Vincent Van Gogh
Dutch Post-Impressionist Painter, 1853-1890
Vincent Willem van Gogh (30 March 1853 ?C 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist artist. Some of his paintings are now among the world's best known, most popular and expensive works of art.
Van Gogh spent his early adult life working for a firm of art dealers. After a brief spell as a teacher, he became a missionary worker in a very poor mining region. He did not embark upon a career as an artist until 1880. Initially, Van Gogh worked only with sombre colours, until he encountered Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism in Paris. He incorporated their brighter colours and style of painting into a uniquely recognizable style, which was fully developed during the time he spent at Arles, France. He produced more than 2,000 works, including around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches, during the last ten years of his life. Most of his best-known works were produced in the final two years of his life, during which time he cut off part of his left ear following a breakdown in his friendship with Paul Gauguin. After this he suffered recurrent bouts of mental illness, which led to his suicide.
The central figure in Van Gogh's life was his brother Theo, who continually and selflessly provided financial support. Their lifelong friendship is documented in numerous letters they exchanged from August 1872 onwards. Van Gogh is a pioneer of what came to be known as Expressionism. He had an enormous influence on 20th century art, especially on the Fauves and German Expressionists. Related Paintings of Vincent Van Gogh :. | Wheat Field with Cypresses | Sunflowers | Blue Verts | The Trinquetaille Bridge (nn04) | Evening:The Watch (nn04) | Related Artists: Carlo Bonaviawas an Italian painter known for idyllic landscape paintings, engravings and drawings. He was active from 1740 until his death in 1788. He is thought to be from Rome, but worked in Naples from about 1751 to 1788. He was trained in the Neapolitan landscape tradition of Salvator Rosa (1615-1673) and Leonardo Coccorante (1680-1750), but was much more strongly influenced by the work of Claude Joseph Vernet, who visited Naples in 1737 and 1746. Jan van GoyenDutch Baroque Era Painter, 1596-1656
Jan van Goyen was born in Leiden on Jan. 13, 1596. Apprenticed from the age of 10, he had several masters. About 1617 he went to Haarlem to study with Esaias van de Velde, an important innovator in the Haarlem movement of realistic landscape painting. Van Goyen's works between 1621 and 1625 are sometimes hard to distinguish from those of his teacher. They are colorful, detailed views of villages and roads, usually busy with people, as in Winter (1621). It was Van Goyen's usual practice to sign or monogram and date his paintings. He traveled extensively through the Netherlands and beyond, recording his impressions in sketchbooks, occasionally with dates and often depicting recognizable scenes. Thus the chronology of his development is clear. His paintings of the late 1620s show a steady advance from the strong colors and scattered organization of his early works toward tonality and greater simplicity and unity of composition. By 1630 he was painting monochromes in golden brown or pale green; he played a leading part in the tonal phase of Dutch landscape painting. In 1631 Van Goyen settled in The Hague, where he became a citizen in 1634. The simplicity, airiness, and unification of his compositions continued to increase in his abundant production of dune landscapes, river views, seascapes, town views, and winter landscapes. The River View (1636) displays a river so open and extensive as to suggest the sea, with reflections that prolong the vast and luminous sky. In its monumentalization of humble structures and its composition built on a firm scaffolding of horizontal and vertical forces, it forecast at this early date developments that dominated landscape painting in the 1650s and later. In the Village and Dunes (1647) the traditional double-diagonal composition still exists, but it is dominated by horizontal and vertical accents. Stronger contrasts of light and dark replace the earlier tonality. In the last year of his life Van Goyen produced an eloquent new style, in which powerful forms stand out against the radiant sky and water in an exquisitely balanced composition (Evening Calm; 1656). The commission in 1651 to paint a panoramic view of The Hague for the Burgomaster's Room shows the high regard in which Van Goyen was held. He was enormously productive; well over 1,000 of his paintings still exist, and almost as many drawings. Antoine Plamondon (ca. 1804-1895) was a Canadian artist who painted mainly portraits and religious images in 19th-century Quebec.
Plamondon was born in 1804 (or 1802) at L'Ancienne-Lorette, Quebec, the son of the village grocer. He went to school in Saint-Roch, a suburb of Quebec City, after which he was apprenticed to Joseph Legare (1795-1855), a picture restorer and amateur painter. In 1826 Plamondon travelled to Paris where he studied with classical portraitists such as Paulin Guerin (1783-1855). Works from this period are scarce.
In 1830, after the Louis-Philippe uprisings, Plamondon returned to Quebec. While his portraits were of living subjects, many of his religious paintings (commissioned by various churches and religious orders around Quebec City) were based on engravings of old masters. His portrait work was notable for his full-face, close-up, and tightly comosed style as well as a concentration on the latest style of clothing. His later portraits showed more roundness in the modelling and far more space in the composition.
By 1850 Plamondon had moved to the country at Neuville, with his mother, a brother, and a sister, where he lived until the 1890s. Much of his work during this period were religious paintings, copies of old masters, done for local churches.
Plamondon never married. He was a lifelong monarchist and supporter of the Conservative Party, a friend of Sir George-Étienne Cartier and Sir Étienne Tache, but broke with the Conservatives over the execution of Louis Riel. His 1882 self-portrait was probably his last work He died in Neuville in 1895.
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