English Painter, 1761-1807,English painter. He was born in a tin-mining district, where his father was a mine carpenter. He had a natural talent for drawing and was taken up by an itinerant doctor, John Wolcot (the poet Peter Pindar, 1738-1819), who was an amateur artist and had a number of well-connected friends. Wolcot taught Opie the rudiments of drawing and painting, providing engravings for him to copy and gaining him access to country-house collections. Opie's early portraits, such as Dolly Pentreath (1777; St Michael's Mount, Cornwall, Lord St Levan priv. col.), are the work of a competent provincial painter and owe much to his study of engravings after portraits by Rembrandt. His attempts at chiaroscuro and impasto in Rembrandt's manner gave his pictures a maturity that clearly startled contemporary audiences expecting to see works by an untutored artist. Thus in 1780, when a picture by him was exhibited in London at the Society of Artists with the description 'a Boy's Head, an Instance of Genius, not having ever seen a picture', Opie was hailed as 'the Cornish Wonder'. When he himself arrived in London, where he was promoted by Wolcot and his paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1781 and 1782, he was seen as a phenomenon, impressing even Joshua Reynolds, who is reputed to have remarked that Opie was 'like Caravaggio and Velasquez in one'.   Related Paintings of John Opie :. | Captain Joseph Lamb Popham | Die Familie des Bauern | Lachlan Macquarie attributed to | Sarah Siddons | The Murder of Rizzio, by John Opie |
Related Artists:
George Shuklin
painted Pyotr Drozhdin in 1745
Nittis, Giuseppe de
Italian, 1846-84 Italian painter, pastellist and printmaker. Throughout his career he was committed to a plein-air aesthetic and was particularly interested in rendering varying light effects, a concern that brought him into contact with the Impressionists. He was also acquainted with the members of the Macchiaioli, for whom his work was influential. In addition to oils, he experimented with printmaking and made innovative use of pastels. Practising a restrained, and therefore 'acceptable', form of Impressionism, he achieved great success in his lifetime,
Vaclav Brozik
(5 March 1851 - 15 April 1901) was a Czech academic painter. Since 1868 he studied at the Academy of Arts in Prague, Dresden, and Munich. In 1879 he went on study journey to the Netherlands. He married a daughter of a wealthy art dealer in Paris, who helped him achieve success in French high society. He divided his time between Prague, where he taught at the Academy since 1893, and Paris. In 1896 he was elected as a foreign member and the successor of John Millais in the French Academie des beaux-arts. He died suddenly of cardiac failure and is buried at the Cimetiere de Montmartre.