Dutch Baroque Era Painter, ca.1625-1679 Daily life was Jan Steen's main pictorial theme. Many of the genre scenes he portrayed are lively to the point of chaos and lustfulness, even so much that a Jan Steen household, meaning a messy scene, became a Dutch proverb (een huishouden van Jan Steen). Subtle hints in his paintings seem to suggest that Steen meant to warn the viewer rather than invite him to copy this behaviour. Many of Steen's paintings bear references to old Dutch proverbs or literature. He often used members of his family as models. Jan Steen painted also quite a few self-portraits, in which he showed no tendency of vanity. Steen did not shy from other themes: he painted historical, mythological and religious scenes, portraits, still lifes and natural scenes. His portraits of children are famous. He is also well known for his mastery of light and attention to detail, most notably in textiles. Steen was prolific, producing about 800 paintings, of which roughly 350 survive. Steen's work was valued much by contemporaries and as a result he was reasonably well paid for his work. He did not have any students, but his work proved a source of inspiration for many painters.  Related Paintings of Jan Steen :. | Card Players Quarreling | Children teaching a cat to dance | The Drinker | Skittle Players Outside an Inn | Woman sourig a pot |
Related Artists:
PYNAS, Jacob
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, ca.1585-1650
John George Brown
1831-1913 John George Brown Galleries John George Brown (November 11, 1831 - February 8, 1913), American painter, was born in Durham, England, on 11 November 1831. He studied at Newcastle-on-Tyne, in the Edinburgh Academy, and after moving to New York City in 1853, he studied with Thomas Seir Cummings at the schools of the National Academy of Design, of which he became a member in 1863.New International Encyclopedia He was its vice-president, 1899-1904, and originated the idea of the removal of the Academy to a new site in 110th Street. In 1866 he became one of the charter members of the Water-Color Society, of which he was president from 1887 to 1904. He generally confined himself to representations of street child life, bootblacks, newsboys, etc.; his Passing Show (Paris, Salon, 1877) and Street Boys at Play (Paris Exhibition, 1900) are good examples of his popular talent. Brown's art is best characterized as British genre paintings adapted to American subjects. Essentially literary, it is executed with precise detail, but is poor in color, and more popular with the general public than with connoisseurs.
Henri Gervex
French Academic Painter, 1852-1929.French painter. His artistic education began with the Prix de Rome winner Pierre Brisset (1810-90). He then studied under Alexandre Cabanel at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where his fellow pupils included Henri Regnault, Bastien-Lepage, Forain, Humbert (1842-1934) and Cormon; and also informally with Fromentin. Gervexs first Salon picture was a Sleeping Bather (untraced) in 1873: the nude, both in modern and mythological settings, was to remain one of his central artistic preoccupations. In 1876 he painted Autopsy in the H?tel-Dieu (ex-Limoges; untraced), the sort of medical group portrait he repeated in 1887 with his Dr Pean Demonstrating at the Saint-Louis Hospital his Discovery of the Hemostatic Clamp (Paris, Mus. Assist. Pub.), which celebrated the progress of medical science with a sober, quasi-photographic realism. Gervexs most controversial picture was Rolla (1878; Bordeaux, Mus. B.-A.), refused by the Salon of 1878 on grounds of indecency, partly because of the cast-off corset Degas had insisted he include. The painting shows the central character in a de Musset poem, Jacques Rolla, who, having dissipated his family inheritance, casts a final glance at the lovely sleeping form of the prostitute Marion before hurling himself out of the window. As his friend, Manet, had done the year before with his rejected Nana (1877; Hamburg, Ksthalle), Gervex exhibited his work in a commercial gallery, with great success.