English Romantic Painter, 1775-1851 Joseph Mallord William Turner (23 April 1775 ?C 19 December 1851) was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker, whose style is said to have laid the foundation for Impressionism. Although Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, he is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting. Turner's talent was recognised early in his life. Financial independence allowed Turner to innovate freely; his mature work is characterised by a chromatic palette and broadly applied atmospheric washes of paint. According to David Piper's The Illustrated History of Art, his later pictures were called "fantastic puzzles." However, Turner was still recognised as an artistic genius: the influential English art critic John Ruskin described Turner as the artist who could most "stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of Nature." (Piper 321) Suitable vehicles for Turner's imagination were to be found in the subjects of shipwrecks, fires (such as the burning of Parliament in 1834, an event which Turner rushed to witness first-hand, and which he transcribed in a series of watercolour sketches), natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. He was fascinated by the violent power of the sea, as seen in Dawn after the Wreck (1840) and The Slave Ship (1840). Turner placed human beings in many of his paintings to indicate his affection for humanity on the one hand (note the frequent scenes of people drinking and merry-making or working in the foreground), but its vulnerability and vulgarity amid the 'sublime' nature of the world on the other hand. 'Sublime' here means awe-inspiring, savage grandeur, a natural world unmastered by man, evidence of the power of God - a theme that artists and poets were exploring in this period. The significance of light was to Turner the emanation of God's spirit and this was why he refined the subject matter of his later paintings by leaving out solid objects and detail, concentrating on the play of light on water, the radiance of skies and fires. Although these late paintings appear to be 'impressionistic' and therefore a forerunner of the French school, Turner was striving for expression of spirituality in the world, rather than responding primarily to optical phenomena. Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway painted (1844).His early works, such as Tintern Abbey (1795), stayed true to the traditions of English landscape. However, in Hannibal Crossing the Alps (1812), an emphasis on the destructive power of nature had already come into play. His distinctive style of painting, in which he used watercolour technique with oil paints, created lightness, fluency, and ephemeral atmospheric effects. (Piper 321) One popular story about Turner, though it likely has little basis in reality, states that he even had himself "tied to the mast of a ship in order to experience the drama" of the elements during a storm at sea. In his later years he used oils ever more transparently, and turned to an evocation of almost pure light by use of shimmering colour. A prime example of his mature style can be seen in Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway, where the objects are barely recognizable. The intensity of hue and interest in evanescent light not only placed Turner's work in the vanguard of English painting, but later exerted an influence upon art in France, as well; the Impressionists, particularly Claude Monet, carefully studied his techniques.  Related Paintings of Joseph Mallord William Turner :. | Sea fight | Gray | Wind | Watercolour | Arc-s spot |
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Adriaen Isenbrant
(between 1480 and 1490 - Bruges, July 1551), was a Flemish Northern Renaissance painter, who from documentary evidence was clearly a significant artist of his period, but to whom no specific works can be clearly documented. As hypothesised by art historians, he ran a large workshop specializing in religious subjects and devotional paintings, painting conservatively in the tradition of Early Netherlandish painting. He is believed by some to be the anonymous Master of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin. Other art historians doubt that any works can be reliably attributed to him, and the number of paintings attributed to him by major museums has been in decline for many decades. There are only a few documentary records of his life, and some mentions in literature from his lifetime or soon after, but he cannot be documented as the creator of any surviving work; everything else consists of hypothesis. It is possible that he was born in Haarlem or even in Antwerp about 1490. It is not known where or with which painter he served his apprenticeship. He is named for the first time in 1510, when he came to Bruges and bought his burghership. In November of the same year he already became master in the painterse Guild of St. Luke and the goldsmithse guild of St. Elooi. He was later elected nine time a deacon (in Old Dutch : vinder) and twice the governor (in Old Dutch : gouverneur = treasurer) of the guild. Soon he had an important workshop, probably in the Korte Vlaminckstraat in Bruges. This was close to the workshop of Gerard David, at the Vlamijncbrugghe and the former workshop of Hans Memling. Bruges, at that time, was one of the richest towns in Europe. Rich traders and merchants ordered diptychs and portraits for personal use. Isenbrandt painted mainly for private clients. However, there were some paintings that were created without any particular commission. He had enough work to even put out work to other painters in Bruges, as a legal suit from 1534 by Isenbrandt against Jan van Eyck (not the famous one) for non-delivery of paintings he had ordered, demonstrates. He was also appointed the agent in Bruges of the painter Adriaan Provoost (son of Jan Provoost), who had moved to Antwerp in 1530. Contemporary sources therefore mention Isenbrandt as a famous and well-to-do painter. He married twice, the first time with Maria Grandeel, daughter of the painter Peter Grandeel. They had one child. After her death in 1537, he married again in 1547 with Clementine de Haerne. This second marriage resulted in two daughters and a son. He also had an extramarital daughter with the innkeeper Katelijne van Brandenburch (who was at the same the mistress of his friend Ambrosius Benson). When he died in 1551, he was buried alongside his first wife at the cemetery of the St. Jacob church in Bruges; his children inherited no less than four houses with surrounding property.
Fernando Gallego
(c. 1440 - 1507) was a Spanish painter, brought up in an age of gothic style, his art is generally regarded as Hispano-Flemish style. It's thought that he was born in Salamanca, Spain, and his first known works were in the cathedrals of Plasencia and Coria, in Ceres (Spain).
Adolfo Muller-Ury
(March 29, 1862 - July 6, 1947) was a Swiss-born American portrait painter and impressionistic painter of roses and still life. He was born Felice Adolfo Meller on March 29, 1862 at Airolo, in the Ticino in Switzerland, into a prominent patrician family whose lineage descended from Alfred the Great, Charlemagne and Doge Pietro Orseolo of Venice, through the von Rechburg family (a lady from which family married a Meller) and by the 18th and 19th centuries included mercenaries, lawyers, hoteliers and businessmen. His father was lawyer Carl Alois Meller (1825 - 1887), Gerichtspräsident (Presiding Judge) of the Cantonal Courts, and his mother Genovefa Lombardi (1836 - 1920), daughter of Felice Lombardi who was Director of the Hospice on the St Gotthard Pass, which he took over from the Capuchin monks who had run this for centuries. Adolfo was their sixth of nineteen children, most of whom survived infancy. The family spoke Airolese mainly, a local dialect of Ticinese Italian, as well as Swiss-German. His family were Roman Catholic.