1599-1660,Spanish painter. He was apprenticed to Francisco Herrera the Elder before being trained by Francisco Pacheco. His early works were mostly religious or genre scenes. After arriving in Madrid in 1623, he painted a portrait of Philip IV that won him immediate success and an appointment as court painter. His position gave him access to the royal collections, including works by Titian, who exerted the greatest influence on his style. In his portraits from this period, only the faces and hands of the figures are accentuated, and the dark figures stand out against a light background. A visit to Italy (1629 ?C 31) further developed his style, and on his return to Madrid he entered his most productive period. Velazquez created a new type of informal royal portrait for Philip hunting lodge, and his portraits of court dwarfs display the same discerning eye as those of his royal subjects. On a second visit to Rome (1649 ?C 51) he painted a portrait of Pope Innocent X. The powerful head, brilliant combinations of crimson of the curtain, chair, and cope are painted with fluent technique and almost imperceptible brushstrokes that go far beyond the late manner of Titian and announce the last stage in Velazquez development. This portrait was copied innumerable times and won him immediate and lasting renown in Italy. In his last years he created his masterpiece, Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour, 1656). In this casual scene, the artist is shown painting the king and queen in the presence of the infanta Margarita and her attendants; the nearly life size figures are painted in more or less detail according to their relation to the central figure of the infanta and to the source of light, creating a remarkable illusion of reality never surpassed by Velazquez or any other artist of his age. He is universally acknowledged as one of the giants of Western art.   Related Paintings of Velasquez :. | Hunting De accepts Crown Prince Cady | Christ on the Cross | The spirit of Christ and supervision | Omelette woman | Jesus and Maria Mada at home |
Related Artists:
Louis Anquetin
1861-1932,French painter. He came to Paris in 1882 and studied art at the Ateliers of Bonnat and Cormon, where he was a contemporary and friend of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Emile Bernard and Vincent van Gogh. His early work shows the influence of Impressionism and of Edgar Degas. In 1887 Anquetin and Bernard devised an innovative method of painting using strong black contour lines and flat areas of colour; Anquetin aroused much comment when he showed his new paintings, including the striking Avenue de Clichy: Five O'Clock in the Evening (1887; Hartford, CT, Wadsworth Atheneum) at the exhibition of Les XX in Brussels and at the Salon des Independants in Paris in 1888. The new style, dubbed Cloisonnisme by the critic Edouard Dujardin (1861-1949), resulted from a study of stained glass, Japanese prints and other so-called 'primitive' sources; it was close to the Synthetist experiments of Paul Gauguin and was adopted briefly by van Gogh during his Arles period. Anquetin's works were shown alongside Gauguin's and Bernard's at the Caf? Volpini exhibition in 1889,
Wilson Irvine
1869-1936 Wilson Henry Irvine Galleries Wilson Henry Irvine (28 February 1869-1936) was a master American Impressionist landscape painter. Although most closely associated with the Old Lyme, Connecticut art colony headed by Florence Griswold, Irvine spent his early career near Chicago, a product of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Irvine also painted across Western Europe ?? where he produced outstanding American Impressionist versions of the local countryside. Today, Wilson Irvine's paintings grace the collection of Chicago's Art Institute, as well as other notable collections strong in American Impressionism, including: Old Lyme's Florence Griswold Museum; Washington, D.C.'s Smithsonian Institution National Portrait Gallery and Corcoran Gallery of Art; and Chicago's Union League Club. Irvine is best known for his mastery of light and texture ?? a 1998 exhibit of his work was called Wilson Henry Irvine and the Poetry of Light. To capture subtle effects of light, Irvine often painted en plein air ?? wearing his trademark cap, knickers, and goatee, with his easel and his paints set up in the field. Sometimes Irvine's obsession with light led him to paint rather pedestrian subjects ?? landscapes depicting little more than some trees, or a road or fence. But a number of Irvine masterpieces depict well-composed scenes including houses, boats, bridges ?? even a handful of portraits, including at least one self-portrait and a nude. Wilson Henry Irvine, born near Byron, Illinois, was a descendant of early Illinois settlers and farmers. Wilson channeled his family's agrarian interests into a painter's eye for landscape. From the beginning, Irvine's interest in painterly subjects was equalled by a parallel focus on artistic technology. While still in his 20s, Irvine was a pioneer of the airbrush as artistic medium ?? a medium which had just been developed and marketed by Liberty Walkup, Irvine's Illinois neighbor, mentor, and teacher. Having mastered the airbrush, in 1888 Irvine moved to Chicago to make his reputation. Irvine's "day job" during this period was as an illustrator/graphic designer, often employing the still-novel airbrush. But simultaneously, Irvine built a career as a serious painter. He worked his way up Chicago art society ?? he led the Palette and Chisel Club and Cliff Dwellers Club, along with sculptor Loredo Taft. During these years, Irvine gravitated to the night school of the famed Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied for over seven years. Indeed, the Art Institute was to remain a loyal patron. By the turn of the century, the Institute often showed Irvine's work, and gave him a prestigious solo show over the 1916-1917 Christmas season. To this day, the Art Institute maintains a number of Wilson Irvine paintings in its permanent collection.
Abanindranath Tagore
Indian, 1871-1951,Painter and writer, brother of Gaganendranath Tagore. Intermittently taught by two undistinguished European academicians, Olinto Ghilardy and Charles Palmer, in 1897 he came under the influence of Ernest Binfield Havell (see HAVELL,), art scholar and catalyst of indigenism. Impressed by Mughal and Persian miniatures and the work of the Japanese artists Taikan Yokoyama and Shunso Hishida, who visited India in 1903, Abanindranath discarded Western realism for the stylized naturalism of Japanese art, which suited his poetic temperament, and the general John Ruskin-William Morris thought axis of such early indigenist theorists as Havell and Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy. His work until the Omar Khayyam illustrations (1906-10; Santiniketan, Nandan Mus.), with their revivalist nationalism and fin-de-siecle affectations, greatly influenced the Neo-Bengal art movement formed chiefly by his pupils at the Calcutta Art School, where he was Vice-principal from 1905 to 1915. His own later work developed an imagist focus. The Arabian Nights series (1930; Calcutta, Babindra-Bharati Soc.), his magnum opus, in which literary and visual antecedents give the image a cultural ambience without intruding on its independence, marks the beginning of modern Indian narrative painting. His aesthetic theories, formulated in lectures he gave as the Vageswari Professor of Art at Calcutta University (1921-9), stressed the role of individual sensibility and imagination in creativity. Induced by his uncle Rabindranath,