Alfred Émile Léopold Stevens (11 May 1823 – 24 August 1906) was a Belgian painter.
Alfred Stevens was born inBrussels. He came from a family involved with the visual arts: his older brother Joseph (1816-1892) and his son Léopold (1866–1935) were painters, while another brother Arthur (1825–99) was an art dealer and critic.
His father, who had fought in the Napoleonic wars in the army ofWilliam I of the Netherlands, was an art collector who owned several watercolors byEugène Delacroix, among other artists. His mother’s parents ran Café de l’Amitié in Brussels, a meeting place for politicians, writers, and artists.
All the Stevens children benefited from the people they met there, and the social skills they acquired in growing up around important people.
Sir John Lavery (20 March 1856 – 10 January 1941)
Anna Pavlova
An Irish painter best known for his portraits.
Belfast-born John Lavery attended theHaldane Academy, inGlasgow, in the 1870s and theAcadémie Julianin Paris in the early 1880s. He returned to Glasgow and was associated with theGlasgow School.
In 1888 he was commissioned to paint the state visit of Queen Victoriato the Glasgow International Exhibition. This launched his career as a society painter and he moved to London soon after. In London he became friendly withJames McNeill Whistler and was clearly influenced by him.
Lavery’s first wife, Kathleen MacDickmott, whom he married in 1889, died oftuberculosisin 1891, shortly after the birth of their daughter, Eileen (later Lady Sempill, 1890-1935). In 1909 Lavery marriedHazel Martyn(1886–1935), an Irish-American known for her beauty and poise; by her he had one daughter, Alice (Mrs. Jack McEnery).
Hazel Lavery was to figure in more than 400 of her husband’s paintings. The sumptuous The Artist’s Studio: Lady Lavery with her Daughter Alice and Step-Daughter Eileen, currently is in theNational Gallery of Ireland.
Hazel Lavery modelled for the allegorical figure of Ireland he painted on commission from the Irish government, reproduced onIrish banknotesfrom 1928 until 1975.
Jean-Baptiste Greuze (21 August 1725 – 4 March 1805) was a French painter
He is generally said to have formed his own talent; this is, however, true only in the most limited sense, for at an early age his inclinations, though thwarted by his father, were encouraged by a Lyonnese artist named Grandon, or Grondom, who enjoyed during his lifetime considerable reputation as a portrait-painter.
Grandon not only persuaded the father of Greuze to give way to his sons wishes, and permit the lad to accompany him as his pupil to Lyon, but, when at a later date he-himself left Lyon for Paris — where his son-in-law Grétry the celebrated composer enjoyed the height of favour — Grandon carried young Greuze with him.
Settled in Paris, Greuze worked from the living model in the school of the Royal Academy (Paris), but did not attract the attention of his teachers; and when he produced his first picture, “Le Père de famille expliquant la Bible a ses enfants,” considerable doubt was felt and shown as to his share in its production.
By other and more remarkable works of the same class Greuze soon established his claims beyond contest, and won for himself the notice and support of the well-known connoisseur La Live de Jully, the brother-in-law of Madame d’Epinay.
William McGregor Paxton (June 22, 1869 – 1941) was an American Impressionist painter.
Born in Baltimore, the Paxton family came to Newton Corner in the mid-1870s, where William’s father James established himself as a caterer. At 18, William won a scholarship to attend the Cowles Art School, where he began his art studies with Dennis Miller Bunker.
Later he studied with Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris and, on his return to Boston, with Joseph DeCamp at Cowles. There he met his future wife Elizabeth Okie, who also was studying with DeCamp. After their marriage, William and Elizabeth lived with his parents at 43 Elmwood Street, and later bought a house at 19 Montvale Road in Newton Centre.
Paxton, who is best known as a portrait painter, taught at the Museum School from 1906 to 1913. Along with other well known artists of the era, including Edmund Charles Tarbell and Frank Weston Benson, he co-founded the The Guild of Boston Artists and he is identified with the Boston School.
He was well known for his extraordinary attention to the effects of light and detail in flesh and fabric. Paxton’s compositions were most often idealized young women in beautiful interiors. Paxton gained fame for his portraiture and painted both Grover Cleveland and Calvin Coolidge. He taught at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School from 1906 to 1913. Paxton was made a full member of the National Academy of Design in 1928.
Paxton was working on his last painting, a view of his living room at 19 Montvale Road, with his wife posing for him, when he was stricken with a heart attack and died at the age of 72.
Alexander Roslin (1718 – 1793) was a Swedish portrait painter.
Roslin was born on July 15, 1718, in Malmö, Sweden. In 1759 he married Marie-Suzanne Giroust. He plied his trade in Stockholm, Bayreuth, Vienna, Paris and Italy. From 1750, he worked mainly in Paris.
He died in Paris on July 5, 1793.
A number of portraits of Russian Imperial statesmen have been attributed to Roslin, including portraits of Ivan Betskoi and Ivan Shuvalov. He also painted some notable portraits of Polish and French aristocratic ladies. The vast majority of his paintings feature aristocrats and nobility in Europe.
Konstantin Yegorovich Makovsky ( 1839 — 1915)
An influential Russian painter, affiliated with the “Peredvizhniki (Wanderers)”.
Konstantin was born in Moscow as the older son of a Russian art figure and amateur painter, Yegor Ivanovich Makovsky. His mother was a music composer, and hoped his son would one day follow up.
In 1851 Konstantin entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture where he became the top student, easily getting all the available awards. His teachers were МM.I. Skotty, pupils of Karl Brullov. Makovsky’s inclinations to Romanticism and decorative effects can be explained by the influence of Briullov.
In the 1880s he became a fashioned author of portraits and historical paintings. At the World’s Fair of 1889 in Paris he received the Large Gold Medal for his paintings Death of Ivan the Terrible, The Judgement of Paris, and Demon and Tamara.
He was one of the most highly appreciated and highly paid Russian artists of the time. Many democratic critics considered him as a renegade of the Wanderers’ ideals, producing (like Henryk Siemiradzki) striking but shallow works, while others see him as a forerunner of Russian Impressionism.
Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa - copy???
All about Mona
Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa wascopied by other artists and his students starting almost as soon as it was made in the first decades of the 16th century. Some of them have been advanced as Leonardo originals, at least in part and others have always been known to be copies. One of these known copies is in the Prado Museum in Madrid.
Before restoration
Prado experts thought it was painted relatively early in the 16th century by an anonymous artist, but with its black painted background, bright red sleeves, and relatively flat shadowing compared to the velvety depth of da Vinci’s original, the Prado’s Mona Lisa didn’t get much attention. They also thought the wood was oak, which was used by northern European artists.
Using infrared reflectography, they then found that underneath that dull black background was a beautiful Tuscan landscape almost identical to the one behind Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.
There are documentary sources that attest to Leonardo having his students paint alongside him in the studio, but this is the first time we have IR evidence that strongly indicates contemporaneous painting.
Conservators have spent the past year removing the black overpaint — probably added in the 18th century to make it match other pieces with a black background in a gallery setting.
The copy is in the final stages of conservation. It will be displayed at the Prado in a few weeks, then it will go on loan to the Louvre for its exhibition with Leonardo’s Saint Anne (March 19 – June 25) where it will be back in the same room with Leonardo’s Mona Lisa for the first time in 500 years or so.
Isleworth Mona Lisa
The Isleworth Mona Lisa is one of many paintings based closely onLeonardo da Vinci’sMona Lisa. Though insufficiently examined, the painting is claimed by some to be partly an original work of Leonardo dating from the early 16th century.
Shortly beforeWorld War I, English art collector Hugh Blaker discovered the painting in the home of aSomersetnobleman in whose family it had been for nearly 100 years. This discovery led to the conjecture that Leonardo painted two portraits of Lisa del Giocondo: the famous one inThe Louvre, and the one discovered by Blaker, who bought the painting and took it to his studio inIsleworth,London, from which it takes its name.
According to Leonardo’s early biographerGiorgio Vasari, Leonardo had started to paint Mona Lisa in 1503, but “left it unfinished”. However, a fully finished painting of a “certain Florentine lady” surfaces again in 1517, shortly before Leonardo’s death and in his private possession. The latter painting almost certainly is the same that now hangs in the Louvre.
Based on this contradiction, supporters of theauthenticityof the Isleworth Mona Lisa claim it to be the unfinished Mona Lisa, made at least partially by Leonardo and originally handed over to its commissioner, and the Louvre Mona Lisa a later version of it, made by Leonardo for his own use.
The painting is wider than the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, having columns on either side which also appear in some other versions. The Isleworth Mona Lisa is framed by two columns on each side of the picture.
The Louvre painting is narrower and has no columns, but has the projecting bases on either side, suggesting that the picture was original framed by columns but has been trimmed. However, experts who examined the Mona Lisa in 2004-2005 stated that the original painting has not been trimmed.
The Louvre’s Mona Lisa
Also known as La Gioconda or La Joconde, or Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo.
It is a painting in oil on a poplar panel, completed circa 1503–1519 and bought by king Francis I of France. It is now the property of the French State and it is on permanent display at the Musée du Louvre in Paris.
The painting is a half-length portrait and depicts a seated woman, Lisa del Giocondo, whose facial expression has been frequently described as enigmatic. The ambiguity of the subject’s expression, the monumentality of the composition, and the subtle modeling of forms and atmospheric illusionism were novel qualities that have contributed to the continuing fascination and study of the work.
Little is known about Lisa’s life. Born in Florence and married in her teens to a cloth and silk merchant who later became a local official, she was mother to five children and led what is thought to have been a comfortable and ordinary middle-class life. Lisa outlived her husband, who was considerably her senior.
The twist and Mystery of Mona.
If the pillars was not cut out in the Louvre’s Mona Lisa, why did Leonardo add them at all. In the Isleworth’s Mona Lisa which may have be started or partially painted by Leonardo he has added the pillars to complete a balance composition.
Now the Pardo’s Mona Lisa is painted the same as the Louvre’s Mona minus the pillars. If it was painted by a student of Leonardo, he had to be painted while Da Vinci use it as a study work.
It makes more since that the Isleworth would be painted by the student with Leonardo’s hand helping. Then the pillars are painted in the work. Now getting back to Pardo’s Mona Lisa, it would have been painted after the Louvre’s Mona Lisa was cut down to fit the frame it is now which is from a later period.
We may never know the truth…….
Interesing Facts on the Louvre’s Mona Lisa
The Mona Lisa is Lisa Gherardini a wife of a well to do silk merchant, Francesco del Giocondo.
Was painted between 1503 to 06.
Her no. in the Louvre is 779 of 6000 paintings
Known in France as La Joconde, in Italy as La Gioconda, everywhere else
as the Mona Lisa.
The last time the Mona Lisa was here in the U.S., 1963.
Stolen from the Louvre in 1911 and was recovered in 1913.
It hung in the King’s bathroom after Leonardo’s death.
Jean-Joseph Constant (10 June 1845 – 26 May 1902), was a French painter and etcher best known for his Oriental subjects and portraits.
Benjamin-Constant was born in Paris. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he was a pupil of Alexandre Cabanel. A journey to Morocco in 1872 strongly influenced his early artistic development and lead him to produce Romantic scenes under the spell of Orientalism.
Among his noted works in this vein are Last Rebels, Justice in the Harem (both in the Luxembourg Gallery), Les Chérifas, and Moroccan Prisoners (Bordeaux). His large canvas, The Entrance of Mahomet II into Constantinople (Toulouse Museum), received a medal in 1876.
After 1880, he changed his manner, devoting himself to mural decorations and to portraits.
Leonardo da Vinci - La Scapigliata
La Scapigliata is widely known as The Female Head. In Italian, La Scapigliata means “Woman who is uncombed” which explains the ringlets flowing down around her neck and shoulders.
Leonardo da Vinci started La Scapigliata on Apr 15, 1452, but did not finish it until 67 years later on May 2, 1519. In this painting, da Vinci showed noble women to be equal to men in mental status. This is why her head appears three dimensional while her chest is only one dimensional.
Lucas Velázquez, Eugenio (Madrid, 1817-1870). Spanish painter.
Lucas Velázquez is undoubtedly romantic Spanish artist who knew better understand the art of Goya, elevated to the most important and passionate follower of the universe Goyescas after the death of the great Aragonese, whose essence was able to assimilate to the point of making it difficult in certain
Sometimes the correct attribution of some works little attention. Since the nineteenth century or Eugenio Padilla Eugenio Lucas the Elder and Lucas as a native of Alcala de Henares, in fact born in Madrid on February 9, 1817. He began his artistic training as a student of the Academy of San Fernando, but disagreed with the cold classicism of academic lessons, preferring to study directly the great geniuses of the Spanish paintings in the Prado Museum repeatedly copied Velázquez and above all, Goya, whose works mark the definitive style and personality of this creative artist.
Thus, Lucas found in the compositions Goyescas a special niche for developing an imaginative painting of passions unleashed, fantastic visions and scenes of intense drama, in the truest spirit romantic scenes primarily Inquisition, Sabbath, witchcraft, pilgrimages, and Handjob bulls, all subjects learned by Goya, and constitute the core of his most interesting fecundísima career. Moreover, in 1850 he painted the ceiling, now disappeared, the Teatro Real in Madrid, and later Queen Elizabeth II named him an honorary house painter and a knight of the Order of Carlos III.
Married since 1844, in 1853 he separated from his wife, living the following year with Villaamil Frances, which had four children, one of whom, Eugenio Lucas Villaamil continued, albeit with more limited skills and personality rather eclectic-el craft and style of his father, confused at times the works of both artists. He died in Madrid on September 11, 1870. T
he Prado Museum preserves one of the most interesting and representative of the different facets of the artist painting from Vitores donation, made in 1969 to the late Museum of Modern Art.
