1615-1673 Italian Salvator Rosa Galleries Salvatore Rosa (1615 - March 15, 1673) was an Italian Baroque painter, poet and printmaker, active in Naples, Rome and Florence. As a painter, he is best known as an "unorthodox and extravagant" and a "perpetual rebel" proto-Romantic. His life and writings were equally colorful. He continued apprenticeship with Falcone, helping him complete his battlepiece canvases. In that studio, it is said that Lanfranco took notice of his work, and advised him to relocate to Rome, where he stayed from 1634-6. Returning to Naples, he began painting haunting landscapes, overgrown with vegetation, or jagged beaches, mountains, and caves. Rosa was among the first to paint "romantic" landscapes, with a special turn for scenes of picturesque often turbulent and rugged scenes peopled with shepherds, brigands, seamen, soldiers. These early landscapes were sold cheaply through private dealers. This class of paintings peculiarly suited him. He returned to Rome in 1638-39, where he was housed by Cardinal Francesco Maria Brancaccio, bishop of Viterbo. For the Chiesa Santa Maria della Morte in Viterbo, Rosa painted his first and one of his few altarpieces with an Incredulity of Thomas. While Rosa had a facile genius at painting, he pursued a wide variety of arts: music, poetry, writing, etching, and acting. In Rome, he befriended Pietro Testa and Claude Lorraine. During a Roman carnival play he wrote and acted in a masque, in which his character bustled about Rome distributing satirical prescriptions for diseases of the body and more particularly of the mind. In costume, he inveighed against the farcical comedies acted in the Trastevere under the direction of Bernini. While his plays were successful, this also gained him powerful enemies among patrons and artists, including Bernini himself, in Rome. By late 1639, he had had to relocate to Florence, where he stayed for 8 years. He had been in part, invited by a Cardinal Giancarlo de Medici. Once there, Rosa sponsored a combination of studio and salon of poets, playwrights, and painters --the so called Accademia dei Percossi ("Academy of the Stricken"). To the rigid art milieu of Florence, he introduced his canvases of wild landscapes; while influential, he gathered few true pupils. Another painter poet, Lorenzo Lippi, shared with Rosa the hospitality of the cardinal and the same circle of friends. Lippi encouraged him to proceed with the poem Il Malmantile Racquistato. He was well acquainted also with Ugo and Giulio Maffei, and housed with them in Volterra, where he wrote four satires Music, Poetry, Painting and War. About the same time he painted his own portrait, now in the National Gallery, London.  Related Paintings of Salvator Rosa :. | Jacob Dream | Democritus and Protagoras | Jason Charming the Dragon | Seascape at Sunset | The Lie |
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Leopold Robert
(13 May 1794 - 20 March 1835), Swiss painter, was born at La Chaux-de-Fonds (Neuchâtel) in Switzerland, but left his native place with the engraver Girardet at the age of sixteen for Paris. He was on the eve of obtaining the grand prix for engraving when the events of 1815 blasted his hopes, for Neuchâtel was restored to Prussia, and Robert was struck off the list of competitors as a foreigner. Whilst continuing his studies under Girardet he had never ceased to frequent the studio of David, and he now determined to become a painter, and only returned to his native country when his master himself was exiled. At Neuchâtel he attracted the notice of Roullet de Mezerac, who enabled him by a timely loan to proceed to Rome. In depicting the customs and life of the people, of southern Italy especially, he showed peculiar feeling for the historical characteristics of their race. After executing many detached studies of Italian life Robert conceived the idea of painting four great works which should represent at one and the same time the four seasons in Italy and the four leading races of its people. In the "Return from the Fete of the Madonna dell'Arco" (Louvre) he depicted the Neapolitans and the spring. This picture, exhibited at the Salon of 1827, achieved undoubted success and was bought for the Luxembourg by Charles X; but the work which appeared in 1831 the "Summer Reapers arriving in the Pontine Marshes" (Louvre), which became the property of Louis Philippe established the artist's reputation. Florence and her autumn vineyards should now have furnished him with his third subject. He attempted to begin it, but, unable to conquer his passion for Princess Charlotte Napoleon (then mourning the violent death of her husband, Robert's devoted friend), he threw up his work and went to Venice, where he began and carried through the fourth of the series, the "Fishers of the Adriatic." This work was not equal to the "Reapers." Worn by the vicissitudes of painful feeling, and bitterly discouraged, Robert committed suicide before his easel on 20 March 1835, on the tenth anniversary of the melancholy suicide of a brother to whom he had been much attached.
Alexandre Seon
French Symbolist Painter, 1855-1917 was a French Symbolist artist, illustrator and decorator. Seon studied at the Beaux-Arts of Lyon and Paris, becoming a student of Puvis de Chavannes in 1891, with whom he later collaborated. He was closely associated with Josephin Peladan and his Salon de la Rose-Croix, and designed the frontispiece for Peladan's 1891 novel l'Androgyne
Heinrich von Angeli
1840 - 1925 Austrian painter. In 1853 he moved to Vienna to live with his uncle, who was a collector and a friend of the painters Friedrich von Amerling and Mathias Ranftl (1805-54). Angeli's early Self-portrait reflects the precocious maturity of his style, and in 1854 he enrolled at the Akademie der Bildenden K?nste in Vienna. In 1856, on the advice of Amerling, he went to study under Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze in D?sseldorf, where he executed one of his most significant history paintings, Mary Stuart Reading her Death Warrant (1857). In 1859 he moved to Munich, where he worked independently and was encouraged by Karl Theodor von Piloty, producing the history paintings Ludwig XI and Franz de Paula (1859) and Antony and Cleopatra for Ludwig I of Bavaria. In 1862 he again settled in Vienna, where he enjoyed increasing success. The life-size portrait of Baronin Seidler and the genre painting Avengers of Honour (1869), both exhibited at the Weltausstellung in Vienna in 1873, secured his reputation. After brief stays in Paris and Berlin (c. 1866), he went in 1871 to Italy, where he painted numerous portraits and the genre work Absolution Denied. His final genre paintings, Youthful Love (sold London, Sotheby's, 3 Oct 1980) and Calabrian Shepherd Couple, also date from this year. Henceforth he devoted himself entirely to portrait painting, receiving important commissions from such aristocratic circles as the Kinsky and Auersperg families (e.g. Graf Anton Alexander Auersperg, 1876; Vienna, Pr?sidium des Nationalrates). Whereas his early portraits were influenced by Amerling, Anton Einsle and 17th-century Dutch art, from the 1870s he developed his own elegant and restrained style. This helped him to obtain commissions at the courts of Vienna, St Petersburg and London