Domenico de’ Rossi (1659–1730) was an Italian sculptor and engraver. In 1709 Domenico inherited the printshop of Giovanni Giacomo de’ Rossi, by the church of Santa Maria della Pace, the largest and most long-lived publisher of the Roman baroque. Several generations of the de’ Rossi participated in the family publishing firm established in the 17th century,…
Dieric Bouts (born ca. 1415 – 6 May 1475) was an Early Netherlandish painter. According to Karel van Mander in his Het Schilderboeck of 1604, Bouts was born in Haarlem and was mainly active in Leuven (Louvain), where he was city painter from 1468. Van Mander confused the issue by writing biographies of both “Dieric…
“ANECDOTES HAVE their own truth, deeper, often, than the bare historical truth that would be theirs if the events they pretend to record in fact took place. It is a matter of historical truth that Velazquez painted the great portrait of his slave and assistant, Juan de Pareja, during his second sojourn in Italy. Pareja…
French painter, active in Italy. He was for a long time confused with FRAN?OIS DE NOM?, and the work of both artists was thought to be by a Mons’ Desiderio, a ‘highly praised painter of perspectives and city scenes’ (de Dominici). It is now generally accepted that Mons? Desiderio was the pseudonym of Didier Barra…
David Teniers the Younger (15 December 1610 – 25 April 1690) was a Flemish artist born in Antwerp, the son of David Teniers the Elder. His son David Teniers III and his grandson David Teniers IV were also painters. His wife Anna, née Anna Breughel, was the daughter of Jan Brueghel the Elder and the…
A member of the Ryckaert family of artists, he was born and raised in Antwerp, the city in which he conducted his career and in which he died. He was the son of David Ryckaert II, grandson of David Ryckaert I, and nephew of Martin Ryckaert. David Ryckaert was a pupil of his homonymous father; his…
The son of Bartholomäus Hopfer, a painter, and his wife Anna Sendlerin, Daniel moved to Augsburg early in his life, and acquired citizenship there in 1493. In 1497 he married Justina Grimm, sister of the Augsburg publisher, physician and druggist Sigismund Grimm. The couple had three sons, Jörg, Hieronymus and Lambert, the last two of whom…
Cristofano Allori (17 October 1577 – 1 April 1621) was an Italian portrait painter of the late Florentine Mannerist school. Allori was born at Florence and received his first lessons in painting from his father, Alessandro Allori, but becoming dissatisfied with the hard anatomical drawing and cold coloring of the latter, he entered the studio…
He was born into a family of artists, and learned to paint from his father Herman, along with his brothers Abraham and Herman Saftleven the Younger. He lived for a time in Utrecht with his brother. Saftleven’s subject matter covered various subjects, including genre works, portraits, beach scenes, and biblical and mythological themes. Some consider his…
Jacques Albin Simon Collin de Plancy (1793 or 1794 –1881) was a French occultist, demonologist and writer; he published several works on occultism and demonology. He was born in 1793 or 1794 in Plancy (presently Plancy-l’Abbaye) and died in 1881 in Paris. He was a free-thinker influenced by Voltaire. He worked as a printer and…
Gillot was born in Langres. He was a painter, engraver, book illustrator, metal worker, and designer for the theatre. He had Watteau as an apprentice between 1703 and 1708. Gillot’s sportive mythological landscape pieces, with such titles as Feast of Pan and Feast of Bacchus, opened the Academy of Painting at Paris to him in…
Charles Allan Gilbert (September 3, 1873 – April 20, 1929), better known as C. Allan Gilbert, was a prominent American illustrator. He is especially remembered for a widely published drawing (a memento mori or vanitas) titled All Is Vanity. The drawing employs a double image (or visual pun) in which the scene of a woman…
Profoundly yet sensitively Germanic, images by Caspar David Friedrich are those of a Wagner in nucleo – without the heavy orchestral breathing. Implicitly musical, the painter’s tender art reaches back to Mozart and on to Richard Strauss, filled with death and transfiguration. A one-man, more benevolent Brothers Grimm, Friedrich, born in Swedish Pomerania, never terrorized…
Schwabe was born in Altona, Holstein, and moved to Geneva, Switzerland at an early age. After studying art in Geneva, he relocated to Paris as a young man, where he worked as a wallpaper designer, and he became acquainted with Symbolist artists. His paintings typically featured mythological and allegorical themes; as an essentially literary artist,…
Carlo Farneti – Illustration for a 1935 edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, from the collection of Richard Sica.
Carl Gustav Carus (3 January 1789 – 28 July 1869) was a German physiologist and painter, born in Leipzig, who played vaorious roles during the Romantic era. A friend of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, he was a many-sided man: a doctor, a naturalist, a scientist, a psychologist, and a landscape painter who studied under Caspar…
One of the most prolific artists of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, Byam Shaw excelled as a painter, illustrator, printmaker, theatre designer, teacher and muralist. John Byam Liston Shaw was born in Madras on 13 November 1872, the son of John Shaw and Sophia Alicia Byam Gunthorpe. His father was Registrar to the High…
The style of this painter of Istrian origin is highly unusual. Active in Mantua and Padua (though he cannot be identified with the monk and prophet of the same name [1437-1531], as was once thought), his work reveals the influence of Mantegna together with some elements drawn from Ferrarese painting. It is characterized by a…
The religious supernatural recognizes – zed a self torn between transcendent forces that fought for its possession. The Devil and his minions, the Demons, engaged in a struggle for the soul with the angels and guardian spirits. When the religious supernatural expresses the search for salvation in terms of conflict and terror it anticipates the universe…
Rackham was born in London as one of 12 children. In 1884,at the age of 17,he was sent on an ocean voyage to Australia to improve his fragile health, accompanied by two Aunts. At the age of 18, he worked as a clerk at the Westminster Fire Office and began studying part-time at the Lambeth…