Born 1606, Died 1669.One of the great Dutch painters and printmakers of the 17th century, Rembrandt van Rijn is best known for his expressive use of light and shadow (also called chiaroscuro) in his many portraits. Raised in Leiden, he studied with Pieter Lastman (1583-1633) in Amsterdam, then returned to Leiden around 1625 and set up shop as a teacher and portrait artist. Sometime between 1630 and 1632 Rembrandt relocated to Amsterdam, where he spent the rest of his career. Though he had his detractors (some of whom considered him coarse and "low born"), Rembrandt was successful and famous during his lifetime, though he fell on financial hard times in his later years. He was a master printer and produced hundreds of group portraits and historical paintings, including The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp (1632), The Military Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq (1642) and Aristotle with a Bust of Homer (1653). His portraits -- including a lifelong trail of intriguing and rather frank self-portraits -- reveal his interest in psychological study and continue to be admired as landmarks in Western art. The Military Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq is also known as "The Night Watch" because it was thought the painting depicted a nighttime scene. When the painting was cleaned in the 1940s it became obvious that it depicted a daytime scene... He married Saskia van Ulenburgh (also Uylenburgh) in 1634.   Related Paintings of REMBRANDT Harmenszoon van Rijn :. | Self-Portrait | Facob Trip (mk33) | Facob blessing the Sons of Foseph (mk33) | The Polish Rider | The Blinding of Samson |
Related Artists:
Nikolai Kasatkin
Russian.1859-1930
GAINSBOROUGH, Thomas
English Rococo Era/Romantic Painter, 1727-1788 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's 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.
Antoine Rivalz
(1667, Toulouse - 1735) was a French painter. The son of Jean-Pierre Rivalz (who painted and designed the city's hôtel de ville), Antoine was the official painter to the town of Toulouse, a talented portraitist of the society of the city in the 18th century. He also produced a large number of drawings. Antoine Rivalz began his training in the studios of his father Jean-Pierre, the sculptor Marc Arcis and the artist Raymond Lafage. In his training, he was particularly interested in studying classical works and the Baroque Italian masters. From 1685 to 1687 he trained at the Academie royale de peinture et de sculpture in Paris. On his return to Toulouse he received his first two commissions. In 1687 he set out for Rome, where he stayed for more than ten years. In 1694 he won second prize at the Accademia di San Luca with a drawing of The fall of the giants, with first prize going to Antonio Balestra and Felice Nardi. In Rome he became friends with other artists such as Carlo Maratta, Luigi Garzi and Benedetto Luti, and was more and more in demand for commissions from families in both Rome and Toulouse. In 1703, he returned to Toulouse and was made painter of the city's hôtel de ville, a post he held until his death. Supported by an important studio, he received a large number of commissions - commemorative paintings, paintings of ordinance and armour, architectural projects, restorations. This post, however, allowed him above all to forge productive relations with the city's upper classes and benefit from a near-monopoly on public, religious and private commissions in the city. He married his first cousin Louise Rivalz, with whom he had six children, including the future artist Pierre Rivalz, known as the "chevalier Rivalz". In 1726 he set up Toulouse's first art school and in 1750 letters patent from Louis XV turned it into the Academie royale de peinture et de sculpture de Toulouse, the only one in France (after that in Paris) to be allowed to bear that title.