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 :. | Field with Poppies (nn04) | The Reaper (nn04) | Couple in the Park at Arles | Boats on the Beach of Saintes-Maries (nn04) | The Schoolboy (nn04) |
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paul delvaux
Delvaux was born in Antheit in the Belgian province of Liege, the son of a lawyer. The young Delvaux took music lessons, studied Greek and Latin, and absorbed the fiction of Jules Verne and the poetry of Homer. All of his work was to be influenced by these readings, starting with his earliest drawings showing mythological scenes. He studied at the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, albeit in the architecture department owing to his parents' disapproval of his ambition to be a painter. Nevertheless, he pursued his goal, attending painting classes taught by Constant Montald and Jean Delville. The painters Frans Courtens and Alfred Bastien also encouraged Delvaux, whose works from this period were primarily naturalistic landscapes. He completed some 80 paintings between 1920 and 1925, which was the year of his first solo exhibition. Delvaux's paintings of the late 1920s and early 1930s, which feature nudes in landscapes, are strongly influenced by such Flemish Expressionists as Constant Permeke and Gustave De Smet. A change of style around 1933 reflects the influence of the metaphysical art of Giorgio de Chirico, which he had first encountered in 1926 or 1927. In the early 1930s Delvaux found further inspiration in visits to the Brussels Fair, where the Spitzner Museum, a museum of medical curiosities, maintained a booth in which skeletons and a mechanical Venus figure were displayed in a window with red velvet curtains. This spectacle captivated Delvaux, supplying him with motifs that would appear throughout his subsequent work. In the mid-1930s he also began to adopt some of the motifs of his fellow Belgian Rene Magritte, as well as that painter's deadpan style in rendering the most unexpected juxtapositions of otherwise ordinary objects. Delvaux acknowledged his influences, saying of de Chirico, "with him I realized what was possible, the climate that had to be developed, the climate of silent streets with shadows of people who can't be seen, I've never asked myself if it's surrealist or not." Although Delvaux associated for a period with the Belgian surrealist group, he did not consider himself "a Surrealist in the scholastic sense of the word." As Marc Rombaut has written of the artist: "Delvaux ... always maintained an intimate and privileged relationship to his childhood, which is the underlying motivation for his work and always manages to surface there. This 'childhood,' existing within him, led him to the poetic dimension in art." The paintings Delvaux became famous for usually feature numbers of nude women who stare as if hypnotized, gesturing mysteriously, sometimes reclining incongruously in a train station or wandering through classical buildings. Sometimes they are accompanied by skeletons, men in bowler hats, or puzzled scientists drawn from the stories of Jules Verne. Delvaux would repeat variations on these themes for the rest of his long life, although some departures can be noted. Among them are his paintings of 1945-47, rendered in a flattened style with distorted and forced perspective effects, and the series of crucifixions and deposition scenes enacted by skeletons, painted in the 1950s. In the late 1950s he produced a number of night scenes in which trains are observed by a little girl seen from behind. These compositions contain nothing overtly surrealistic, yet the clarity of moonlit detail is hallucinatory in effect. Trains had always been a subject of special interest to Delvaux, who never forgot the wonder he felt as a small child at the sight of the first electric trams in Brussels.
Amaldus Clarin Nielsen
(23 May 1838 - 10 December 1932) was a Norwegian painter. He was born in Halse as a son of shipmaster and merchant Niels Clemetsen Nielsen (1795 - 1845) and his wife Andrea Marie Møller (1802 - 1866). He grew up in Mandal in Vest-Agder county, Norway. He lived most of his childhood and adolescence without a father. He received some tuition from a traveling drawing teacher and traveled to Copenhagen to study in 1854
Pieter van Aelst
(August 14, 1502 - December 6, 1550) was a Flemish painter. He studied under Bernaert van Orley and later lived in Italy before entering the Antwerp Guild of painters in 1527. In 1533, he travelled to Constantinople for one year in a failed attempt to establish business connections for his tapestry works. Van Aelst established a studio in Brussels in 1544, where he created paintings and tapestries. His students include Gillis van Coninxloo, Willem Key, Hans Vredeman de Vries, Michiel Coxcie, and possibly Pieter Brueghel the Elder, who did eventually marry van Aelst's daughter, Mayken. His second wife, Mayken Verhulst, was an artist as well, and, according to Carel van Mander, the first teacher of her grandchildren, Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder. He was also the uncle of Joachim Bueckelaer. Van Aelst's studio is also well known for its engraved works. In particular, van Aelst is noted for his 1539 translation of Sebastiano Serlio's architectural treatise, Architettura, which is credited with having played a crucial role in spreading Renaissance ideas to the Low Countries and hastening the transition from the late Gothic style prevalent in the area at the time. He was in charge of the spectacular decorations for the 1549 Royal entry into Antwerp of Philip II of Spain, "the most famous entry of the century", according to Roy Strong.