreground contrast with the idyllic golden distance. Occasionally Both peoples his landscapes with religious or mythological figures as in Judgement of Paris (London, National Gallery) where the figures were painted by a fellow Utrecht artist, Cornelis van Poelenburch. Jan's brother Andries (c.1612-41), who specialised in peasant scenes, died in Venice as they were returning to Utrecht.
Adolph Heinrich Richter
painted A young wine grower and her children in