Italian Painter, 1835-1901 was an Italian artist who belonged to the group known as the Macchiaioli. He was born in the Santa Croce quarter of Florence, and showed an early inclination toward the study of literature, but with the encouragement of his father, Giovanni Signorini, a court painter for the Grand Duke of Tuscany, he decided instead to study painting. In 1852 he enrolled at the Florentine Academy, and by 1854 he was painting landscapes en plein air. The following year he exhibited for the first time, showing paintings inspired by the works of Walter Scott and Machiavelli at the Florentine Promotrice. In 1855, he began frequenting the Caffe Michelangiolo in Florence, where he met Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega, and several other Tuscan artists who would soon be dubbed the Macchiaioli. The Macchiaioli, dissatisfied with the antiquated conventions taught by the Italian academies of art, started painting outdoors in order to capture natural light, shade, and color. They were forerunners of the Impressionists who, beginning in the 1860s, would pursue similar aims in France. Signorini was a volunteer in the Second Italian War of Independence in 1859, and afterwards painted military scenes which he exhibited in 1860 and 1861. He made his first trip outside Italy in 1861 when he visited Paris, to which he would often return in the decades that followed. There he met Degas and a group of expatriate Italian artists in his orbit, including Giovanni Boldini, Giuseppe De Nittis, and Federico Zandomeneghi; unlike them, however, Signorini remained rooted in Italy. He became not only one of the leading painters of the Macchiaioli, but also their leading polemicist. Art historian Giuliano Matteucci has written: "If we acknowledge Fattori and Lega as the major creative figures of the macchiaioli, then Signorini must surely be recognized as their 'deus ex machina'",   Related Paintings of Telemaco signorini :. | Department for Violent Female Mental Patients at San Bonifacio in Florence | Settignano,September Morning | Leith | Leith | The Riverbank |
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Abbey, Edwin Austin
American Golden Age Illustrator and Muralist, 1852-1911 American painter and illustrator, active in England. He began his artistic training in 1866, studying drawing with the Philadelphia portrait and landscape painter Isaac L. Williams (1817-95). In 1868 he attended evening classes in drawing at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Christian Schussele (1824-79). In the same year Abbey began to work as an illustrator for the Philadelphia publishers Van Ingen & Snyder. In 1870 Harper's Weekly published the Puritans' First Thanksgiving, and in 1871 Abbey moved to New York to join the staff of Harper & Brothers, thus inaugurating his most important professional relationship. Throughout the 1870s Abbey's reputation grew, both for his detailed exhibition watercolours and for his elegant line drawings, which, translated to wood-engravings in numerous periodicals, illustrated both factual and fictional events of the past and present. The influences on him were mainly English, in particular the works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and illustrations in the English press, which he studied avidly. The success of his illustrations to some of Robert Herrick's poems, such as Corinna's Going A-Maying in Harper's New Monthly Magazine (May 1874), prompted Harper & Brothers in 1878 to send Abbey to England to do a complete series of drawings for an illustrated gift-book, Selections from the Poetry of Robert Herrick (New York, 1882).
William James Muller
British Painter, 1812-1845, English landscape and figure painter, was born at Bristol, his father, a Prussian, being curator of the museum. He first studied painting under JB Pyne. His early subjects deal mainly with the scenery of Gloucestershire and Wales, and he learned much from his study of Claude, Ruysdael, and earlier landscape-painters. In 1833 he figured for the first time in the Royal Academy with his "Destruction of Old London Bridge--Morning," and next year he made a tour through France, Switzerland and Italy. Four years later he visited Athens, extending his travels to Egypt, and in the sketches executed during this period and the paintings produced from them his power and individuality are apparent. Shortly after his return he left Bristol and settled in London, where he exhibited regularly. In 1840 he again visited France, where he executed a series of sketches of Renaissance architecture, twenty-five of which were lithographed and published in 1841, in a folio entitled "The Age of Francis I. of France." In 1843 he accompanied,
Peck Sheldon
American portrait painter and artist b.1797 d.1868 American painter. A self-taught painter, he used his family as subjects in his early works, employing dark colours against flat backgrounds. After moving to Jordan, NY, in 1828 he used brighter colours and included more detail. He continued to paint on panel, almost always making half-length portraits characterized by such features as a broad brow, a wide, intense stare from detailed eyes and the use of a decorative brushstroke