German-born American Hudson River School Painter, 1830-1902 Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany. His family moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1833. He studied painting with the members of the D??sseldorf School in D??sseldorf, Germany from 1853 to 1857. He taught drawing and painting briefly before devoting himself to painting. Bierstadt began making paintings in New England and upstate New York. In 1859, he traveled westward in the company of a Land Surveyor for the U.S. government, returning with sketches that would result in numerous finished paintings. In 1863 he returned west again, in the company of the author Fitz Hugh Ludlow, whose wife he would later marry. He continued to visit the American West throughout his career. Though his paintings sold for princely sums, Bierstadt was not held in particularly high esteem by critics of his day. His use of uncommonly large canvases was thought to be an egotistical indulgence, as his paintings would invariably dwarf those of his contemporaries when they were displayed together. The romanticism evident in his choices of subject and in his use of light was felt to be excessive by contemporary critics. His paintings emphasized atmospheric elements like fog, clouds and mist to accentuate and complement the feel of his work. Bierstadt sometimes changed details of the landscape to inspire awe. The colors he used are also not always true. He painted what he believed is the way things should be: water is ultramarine, vegetation is lush and green, etc. The shift from foreground to background was very dramatic and there was almost no middle distance Nonetheless, his paintings remain popular. He was a prolific artist, having completed over 500 (possibly as many as 4000) paintings during his lifetime, most of which have survived. Many are scattered through museums around the United States. Prints are available commercially for many. Original paintings themselves do occasionally come up for sale, at ever increasing prices.  Related Paintings of Albert Bierstadt :. | A Storm in the Rocky Mountains | Conway Valley New Hampshire | Wasatch Mountains and Great Plains in distance, Nebraska | Prong-Horned Antelope | Looking Down the Yosemite Valley, California |
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Thomas Gainsborough
1727-1788 British Thomas Gainsborough Locations English painter, draughtsman and printmaker. He was the contemporary and rival of Joshua Reynolds, who honoured him on 10 December 1788 with a valedictory Discourse (pubd London, 1789), in which he stated: If ever this nation should produce genius sufficient to acquire to us the honourable distinction of an English School, the name of Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity, in the history of Art, among the very first of that rising name. He went on to consider Gainsborough portraits, landscapes and fancy pictures within the Old Master tradition, against which, in his view, modern painting had always to match itself. Reynolds was acknowledging a general opinion that Gainsborough was one of the most significant painters of their generation. Less ambitious than Reynolds in his portraits, he nevertheless painted with elegance and virtuosity. He founded his landscape manner largely on the study of northern European artists and developed a very beautiful and often poignant imagery of the British countryside. By the mid-1760s he was making formal allusions to a wide range of previous art, from Rubens and Watteau to, eventually, Claude and Titian. He was as various in his drawings and was among the first to take up the new printmaking techniques of aquatint and soft-ground etching. Because his friend, the musician and painter William Jackson (1730-1803), claimed that Gainsborough detested reading, there has been a tendency to deny him any literacy. He was, nevertheless, as his surviving letters show, verbally adept, extremely witty and highly cultured. He loved music and performed well. He was a person of rapidly changing moods, humorous, brilliant and witty. At the time of his death he was expanding the range of his art, having lived through one of the more complex and creative phases in the history of British painting. He painted with unmatched skill and bravura; while giving the impression of a kind of holy innocence, he was among the most artistically learned and sophisticated painters of his generation. It has been usual to consider his career in terms of the rivalry with Reynolds that was acknowledged by their contemporaries; while Reynolds maintained an intellectual and academic ideal of art, Gainsborough grounded his imagery on contemporary life, maintaining an aesthetic outlook previously given its most powerful expression by William Hogarth. His portraits, landscapes and subject pictures are only now coming to be studied in all their complexity; having previously been viewed as being isolated from the social, philosophical and ideological currents of their time, they have yet to be fully related to them. It is clear, however, that his landscapes and rural pieces, and some of his portraits, were as significant as Reynolds acknowledged them to be in 1788.
Eilif Peterssen
1852-1928 was a Norwegian painter. He attended the of Fredrik Eckersberg in Kristiania (now Oslo) in 1866 and 1870. After that, he studied painting briefly with Knud Bergslien at the Johan Fredrick Eckersberg School of Painting and left to go abroad in 1871. He studied at the School of Art of Copenhagen; in Karlsruhe (1871?C1873), where he was a student of Hans Gude; and, together with Hans Heyerdahl, in Munich under Wilhelm von Diez. He then studied in London, Paris, and Italy. After these travels, he returned to Norway and settled in Bærum. He made his debut at the Høstutstillingen (Autumn Exposition) in Kristiania in 1882. He was a profound connoisseur of European art and was later associated groups such as Lysaker, the painters of Fleskum and those of Skagenpainters, as well as with individual artists like August Eiebakke, Kitty Kielland and Harald Oskar Sohlberg. In Norway, he is also known as the designer of the coat of arms of Norway, adopted when the country separated from Sweden in 1905 to become an independent country. This version was used for official government purposes until 1937, when it was replaced by a new version. Nonetheless, Peterssen's design is still used for the royal coat of arms and for the royal flag. In addition to his canvasses, he collaborated on the decoration of the Tourist Hotel in Holmenkollen in 1889. In the same year, he painted the murals "The Wanderers of Emmaus" in the Church of Tanum in Bærum and "Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane" in the Church of the Cross, Bergen.
Barry, James
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1627-ca.1683 Studied under Otto Marseus van Schrieck. Students included Rachel Ruysch.