1728-1779 Dutch Anton Raphael Mengs Gallery Mengs was born in 1728 at Usti nad Labem (German: Aussig) in Bohemia on 12 March 1728; he died in Rome 29 June 1779. His father, Ismael Mengs, a Danish painter, established himself finally at Dresden, whence in 1741 he took his son to Rome. In Rome, his fresco painting of Parnassus at Villa Albani gained him a reputation as a master painter. The appointment of Mengs in 1749 as first painter to Frederick Augustus, elector of Saxony did not prevent his spending much time in Rome, where he had married Margarita Quazzi who had sat for him as a model in 1748, and abjured the Protestant faith, and where he became in 1754 director of the Vatican school of painting, nor did this hinder him on two occasions from obeying the call of Charles III of Spain to Madrid. There Mengs produced some of his best work, and specially the ceiling of the banqueting-hall of the Royal Palace of Madrid, the subject of which was the Triumph of Trajan and the Temple of Glory. Among his pupils there was Agust??n Esteve. After the completion of this work in 1777, Mengs returned to Rome, and there he died, two years later, in poor circumstances, leaving twenty children, seven of whom were pensioned by the king of Spain. His portraits and autoportraits recall an attention to detail and insight, often lost from the grand manner paintings. Besides numerous paintings in the Madrid gallery, the Ascension and St Joseph at Dresden, Perseus and Andromeda at Saint Petersburg, and the ceiling of the Villa Albani must be mentioned among his chief works. In 1911, Henry George Percy, 7th Duke of Northumberland, possessed a Holy Family, and the colleges of All Souls and Magdalen, at Oxford, possessed altar-pieces by Mengs's hand. In his writings, in Spanish, Italian and German, Mengs has put forth his eclectic theory of art, which treats of perfection as attainable by a well-schemed combination of diverse excellences Greek design, with the expression of Raphael, the chiaroscuro of Correggio, and the colour of Titian. He would have fancied himself the first neoclassicist, while in fact he may be the last flicker of Baroque art. Or in the words of Wittkower, In the last analysis, he is as much an end as a beginning. His intimacy with Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who constantly wrote at his dictation, has enhanced his historical importance, for he formed no scholars, and the critic must now concur in Goethe's judgment of Mengs in Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert; he must deplore that so much learning should have been allied to a total want of initiative and poverty of invention, and embodied with a strained and artificial mannerism. Mengs was famous for his rivalry with the contemporary Italian painter Pompeo Batoni.  Related Paintings of Anton Raphael Mengs :. | Portrait of Charles III of Spain | Evening | Portrait of Isabel Parreno Arce Ruiz de Alarcon y Valdes, Marchioness of Llano | St Foseph-s dream | Maria Luisa von Parma Prinzessin von Asturien |
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lorens pasch d. y
Lorens Pasch d.y., född 1733, död 1805, konstnär; professor vid Konstakademien från 1773. Son till Lorens Pasch d.ä., bror till Ulrika Pasch, brorsson till Johan Pasch. Invald tillsammans med sin syster i Konstakademien 1773.
STANZIONE, Massimo
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1585-1656 Italian painter. Primarily a painter of altarpieces and frescoes, his large production and vast following of students and imitators made him perhaps the leading Neapolitan painter in the first half of the 17th century. He was known as the great rival of Jusepe de Ribera, and for most of the 1630s and 1640s he and Ribera dominated painting in Naples. Stanzione's rich colour and idealized naturalism, for which he was called 'il Guido Reni napoletano', definitively influenced numerous local artists and remained discernible in the earliest works (1670s) of Francesco Solimena. Only a few portraits and mythological paintings by Stanzione are known,
Tait Arthur Fitzwilliam
English-born American Painter, 1819-1905 American painter and lithographer of English birth. He spent the first three decades of his life in England and arrived in New York in 1850. Steeped in admiration for the subjects of Edwin Landseer and the style of the Pre-Raphaelites, he established himself as a realistic painter of animals and sporting scenes. For his images of Western hunters and trappers, he used as sources the works of George Catlin and William Ranney, artists who, unlike himself, had travelled extensively. He established a summer studio at a camp in the Adirondack Mountains, where he painted sporting scenes. These wilderness scenes, often composed around an anecdote, appealed to a wide popular audience, and from 1852 Currier & Ives as well as Louis Prang published a number of lithographs and chromolithographs of his work. Tait also composed still-lifes of game birds and, in his later career, barnyard scenes of sheep and chickens. His painting A Tight Fix: Bear Hunting in Early Winter