(1735-1786) was a portrait painter and the first English painter to work in India. He was born in London, the son of a coach painter, in a family that had been members of the Brewers' Company of freemen for five generations. He studied drawing with William Shipley in the Strand and first entered professional portraiture in the 1750s. Kettle's first series of portraits appeared in the 1760s. His first surviving painting is a self-portrait from 1760, with his first exhibit at the Society of Artists in 1761. In 1762, he worked at restoring Robert Streater's ceiling fresco in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, and painted Francis Yarborough, a doctor of Brasenose College, Oxford in 1763. He painted many members of the family of William Legge, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth. In 1764-5, he was active in London and continued exhibiting at the Society of Artists. In 1768, Kettle sailed to India with the British East India Company, landing at Madras (now Chennai), where he remained for two years. There, he painted Lord Pigot and Muhammad Ali Kahn twice (once alone and once with five of his sons). He also painted non-portraits, including Dancing Girls (Blacks) in 1772 and a suttee scene in 1776 entitled, The ceremony of a gentoo woman taking leave of her relations and distributing her jewels prior to ascending the funeral pyre of her deceased husband. In 1770 Kettle painted a half-length portrait of 'Sir' Levett Hanson, a peripatetic writer on European knighthood and chivalry originally from Yorkshire. (The portrait is now in the collection of the Bury St Edmunds Manor House Museum.) Kettle moved on to Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1771 and painted Shuja ud-Daula and Dancing-Girl Holding the Stem of a Hookah. In 1775,he painted George Bogle, Warren Hastings' emissary to Tibet, in Tibetan dress, presenting a ceremonial white scarf to Lobsang Yeshe the 5th Panchen Lama.He also took an Indian mistress and had two daughters by her.  Related Paintings of Tilly Kettle :. | Brownlow North (1741-1820), future bishop of Winchester | The Orphan of China | Dancing Girl or An Indian Dancing Girl with a Hookah | Portrait of Mrs Yates as Mandane in The Orphan of China | The Orphan of China |
Related Artists:
Emil Orlik
(July 21, 1870 - September 28, 1932) was born in Prague, which was at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and lived and worked in Prague, Austria and Germany. He was a painter, an etcher and lithographer. In 1905 Emil Orlik moved to Berlin and took a post at the "School for Graphic and Book Art" of the Museum of Decorative Arts (Kunstgewerbemuseum), now part of the Berlin State Museums.
SEGHERS, Hercules
Dutch Baroque Era Painter and Printmaker, ca.1590-1638 Dutch landscape painter and etcher. Seghers's work greatly influenced early 17th-century Dutch landscape painting. He studied with the painter Coninxloo (1544C1607) and may have traveled to Italy and in the Alps. Some of the frenzy of his personal life can be seen in his rare paintings and his more numerous, masterly etchings. His landscapes consist of vast, often desolate, panoramas and powerful, smaller scenes rendered with drama and pathos. Rembrandt owned eight paintings by him, and his own landscape style was influenced by Seghers.
CASTELLO, Valerio
Italian painter, Genoese school (b. 1624, Genova, d. 1659, Genova) Painter and draughtsman, son of Bernardo Castello. He was one of the leading Ligurian painters of the 17th century, whose art developed from a continuous and passionate study of a wide range of sources. His paintings of mythological and religious subjects unite an elegant figure style with an interest in dramatic and violent compositions; his touch is spontaneous and his palette vibrant with reds and pinks, blues and yellows. His brilliant decorative frescoes introduced the splendour of the High Baroque to Genoese painters. He was well known for his rapid oil sketches, with light and lively brushwork, which anticipate aspects of the Rococo.