1815-1879 French Thomas Couture Location French painter and teacher. A student of Antoine-Jean Gros in 1830-38 and Paul Delaroche in 1838-9, he demonstrated precocious ability in drawing and was expected to win the Prix de Rome. He tried at least six times between 1834 and 1839, but achieved only second prize in 1837 (entry untraced). Disgusted with the politics of the academic system, Couture withdrew and took an independent path. He later attacked the stultified curriculum of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and discouraged his own students from entering this institution. He first attained public notoriety at the Paris Salon with Young Venetians after an Orgy (1840; Montrouge, priv. col., see Boime, p. 85), the Prodigal Son (1841; Le Havre, Mus. B.-A.) and the Love of Gold (1844; Toulouse, Mus. Augustins). These early canvases are treated in a moralizing and anecdotal mode; the forms and compositional structures, like the debauched and corrupt protagonists, are sluggish and dull. Yet what made his work seem fresh to the Salon audience was his use of bright colour and surface texture derived from such painters as Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps and Eugene Delacroix, while his literary bent and methodical drawing demonstrated his mastery of academic tradition. The critics Thophile Gautier and Paul Mantz (1821-95) proclaimed him as the leader of a new school that mediated between the old and the new, and looked to him for a revitalization of Salon painting. The air of compromise his works projected made him appear a cultural representative of the juste milieu policies of Louis-Philippe.  Related Paintings of Thomas Couture :. | The Concert Singer | The Romans of the Decadence | The Thorny Path | The Romans of the Decadence | Romans in the Decadence of the Empire |
Related Artists:
Paul Nash
British 1889-1946 Paul Nash Location Painter and graphic artist. Wounded during the 1914-18 war, he was appointed an official war artist and examples of his work from this time, We are Making a New World and The Menin Road, are in the Imperial War Museum. Essentially a landscape artist, who saw himself as a successor to Blake and Turner, his work was imbued with deep, sometimes prophetic symbolism. In the Second World War, he was again an official war artist; his Totes Meer (Dead Sea) and Bomber in the Corn hang in the Tate Gallery.
Jean - Baptiste Carpeaux
French Realist Sculptor, 1827-1875. French Realist Sculptor, 1827-1875.French sculptor, painter, draughtsman and etcher. He was one of the leading sculptors of the Second Empire (1852-70) in France.
Richard Earlom
English Printmaker, 1743-1822,English printmaker. Taught by Giovanni Battista Cipriani, he worked in mezzotint, etching and occasionally stipple. His mezzotints of flowers and still-lifes, such as Roses for the Temple of Flora (1805) by Robert John Thornton (?1768-1837) or the Fruit Piece (see Wessely, no. 145) after Jan van Huysum, are also found printed in colours or coloured by hand. Earlom's most influential prints were a set of outline etchings combined with mezzotint of the volume, then belonging to the Dukes of Devonshire, of Claude's drawings of his own landscape paintings