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DEATHS:
1649 VOUET —
1662 VERSPRONCK
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BIRTH:
1765 SCULLY
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| Died
on 30 June 1649: Simon Vouet, French painter
born on 09 January 1590. — Vouet was a leading French Baroque painter and an arbiter of taste for almost 20 years. The son of an artist, he settled in Italy in 1613, living chiefly in Rome, with periods in Genoa, Venice and Naples. His style shows an individual talent and a profound study of Italian painters, especially Veronese. Vouet soon enjoyed high favor, including the patronage of Pope Urban VIII. In 1627 he was invited back to France, where he became First Painter, a position challenged only once, in 1640-42, when he was brought into an artificial rivalry with Poussin. Vouet taught or collaborated with almost all the painters of the next generation in France, notably Le Brun, Le Sueur and Mignard. His portraits of the court of Louis XIII and most of his large-scale decorative schemes for Parisian houses and country chateaux have been destroyed. — [A quel saint se vouait ce Vouet?] — LINKS — The Holy Family with the Infant John the Baptist (1626, 75cm diameter) — The Last Supper (1620) _ The theatrical scene is an anticipation of the great compositions of Vouet in Paris. — Crucifixion (1622, 375x225cm) _ The painting was executed in Rome and transferred to Genoa where Vouet spent a year in the service of Paolo Orsini and the Doria family. His stay in Genoa, and above all the contact with Orazio Gentileschi who was also there, resulted in a change in the style of Vouet: he abandoned Caravaggism and turned towards a pure Baroque style. — St. Jerome and the Angel (1625, 145 x180cm) _ Simon Vouet was the most versatile of all the French painters in Rome in the 1620s. His earliest pictures are the closest to those of Caravaggio, but his art lacked almost all Caravaggio's sense of drama. Instead, he concentrated on flashy and facile effects, which were, of course, to stand him in good stead at the court of Louis XIII, where he was to become the first French painter to be able to understand and interpret the Italian Baroque. He was good at lighting effects and sharp contrasts of color. An example of this is the St. Jerome and the Angel. This painting is devoid of the drama which marks Caravaggio's St Matthew and the Angel, Vouet relied much more on his technique of strong lighting and bold brushwork, and was never interested in penetrating the essence of his subject-matter. |
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Born on 30 June 1945 (1946?): Sean
Scully, (British?) US Abstract painter. — LINKS — Red Durango _ Over the course of his career, Sean Scully has developed a vocabulary for the stripe that expresses a wide range of emotions and ideas. Within a seemingly narrow iconography, the artist has produced brilliantly nuanced effects by experimenting with the dimension, color and composition of the stripe in its vertical, horizontal and diagonal orientations. By constructing his paintings on a heroic scale in multi-paneled arrangements, he injects a sculptural quality that heightens the work’s texture and design. As an art student in the late 1960s, Scully became acquainted with the paintings of Mark Rothko (25 Sep 1903 – 25 Feb 1970) whose spirit can be sensed in such works as Red Durango. Multiple layers of oil paint; soft, irregular edges; and rich colors that emanate light define this important work whose title refers to the Mexican city and state, an area rich in minerals and ferrous metals. Part of the beauty of Red Durango emerges from the artist’s masterful synthesis of balance and movement arising from different widths of horizontal and vertical stripes in multiple fields. Scully’s paintings reflect his experience of landscape and architectural spaces. During a trip to Morocco in 1969, the artist was captivated by the strips of multi-colored dyed wool that hung in the market. Such observations have inspired him to produce paintings of compelling intensity (blah...blah...blah...). — A Happy Land (1987, 244x244cm) — 48 prints at FAMSF |
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Died on 30 June 1662: Jan Corneliszoon
Verspronck (or Versprong), Dutch painter specialized in Portraits
born in 1597. He studied under Frans
Hals. — Verspronck is noted for his portraits of children. He was trained in the studio of his father, Cornelis Engelszoon, who painted portraits, kitchen still lifes and genre scenes. He joined the guild of St Luke in 1632 and spent his entire life as a portrait painter of his fellow townsmen. He was more than twenty years younger than Frans Hals and may have worked in his studio. He was certainly powerfully influenced by Hals's style. His most imposing works are the two group portraits of 1641 and 1642 of the Regentesses of the St Elizabeth Hospital which form a counterpart to the portrait of the Regents of the same institution painted by Hals in the same years. All three paintings hang today in the Frans Halsmuseum in Haarlem. — LINKS — Portrait of a Bride (1640, 79x76cm) _ The painting is both signed and dated "J.V. Spronk 1640". Verspronck's career in the years immediately after 1640 is distinguished by the abundance of his production and the maturity of his style. This female portrait is similar to other slightly earlier works from 1636-37. In his use of light and gradation of background tones from left to right, combined with the novel and distinctly lateral placement of the figure, the artist throws the contours of the sitter's black dress into high relief against a luminous background. This technique is typical of Verspronck's female portraits, and along with the torsion of the figure's bust the contrast serves to enhance the plasticity of the dark mass of the clothing. In the pose and use of contrasting light a direct connection can be made with similar portrait in a private Dutch collection, as well as with a series of female portraits (1640-45) that Verspronck carried out as parts of paired "couples". (The companion-piece of the painting, the Portrait of a Husband is also in the Rome museum.) After this period Verspronck changed his approach to composition and treatment of light, above all abandoning the method of contrasting dark clothing with an illuminated ground. The sitters in such formal portraits as these are generally dressed in the most elaborate and modish version of contemporary costume. Comparing their clothes to the changes in fashion allows us to establish an approximate date for such pictures, though in many cases (such as this pair) the works are actually signed and dated by the artist. — Girl in a Blue Dress (giant size) _ Girl in a Blue Dress _ Girl in a Blue Dress (1641, 82x66) _ Here is a portrait of a small girl in a blue dress painted in 1641 by Johannes Verspronck. At this time, Verspronck was a leading portrait painter in Haarlem. Girl Dressed in Blue is his most famous work and one of the best loved portraits of a child from the seventeenth century. The girl has been portrayed as a real adult. Only her child-like face betrays the fact that she cannot be more than about ten years old. In those days, young girls were dressed in the same way as their mothers. It is not known who this girl is, although we can be certain she came from a wealthy family. This can be seen from her dress decorated with gold lace, her excessive jewellery and the feather fan she is holding. _ Verspronck was more than twenty years younger than Frans Hals and may have worked in his studio. He was certainly powerfully influenced by Hals's bold, linear style and his assertive poses. However, Verspronck's technique is less sketchy, his heads more elaborately worked up: he works in a more refined and detailed manner. This subtle and charming portrait of a young girl holding an ostrich-feather fan is one of Verspronck's most outstanding works. The delicately modelled face and the careful detailing of the dress and jewels set it apart from the work of Hals and give it a quite individual and striking effect. — Portrait of a Woman (1644, 80x66cm) _ Verspronck was son of the Haarlem painter Cornelis Engelszoon (1574 or 1575-1650) who probably trained him. His earliest existing portraits, done in the mid-thirties, show the strong influence of Frans Hals's invention, but he never attempted to emulate Hals's bold brushwork or temperament. His touch is restrained and his works are highly finished. Original was a penchant he soon developed for depicting sitters off centre leaving a wide, neutral background to the right or left of them; these areas are always exquisitely modulated from light to dark. This propensity is seen in his Portrait of a Woman of 1644 (a companion-piece representing the portrait of a man is also in The Hermitage); subsequently, he sets patrons much closer to the canvas's edge. His palette rarely deviates from rich, shining blacks, subtle greys, browns, and white. Like Hals, Verspronck was a particularly sensitive portraitist of women. His contemporaries in Haarlem apparently sensed this too. He was never commissioned to paint a regent group portrait but he was hired to execute two of regentesses. They are his most imposing paintings. The first group, dated 1641, depicts the Regentesses of the St Elizabeth Hospital. It was painted as a companion piece to Hals's group portrait of the regents of the same institution executed in the same year, and, like Hals's, it was done for the hospital and still belongs to it. The two paintings vie for the distinction of being the first regent group portraits painted in Haarlem. — Portrait of a Man and Portrait of a Woman (1641, 81x66cm each) _ Of the numerous individual likenesses of worthy sitters, most were intended to be seen with a "pendant," another portrait that represented the person's spouse. Pendants of married couples were the bread and butter of portrait painters such as Verspronck. This pair of well-executed portraits of an unidentified couple is characteristic of the voluminous genre, which did not change significantly over the first three quarters of the seventeenth century, except at the hands of innovative portraitists such as Rembrandt. Even such apparently direct presentations rely on meaningful conventions. The paintings would have faced one another, perhaps on either side of a chimneypiece. Almost invariably, the woman's portrait would hang at right, the man's at left. From the perspective of the sitters, this convention placed the woman on the man's "sinister" (left-hand) or lesser side, according to theological and social formulas which valued the "dexter" (right-hand) position more highly. This rule conformed to seventeenth-century Dutch views of marriage as a partnership based on mutual affection but steered by the man. — Anna von Schoonhoven [before 1610 - 1647] (1645, 71x60cm). |
Died on a 30 June:-
1849 Albertus Brondgeest, Dutch artist born on 02 December 1786.
1849 Peter de Wint, British painter born on 21 January 1784. —
LINKS
— Boats
on a Beach at Hastings (22x31cm)
1798 Simon Julien de Parme, French artist born on 28 October 1735 (alternative
date of death: 23 or 24 February 1800). — Relative? of Pierre
Julien [1732-1804]?
1802 Gaetano Gandolfi, Italian painter and printmaker born on 30 August
1734. — Born in San Matteo Della Decima, died in Bologna. — LINKS
— Heads
of a Turk and Several Women (etching 11x15cm) — Alexander
Presenting Campaspe to Apelles (1797)
1678 Pauwel de Vos, Flemish painter born in 1591 (1596?). He was the
brother of Cornelis
de Vos (1584 or 1585 – 09 May 9 1651), and pupil and brother-in-law
of Frans
Snyders (11 Nov 1579 – 19 Aug 1657). — Pauwel de Vos, brother
of the painter Cornelis
de Vos, painted beautifully rhythmic hunting scenes and still-lifes in
the style of his brother-in-law Frans
Snyders. In 1637 Snyders and the de Vos brothers helped Rubens
paint pictures for the Torre de la Parada, Philip IV of Spain's hunting-lodge
near Madrid. — LINKS
— Still-Life
Born on a 30 June:
1911 Ruskin Spear, British painter who died in 1990. — LINKS
1898 Jul 30 Henry Moore, English Abstract sculptor who died on 31 August
1986 — LINKS
— not to be confused with painter Henry
Moore [1831-1895]
1891 Sir Stanley Spencer, British artist who died on 14 December 1959.
— LINKS
1853 Robert Ponsonby Staples, British artist who died in 1943.
1824 Willem Anthonie van Deventer, Dutch artist who died in 1893.
1799 François-Auguste-André Biard, French artist who died on 20 June
1882. — [Jouait-il au billard, Biard?]
1789 Émile Jean Horace Vernet, French painter, specialized in
Orientalism, who died on 17 January 1863. — LINKS
— 23
lithographs at FAMSF — The
Arab Tale-teller (1833, 100x138cm) — The
Lion Hunt (1836, 57x82cm) — Napoleonic
Battle in the Alps (1814, 90x117cm) — The
Battle of Habra, Algeria in December 1835 Between Emir Abd El Kadar and the
Duke of Orleans (1840, 88x118cm) — Judith
and Holofernes (42x32cm) — Raphael
and Pope Leo X
1728 Nicolas-Guy Brenet, French painter who died on 22 February 1792.
— LINKS
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