|
|
ART “4”
“2”-DAY 05 February |
| ^
Born on 05 February 1808: Carl Spitzweg,
Munich German painter who died on 23 September 1885. — He got trained (1825–1828), at his father’s insistence, as a pharmacist, by 1829 becoming manager of a pharmacy in the Straubing district of Munich. From 1830 to 1832 he made advanced studies in pharmacy, botany and chemistry at the University of Munich, passing his final examination with distinction. On receiving a large legacy in 1833, which made him financially independent, he decided to become a painter. He had drawn since the age of 15 and had frequented artistic circles since the late 1820s; but he had no professional training as a painter. He learnt much from contacts with young Munich landscape painters such as Eduard Schleich the elder and produced his first oil paintings in 1834. In 1835 Spitzweg became a member of the Munich Kunstverein but left two years later due to disappointment over the reception of the first version of Der arme Poet (1837; second version 1839), a scene of gently humorous pathos that has since become his most celebrated work. Spitzweg’s decision to leave the Kunstverein, however, was also encouraged by his first successful attempts to sell his paintings independently. In 1839 he visited Dalmatia, where he made sketches that he used for many later works on Turkish themes (e.g. The Turkish Coffee House, 1860). From the 1840s he traveled regularly, usually with his close friend, the painter Eduard Schleich [12 Oct 1812 – 08 Jan 1874], both within Bavaria and to Austria and Switzerland and also to the Adriatic coast, especially to Trieste. At this time Spitzweg generally painted humorous scenes, most of them showing individual figures in comic situations, for example The Butterfly Catcher (1840). — LINKS — Orientale Im Bazar (76x61cm) — Schwäbischen Mädchen an einem Gartenzaun (14x21cm) — The Bookworm (79x50cm) — The Botanist (35x56cm) — Der arme Poet (Erste Fassung) (1837, 38x45cm; 257x301pix, 32kb) _ Der arme Poet (Zweite Fassung) (1839; 476x600pix, 157kb) _ In seinem berühmten Gemälde schildert Spitzweg einen Sonderling, der fern von der Welt seine Verse schmiedet. Eigenwillig anrührend geht der "arme Poet" unter seiner Zipfelmütze in seinem armseligen Dachstübchen seinen dichterischen Träumen nach. Die Zipfel- oder Nachtmütze erlangte in jener Zeit der politischen Reaktion einen gewissen Signalwert. Sie geisterte durch die Literatur und in aufreizender Massierung durch Zeichnungen der Karikaturisten. Als Symbol "gesicherter" Abendruhe wurde sie zum Zeichen des verschlafenen, aus der Politik ausgeschlossenen Bürgers. Insbesondere in der französischen Karikatur wurde die "Nachtmütze" zum verschlüsselten Manifest von Respektwidrigkeit. |
| ^
Died on 05 February 1888: Anton
Mauve, Dutch painter in oil and watercolor, and etcher,
of landscapes
with animals and peasants; a member of the Hague School. He was born on
13 September 1838. — {Mauve paintings are not mauve paintings: they
tend more to green}. — He was born in Zaandam, the son of a Mennonite preacher. Anton Mauve spent his youth in Haarlem, where he studied under the animal painters P.F. van Os and Wouterus Verschuur, and began his career as a painter of horses. Lived on and off at Oosterbeek 1858-1874, becoming very friendly from about 1862 with Willem Mans. Settled in 1874 in The Hague, where he began to paint sheep, and scenes of horses and men hauling fishing boats on the beach. Gave painting lessons to van Gogh, his wife's cousin, for three weeks in 1881-1882. Mauve spent much time in Laren from 1882 and settled there 1885. His late pictures include scenes of peasants at their work, influenced by Millet, and some landscapes without animals or humans. He died at Arnhem. — Mauve came from a large family of clergymen in the province of North Holland. At the age of 16 he was apprenticed to the animal painter Pieter Frederik van Os [1808–1892]: animals (especially sheep, but also cows and horses) became Mauve’s preferred theme. He then was trained for a few months by Wouterus Verschuur, who gave him his love of horses, in the style, at least, of Paulus Potter and Philips Wouwerman. Initially Mauve painted horses above all else, not the shining animals Verschuur painted, but worn-out plodding beasts. In 1858 Mauve joined his much older friend Paul Gabriël on a trip to Oosterbeek, the Dutch Barbizon, where he met Gerard Bilders and Willem Maris, two artists who were to have an enormous influence on him. The premature death of Bilders, a painter with whom he shared emotionalism and fickleness of mood, came as a great shock to Mauve. Apart from Bilders, Willem Maris, who was six years his junior, was a lifelong friend. There are a number of similarities between their work as well as essential differences: Mauve tended to add human figures to his animal pieces, whereas the youngest of the Maris brothers did not; Mauve’s cows, horses and sheep seem more peaceful than Maris’s, at times almost listless. For a long time Mauve was impressed by Maris’s virtuosity as a painter, although he eventually adopted a different style. There is a clear relationship between man and animal or between the animals themselves in Mauve’s paintings, a noticeable difference from Maris’s pictures. — The students of Mauve included Vincent van Gogh [1853-1886], Jan Pieter Veth, Philip Zilcken. — LINKS — Morning Ride on the Beach (1876) — Riders in the Snow of the Woods at The Hague (1879) — In the Pasture (59x74cm; 2/5 size, 192kb _ ZOOM to 4/5 size, 697kb) — Gathering Seaweed (110kb) |
| ^
Born on 05 February 1886: Ernest
Martin Hennings, US painter, specialized in the
US West. who died on 29 May 1956. — Hennings spent his childhood in Chicago and often visited and later attended the Art Institute of Chicago. After graduating in 1904, Hennings worked as a commercial artist, muralist, and book illustrator. In 1912 he traveled to Europe and studied under Franz Von Stuck and Angelo Junk at the Royal Academy in Munich, Germany. Hennings returned to Chicago in 1914 and resumed commercial work until former mayor of Chicago Carter H. Harrison, Jr., offered to buy one of his paintings under the condition that Hennings traveled to Taos, New Mexico, and become acquainted with the local art community. Harrison instigated similar deals with Hennings’ friends William Ufer and Victor Higgins. Arriving in Taos in 1917, the landscapes, Amerindians, and wildlife of Taos immediately inspired Hennings. He permanently settled there in 1921, the same year he became the youngest and penultimate member of the Taos Society of Artists. Hennings worked on many commissions, including paintings of the Navajos in the Rio Grande area for the Santa Fe Railroad. — Photo of Hennings. — LINKS — Self Portrait (96x79cm; 576x478pix, 216kb) — The Sheep Herder (1925, 102x102cm) — An Indian Ong (36x36cm) — Canyon View (63x76cm) — Through the Aspens (91x101cm) — Vengeance (127x137cm; 780x850pix, 59kb) |
| ^
Died on 05 February 1635: Joos
(or Jodocus, Josse, Joost, Joeys)
Momper the Younger, Flemish painter born in 1564. — Momper was the leading member of an Antwerp family of landscape painters. He was trained by his father, but he probably went to Italy in the 1580s, in which case he would have seen the Alps: he lived in Antwerp, but his works are invariably of great mountains, sometimes influenced by Bruegel, and they form a transition between Mannerist landscape and the realistic type developed in the Netherlands in the 17th century, e.g. by van Goyen. His pictures usually have blue mountains in the background, with a yellowish-green middle distance and a darker foreground peopled by small figures, often painted by Momper himself. Attribution is difficult because of the other members of the family who worked in a similar style. — LINKS — River Landscape with Boar Hunt (1610) — The Valley (1605, 65x106cm) — Mountain Road (1610, 33x42cm) — Helicon or Minerva's Visit to the Muses (140x199cm) _ This painting is the result of a co-operation of three artists, Joos de Momper (landscape), Hendrik van Balen (figures) and Jan 'Velvet' Brueghel (flowers). It is an attractive work with a harmonious landscape. The foreground and background merge gradually with one another, forbidding rocks give way to a grand valley, in which the mythological scene forms a balanced component. Ovid describes (Met. 5:250-268) how Minerva visited the Muses on Mt Helicon, their home, to listen to their song and story and to see the sacred spring, the Hippocrene, which flowed from a rock after it had been struck by the hoof of the winged horse, Pegasus. The scene is a wooded mountain-side where the company of Muses are playing their instruments. Pegasus is seen in the background leaping from a high rock from which water gushes. The association of Minerva and the Muses was in line with the tradition that made her patroness of the arts. — Landscape (174x256cm) _ Joos de Momper followed in the tradition of panoramic landscape established by Patenier and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The familiar formula of placing browns in the foreground, greens in the middle and light blues in the background establishes the sense of aerial space; also the dark shapes of flying birds against the hazy blues and whites of the sky compound the effect. In the foreground comes the usual picturesque group of figures. — Mountain Scene with Bridges (1600, 53x72cm) _ These distinctively contoured vistas, punctuated by tiny figures in the foreground, and terminating in colorful, increasingly transparent backgrounds, are unmistakably Momper. Distance, scale and breadth - a sensibility that could be called romantic - are combined here with the traditions of earlier Flemish landscape art. — Winter landscape (1620, 50x83cm) _ Momper is rightly regarded as the most important Flemish landscape painter between Pieter Brueghel and Rubens. Brueghel's influence is clearly evident in this winter landscape, and it is quite probable that his son Jan also painted a number of the figures in this picture. Momper's personal achievement lies in his rendering of landscape as a picturesque subject matter in its own right. What we see here is no longer a great universal landscape full of symbolically charged allusions, but a scene whose aesthetic appeal is valued for its own sake. Momper's painting is divided into various planes by a kind of backdrop, against which silhouettes are highlighted by a pale light or dark, thundery clouds. People are making their way along tortuous paths on terrain that seems to be hazardous. Rain-laden stormclouds, sunshine and snow set the atmosphere of the painting. In this respect, Momper has taken an important step towards emancipating the landscape painting as an autonomous genre in which the landscape is not merely a setting for some event, but is treated as a subject matter in its own right. — Tobias' Journey (90x136cm) _ An artist who owed much to Pieter Bruegel the Elder was Joos de Momper, one of the landscape painters preceding the generation of Rubens who made a real contribution to the development of that genre. Although he had also made the usual journey to Italy, it was the example of Bruegel that he followed in his many rocky landscapes, and his vision that was reflected in the vast scale of the composition and the interpretation of perspective in distant views. He usually left the staffage to be painted in by fellow artists specializing in figure painting, as in his Tobias' Journey. — Landscape with the Temptation of Christ (51x83cm) |
| ^
Born on 05 February 1864: Arthur
Wardle, British
Classicist
painter who died on 16 July 1949. — Wardle was one of the finest late Victorian painters of wild animals, and occasionally of wild cats and wild women combined. Wardle also made a large number of superb studies of animals, usually in chalks on colored paper. — As a pastelist, Wardle has taken a place in the modern British School which he can hardly be said to share with anyone else, a place gained by sheer strength of artistic personality. He had a brilliant appreciation of the genius of pastel; he used it with delightful dexterity. In the first two decades of the 20th century, Arthur Wardle was one of the best known of living British animal painters. He portrayed an astonishing diversity of subjects with an engaging naturalism, and a command of different media. Unlike most British animal and sporting artists who restricted themselves to horse and hound, deer, and domesticated beasts, Wardle both drew and painted every mammal from elephant to mouse, in watercolor, pastel, and oils. Wardle's reputation may have been made with his large mythological paintings, but his most individual work was in pastel which underwent a revival in Britain in the 1890s. Inspired by French art, many leading British artists had experimented successfully with pastel, leading to the foundation of the Pastel Society. Wardle was elected a member in 1911. — LINKS — The Attack (66x96cm) — Tigers (66x96cm; 477x750pix, 102kb) — Afternoon Promenade (76x51cm) — Among Friends (79x51cm) — Companions (93x70cm) — Jacques and Jean, Champion Westhighland White Terriers (56x36cm) — Terriers on the Scent (49x41cm; 1000x842pix, 382kb) — The Tiger Pool (74x94cm) — Two Corgies (56x36cm) — Two Scotties in a Landscape (58x43cm; 1000x729pix, 167kb) — A Lionness (28x38cm) — Moon Kissed :: Endymion (25x32cm) _ Endymion was the son of Zeus and the nymph Calyce. According to Greek legend, Endymion was a beautiful young shepherd who slept in a cave on Mount Latmus in Caria. One night while Selene, the moon goddess, drove her chariot through the night sky, she caught sight of the sleeping youth and fell in love with him. Selene contrived that Endymion should sleep forever, so that every night she could descend to embrace him while he slept. Together Endymion and Selene are reputed to have had fifty daughters, representing the fifty moons of the Olympian festal cycle. The story many meanings; some believe Endymion represents the sun, which sets opposite the rising moon, the Latmian cave representing the cave of forgetfuless into which the sun plunges beneath the sea, and others regard him as the personification of sleep or death. Wardle not exclusively an animal painter. He exhibited at the Royal Academy a series of large mythological scenes, which combined figures, often loosely draped, with exotic beasts. — A Bacchante (1909, 99x150cm; 759x1050pix, 76kb) _ In this painting Wardle imagines a Bacchante dancing amongst wild flowers surrounded by 8 equally intoxicated leopards. — The Lure of the North (1912, 85x125cm; 940x1400pix, 86kb) _ This Arctic extravaganza of a painting shows a mermaid (apparently comfortable in icy water) playing her lyre surrounded by three appreciative polar bears (they look like they think that she is playing dinner music and — leaving “playing music” aside — that she IS dinner.) and seagulls (ready to eat any scraps left by the bears). |
site safe for children 