1891-1942 Grant Wood Locations His family moved to Cedar Rapids after his father died in 1901. Soon thereafter he began as an apprentice in a local metal shop. After graduating from Washington High School (Cedar Rapids, Iowa) , Wood enrolled in an art school in Minneapolis in 1910, and returned a year later to teach in a one-room schoolhouse. In 1913 he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and did some work as a silversmith. From 1920 to 1928 he made four trips to Europe, where he studied many styles of painting, especially impressionism and post-impressionism. But it was the work of Jan Van Eyck that influenced him to take on the clarity of this new technique and to incorporate it in his new works. From 1924 to 1935 Wood lived in the loft of a carriage house that he turned into his personal studio at "5 Turner Alley" (the studio had no address until Wood made one up himself). In 1932, Wood helped found the Stone City Art Colony near his hometown to help artists get through the Great Depression. He became a great proponent of regionalism in the arts, lecturing throughout the country on the topic. Wood taught painting at the University of Iowa's School of Art beginning in 1934. During that time, he supervised mural painting projects, mentored students, produced a variety of his own works, and became a key part of the University's cultural community. On February 12, 1942, one day before his 51st birthday, Wood died at the university hospital of liver cancer. When Wood died, his estate went to his sister, Nan Wood Graham, the woman portrayed in American Gothic. When she died in 1990, her estate, along with Wood's personal effects and various works of art, became the property of the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa. Wood was an active painter from an extremely young age until his death, and although he is best known for his paintings, he worked in a large number of media, including ink, charcoal, ceramics, metal, wood and found objects. Throughout his life he hired out his talents to many Iowa-based businesses as a steady source of income. This included painting advertisements, sketching rooms of a mortuary house for promotional flyers and, in one case, designing the corn-themed decor (including chandelier) for the dining room of a hotel. In addition, his 1928 trip to Munich was to oversee the making of the stained-glass windows he had designed for a Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids. He again returned to Cedar Rapids to teach Junior High students after serving in the army as a camouflage painter.  Related Paintings of Grant Wood :. | Cultivation of Flower | The Path intersect the Garden | New Road | Fruit | The Landscape of Autumn |
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Francesco Vanni
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1563-1610 was an Italian painter of the Mannerist style, active in Rome and his native city of Siena. He was half-brother of the painter Ventura Salimbeni, and the stepson of Arcangelo Salimbeni, another Sienese painter. His stepfather died when Francesco was young, and as a 16 year old went first to Bologna, then to Rome. There he apprenticed with Giovanni de' Vecchi during 1579-80, though like other Tuscan painters of his day, he was influenced in part by Federico Barocci from Urbino, and he was among the last painters who also reflected the influence of the Sienese School of painting. He was named a Cavalieri. In Rome, he worked later with Salimbeni, Bartolomeo Passerotti, and Andrea Lilio. He was commissioned by Pope Clement VIII to painted an altarpiece for the St. Peter's, later transferred to mosaic, Simon Magus rebuked by St. Peter. He painted several other pictures for Roman churches; including St. Michael defeats rebel angels for the sacristy of S. Gregorio; a Piet?? for Santa Maria in Vallicella; and the Assumption for S. Lorenzo in Miranda. Returning to Siena, where he ultimately died, he afterwards worked at Parma, Bologna, and again at Rome. At Siena, he painted a S. Raimondo walking on the Sea for the church of the Dominicans. Vanni painted a Baptism of Constantine (1586-7) for the church of San Agostino in Siena. He painted a Christ appearing to St. Catherine for the chapel of il Refugio at the Santuario Cateriniano of Siena, and a Baptism (1587) for the former church of San Giovannino e Gennaro.
Andrea Mantegna
Italian 1431-1506 Andrea Mantegna Locations Mantegna was born in Isola di Carturo, close to Padua in the Republic of Venice, second son of a carpenter, Biagio. At the age of eleven he became the apprentice of Francesco Squarcione, Paduan painter. Squarcione, whose original vocation was tailoring, appears to have had a remarkable enthusiasm for ancient art, and a faculty for acting. Like his famous compatriot Petrarca, Squarcione was something of a fanatic for ancient Rome: he travelled in Italy, and perhaps Greece, amassing antique statues, reliefs, vases, etc., forming a collection of such works, then making drawings from them himself, and throwing open his stores for others to study. All the while, he continued undertaking works on commission for which his pupils no less than himself were made available. San Zeno Altarpiece, (left panel), 1457-60; San Zeno, VeronaAs many as 137 painters and pictorial students passed through Squarcine's school, which had been established towards 1440 and which became famous all over Italy. Padua was attractive for artists coming not only from Veneto but also from Tuscany, such as Paolo Uccello, Filippo Lippi and Donatello. Mantegna's early career was shaped indeed by impressions of Florentine works. At the time, Mantegna was said to be a favorite pupil; Squarcione taught him the Latin language, and instructed him to study fragments of Roman sculpture. The master also preferred forced perspective, the lingering results of which may account for some Mantegna's later innovations. However, at the age of seventeen, Mantegna separated himself from Squarcione. He later claimed that Squarcione had profited from his work without paying the rights. His first work, now lost, was an altarpiece for the church of Santa Sofia in 1448. The same year Mantegna was called, together with Nicol?? Pizolo, to work with a large group of painters entrusted with the decoration of the Ovetari Chapel in the apse of the church of Eremitani. It is probable, however, that before this time some of the pupils of Squarcione, including Mantegna, had already begun the series of frescoes in the chapel of S. Cristoforo, in the church of Sant'Agostino degli Eremitani, today considered his masterpiece. After a series of coincidences, Mantegna finished most of the work alone, though Ansuino, who collaborated with Mantegna in the Ovetari Chapel, brought his style in the Forl?? school of painting. The now censorious Squarcione carped about the earlier works of this series, illustrating the life of St James; he said the figures were like men of stone, and had better have been colored stone-color at once. This series was almost entirely lost in the 1944 Allied bombings of Padua. The most dramatic work of the fresco cycle was the work set in the worm's-eye view perspective, St. James Led to His Execution. (For an example of Mantegna's use of a lowered view point, see the image at right of Saints Peter and Paul; though much less dramatic in its perspective that the St. James picture, the San Zeno altarpiece was done shortly after the St. James cycle was finished, and uses many of the same techniques, including the classicizing architectural structure.) San Luca Altarpiece, 1453; Tempera on panel; Pinacoteca di Brera, MilanThe sketch of the St. Stephen fresco survived and is the earliest known preliminary sketch which still exists to compare to the corresponding fresco. Despite the authentic look of the monument, it is not a copy of any known Roman structure. Mantegna also adopted the wet drapery patterns of the Romans, who derived the form from the Greek invention, for the clothing of his figures, although the tense figures and interactions are derived from Donatello. The drawing shows proof that nude figures were used in the conception of works during the Early Renaissance. In the preliminary sketch, the perspective is less developed and closer to a more average viewpoint however. Among the other early Mantegna frescoes are the two saints over the entrance porch of the church of Sant'Antonio in Padua, 1452, and an altarpiece of St. Luke and other saints (at left) for the church of S. Giustina, now in the Brera Gallery in Milan (1453). As the young artist progressed in his work, he came under the influence of Jacopo Bellini, father of the celebrated painters Giovanni and Gentile, and of a daughter Nicolosia. In 1453 Jacopo consented to a marriage between Nicolosia to Mantegna in marriage.
Joseph Raphael
1869-1950 Joseph Morris Raphael holds a high place in the California, American and French Schools of Impressionism. Born in the town of Jackson, California on June 2, 1869, Raphael became one of the most famous students of his esteemed teacher Arthur F. Mathews at the California School of Design. Later Raphael would continue his art studies in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and at the Academie Julian under Jean-Paul Laurens. Early in his career he made the decision to settle in Europe in Uccle, Belgium where he and his wife established a home and raised their family. For most of his career he remained a devoted follower of pure French Impressionism. He painted the countryside near his home in Uccle, Belgium and also ventured to Holland and France to paint. Just as Raphael's international reputation grew, his family grew as well to include four daughters and one son. His family frequently appeared in his figurative works, he created wonderful closeup studies of his children and frequently captured them in leisurely picnic settings. Other paintings featured local landscapes, and sometimes his charming cottage home with its vegetable and flower gardens which were perhaps a source for his still lifes of fruits, vegetables and flowers. He lived and worked in Europe for thirty-seven years always maintaining close ties with the San Francisco art community and his loyal art dealer and collector Albert M. Bender. In 1939 with the ominous clouds of World War Two approaching, he wisely chose to return to San Francisco where he lived and maintained a studio on Sutter Street until his death on December 11th, 1950.