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 :. | Rocky Mountains | Hetch Hetchy Canyon | Sierra Nevada Morning | Moat Mountain Intervale New Hampshire | the conflagration |
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Jean Leon Gerome Ferris
(August 18, 1863 - March 18, 1930) was an American painter best known for his series of 78 scenes from American history, entitled The Pageant of a Nation, the largest series of American historical paintings by a single artist. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Stephen James Ferris, a portrait painter and a devotee of Jean-L??on G??rôme (after whom he was named) and Mariano Fortuny.He grew up around art, having been trained by his father and having two acclaimed painters, Edward Moran and Thomas Moran, as uncles. Ferris enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1879 and trained further at the Acad??mie Julian beginning in 1883 under William-Adolphe Bouguereau.He also met his namesake G??rôme, who greatly influenced Ferris's decision to paint scenes from American history. As Ferris wrote in his unpublished autobiography, "[G??rôme's] axiom was that one would paint best that with which he is most familiar". However, initially his subjects were Orientalist in nature, that movement having been in vogue when he was young. Some of his material was original, some of it took after Fortuny, but he was skilled enough, despite never having had any experience with Asia. In 1882, he exhibited a painting entitled Feeding the Ibis, which was valued at $600. By 1895, Ferris had gained a reputation as a historical painter, and he embarked on his dream of creating a series of paintings that told a historical narrative. In 1898 he sold one of these, General Howe's Levee, 1777, but he later regretted it, realizing that such a series could not be complete if the separate paintings could not be kept together. As such, he never sold another one of those, but he did sell the reproduction rights to various publishing companies. This later would have the effect of greatly popularizing his work, as these companies made prints, postcards, calendars and blank-backed trade cards use in advertisements. Laminated cards of these works were still being sold as late as 1984. The Landing of William PennThe paintings showed idealized portrayals of famous moments from American history, but were often historically inaccurate. The Landing of William Penn, for example, shows Penn being greeted at New Castle by American Indians who are clothed in the tradition of tribes from the Great Plains. In The First Thanksgiving 1621, the black outfits the Pilgrims are shown wearing are wrong, and the Wampanoag did not wear feathered war bonnets, nor would they have been sitting on the ground. The complete series was shown at Independence Hall in Philadelphia from 1913 to 1930, then moved next door to Congress Hall. In later years it was shown in a number of locations, including the Smithsonian Institution, before being returned to the Ferris family.
John Vanderbank
John Vanderbank (9 September 1694 - 23 December 1739) was an English portrait painter and book illustrator, who enjoyed a high reputation for a short while during the reign of King George I, but who died relatively young due to an intemperate and extravagant lifestyle. Vanderbank was born in London, the eldest son of John Vanderbank Snr. His father was a Huguenot tapestry weaver, born in Paris, but who was forced to flee to Holland before coming to England where he became head of a Soho tapestry weaving factory. Vanderbank studied under Sir Godfrey Kneller at James Thornhill's art academy in Great Queen Street from 1711 until 1720, when he joined with Louis Cheron to found his own academy in St. Martin's Lane. The venture proved a failure, and in 1729 he went to France to avoid his creditors. On his return he entered "the liberties of the Fleet" - mansion houses near Fleet prison, London, in which certain privileged prisoners could serve out their sentences in return for payment. It was noted by George Vertue that "only intemperance prevented Vanderbank from being the greatest portraitist of his generation." He died of Tuberculosis in Holies Street, Cavendish Square, London, on 23 Dec. 1739, aged about 45, and was buried in Marylebone church.
Abanindranath Tagore
Indian, 1871-1951,Painter and writer, brother of Gaganendranath Tagore. Intermittently taught by two undistinguished European academicians, Olinto Ghilardy and Charles Palmer, in 1897 he came under the influence of Ernest Binfield Havell (see HAVELL,), art scholar and catalyst of indigenism. Impressed by Mughal and Persian miniatures and the work of the Japanese artists Taikan Yokoyama and Shunso Hishida, who visited India in 1903, Abanindranath discarded Western realism for the stylized naturalism of Japanese art, which suited his poetic temperament, and the general John Ruskin-William Morris thought axis of such early indigenist theorists as Havell and Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy. His work until the Omar Khayyam illustrations (1906-10; Santiniketan, Nandan Mus.), with their revivalist nationalism and fin-de-siecle affectations, greatly influenced the Neo-Bengal art movement formed chiefly by his pupils at the Calcutta Art School, where he was Vice-principal from 1905 to 1915. His own later work developed an imagist focus. The Arabian Nights series (1930; Calcutta, Babindra-Bharati Soc.), his magnum opus, in which literary and visual antecedents give the image a cultural ambience without intruding on its independence, marks the beginning of modern Indian narrative painting. His aesthetic theories, formulated in lectures he gave as the Vageswari Professor of Art at Calcutta University (1921-9), stressed the role of individual sensibility and imagination in creativity. Induced by his uncle Rabindranath,