Émile Friant (16 April 1863, Dieuze, Moselle – 9 June 1932, Paris) was a French artist. Friant was born in the commune of Dieuze. He would later be forced to flee to Nancy due to the encroachment of the Kingdom of Prussia’s soldiers. His paintings were featured throughout his lifetime at the Salon, until a…
Eliphas Levi, born Alphonse Louis Constant (February 8, 1810 – May 31, 1875), was a French occult author and ceremonial magician. “Eliphas Levi”, the name under which he published his books, was his attempt to translate or transliterate his given names “Alphonse Louis” into Hebrew although he was not Jewish. His second wife was French sculptress Marie-Noémi…
Elihu Vedder is an American artist who never lived in Britain, and finds a place on these pages, along with a few other foreign painters, because his work is so much in the same spirit as that of British Victorian artists, and especially the Classical School. The so-called ‘American Pre-Raphaelites’ tend to be landscape painters,…
Edward Robert Hughes (1851–1914) was an English painter who worked in a style influenced by Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism. Some of his best known works are Midsummer Eve and Night With Her Train of Stars. Hughes was the nephew of Arthur Hughes. He often used watercolour/gouache. He was elected ARWS in 1891, and chose as his…
“Burne-Jones is the most important and the best painter of the second wave of Pre-Raphaelites. A poetic young man from Birmingham who, like Morris, was preparing for a career in the church, he never had any academic art training and consequently developed his own very distinctive approach, using medieval models as his template but invigorating…
Édouard Chimot (26 November 1880 – 7 June 1959) was a French artist, illustrator and editor whose career reached its peak in the 1920s in Paris, through the publication of fine quality art-printed books. As artist his own work occupies a characteristic place, but as editor also his role was extremely important in bringing together…
Born in Toulouse, France, he began his career by studying law at the University of Toulouse. He also studied art, switching to it full time after he became bored with law, and having won prizes at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. He spent a very brief period at the Académie Julian in Paris in 1904…
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…