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(bapt Copenhagen, May 16, 1726; d Copenhagen, July 8, 1776).

Danish painter. Although he was mentioned in the court account-books as early as 1743, his first known painting dates from 1750. From then until 1756 he was active as one of the most important portrait painters of the Danish Rococo. His colouristic style and impasto technique were strongly influenced by the Swedish painter Carl Gustaf Pilo. The double portrait of the Court Jeweller C. F. Fabritius and his Wife (1752; Copenhagen, Stat. Mus. Kst) and the full-length Frederik V (1756; priv. col., see A. Russell, ed.: Danske slotte og herregårde [Danish palaces and manor houses] (Copenhagen, 2/1963–8), iv, p. 385) are among his masterpieces. An important collection of portraits by Als from this period is housed in the Nationalhistoriske Museum på Frederiksborg, Hillerød.

In 1755 Als was the first major gold medal winner at the newly founded Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi in Copenhagen, and the next year he began a six-year study trip to Italy and France. In Rome (...

(b c. 1685; d Madrid, Aug 21, 1752).

Italian painter and etcher, active also in Germany, England and Spain. He was a pioneer of the Venetian Rococo, and his peripatetic career fostered the development of an international decorative style. His oeuvre includes decorative frescoes for churches and palaces, history and mythological paintings and a few etchings. Many of his works were reproduced in prints, and these served as models for tapestries and for the decoration of clocks, wardrobes and porcelain.

Neither the place nor date of Amigoni’s birth is known, although it is likely that his parents were Venetian. He was probably taught by Antonio Bellucci and is first recorded in the Venetian painters’ guild, the Fraglia, in 1711. Amigoni’s one documented work of this early Venetian period (Zanetti), SS Andrew and Catherine (Venice, S Stae), was probably painted shortly before this date. His international career began in southern Germany, where his presence is recorded from about 1715 to 1 July 1729...

(b Porto, nr Milan, 1701; d Triefenstein, Franconia, 1785–6).

Italian painter, active in Germany. As a youth he assimilated the decorative traditions of Lombard painting and was deeply influenced by Venetian artists, chiefly Giambattista Tiepolo. He probably left Italy as a young man, travelling to Bavaria, where he was attracted to the art of Carlo Innocenzo Carlone, and then, perhaps between 1720 and 1730, to that of Jacopo Amigoni. Appiani’s earliest confirmed works are four preparatory studies (three pairs of Classical figures and the Parnassus, all c. 1743; priv. col., see Zubeck, figs 1–4) for frescoes in the castle (destr. 1793) at Saarbrücken. From 1745 he lived in Mainz, where he became the foremost court painter, and between 1748 and 1751 he executed frescoes of sacred subjects in churches in Lindau and Oberdorf. His two most notable surviving early fresco cycles are that in the refectory of the former Premonstratensian monastery of SS Peter and Paul, Obermarchtal (including the ...

(Petrovich)

(b St Petersburg, 1729; d Moscow, 1802).

Russian painter and teacher. He came from a family of serfs, belonging to the Counts Sheremetev, that produced several painters and architects. In about 1746–7 he was a pupil of Georg Christoph Grooth (1716–49), who painted portraits of the Sheremetev family. With Grooth, Argunov worked on the decoration of the court church at Tsarskoye Selo (now Pushkin). A full-length icon of St John of Damascus (1749; Pushkin, Pal.–Mus.), in Rococo style, is distinguished by its secular, decorative character. The Dying Cleopatra (1750; Moscow, Tret’yakov Gal.) is typical of Rococo decorative painting of the mid-18th century, with its striking combination of light, soft tones. Argunov subsequently painted in a quite different style, mainly producing portraits, of which about 60 are known. Among the first of these are pendant portraits of Ivan Lobanov-Rostovsky and his wife (1750 and 1754; St Petersburg, Rus. Mus.), in which the sitters are idealized, as in ceremonial court portraits. The colour schemes of the two portraits are complementary, a device Argunov was to favour, and the feel of materials is admirably rendered. A certain flatness and stiffness in the figures recalls the old tradition of ...

(b Mariana, Minas Gerais, bapt Oct 18, 1762; d Mariana, Feb 2, 1830).

Brazilian painter. He was the most important painter active in the province of Minas Gerais during the Colonial period. He learnt his craft in the workshop with other artists and from such theoretical treatises as Andrea Pozzo’s Perspectivae pictorum atque architectorum (1693–1700) and such technical manuals as the Segredos necessarios para os officcios, artes e manufaturas (Lisbon, 1794), which was recorded in the inventory of his possessions. He was also strongly influenced by engravings of religious subjects in bibles and missals. He had a great influence on the development of religious painting in the region, especially through his numerous pupils and followers, who until the middle of the 19th century continued to make use of his compositional methods, particularly in the perspective ceilings of churches. Often referred to in documents as ‘professor de pintura’, in 1818 he unsuccessfully petitioned for official permission to found an art school in his native city. He left an extensive body of work, which includes decorative painting of architecture, single pictures, and the painting of religious statues (gilding and flesh-colouring). Especially famous are the vast perspective paintings such as the ...

[Camelot]

(b Douai, Jan 12, 1702; d Paris, March 4, 1766).

French painter and collector. His father, Jean-Baptiste Havet, a doctor of Armenian origin, died when Aved was a child. He was brought up in Amsterdam by his step-father, a captain in the Dutch Guards. At 16 he is said to have become a pedlar or ‘camelot’ (hence the nickname given to him by his French acquaintances) travelling through the Netherlands, drawing portraits at fairs. In 1721, after spending short periods in the Amsterdam studios of the French engraver Bernard Picart and of the draughtsman François Boitard (1652–1722), he left the Netherlands to work in the Paris studio of the fashionable portrait painter Alexis-Simon Belle. At this time he met other notable painters including Carle Vanloo and the portrait painters Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Jean-Baptiste Perroneau and Jean-Etienne Liotard. He also formed a deep and lasting friendship with Jean-Siméon Chardin, with whom he may have collaborated on occasion; they used similar techniques, and he may have encouraged Chardin to turn from still-life painting to figure painting in the 1730s....

(b Sigmaringen, Nov 28, 1712; d Jan 3, 1792).

German painter . He probably trained with his stepfather, the painter Johann Joseph Veseer, and later with Franz Joseph Spiegler. In 1735 he went to Vienna, where he matriculated from the Akademie der Bildenden Künste. He possibly studied under Paul Troger and then spent some time in Augsburg. After qualifying as a master painter, von Aw settled c. 1740 in Sigmaringen, where he also held public office, being twice elected burgomaster; later he ran an inn.

Von Aw’s early frescoes and altarpieces with their gentle, bright colours and their lively compositions belong to the tradition of south German Rococo painting. He often borrowed either single figures or even whole groups of figures from other artists; thus when he painted the interior of the castle church of the Holy Trinity at Haigerloch (1748–51) he used engravings after Carlo Carlone, Johann Georg Bergmüller and Matthäus Günther; for the ceiling frescoes (...

(b Naples, 1728; d Naples, 1819).

Italian painter. His art derives from that of his teacher in Naples, Francesco de Mura, but he developed a freer and more decorative manner, influenced by Corrado Giaquinto and by the broken flickering touch of Giacomo del Pò. His early period, when he collaborated with de Mura, is represented by the ceiling painting Macro Caring for a Wounded Warrior (1750; Naples, Ospedale degli Incurabili), the Last Supper (1764; Bitonto Cathedral), derived from a prototype of de Mura’s Holy Family (version, 1775; Gravina Cathedral), and the Virgin Appearing to Pius V and Don Giovanni of Austria (1778; Naples, S Giacomo degli Spagnoli). This last work, however, is already lighter and freer than the earlier paintings, and these qualities are further developed in the ceiling painting of the Apotheosis of Ferdinand IV of Naples and Maria Carolina of Austria (1781; Naples, Pal. Regi Studi, Library). A bozzetto for this work (Cleveland, OH, Mus. A.) was formerly attributed to Giaquinto, not surprisingly, in view of the two artists’ stylistic affinity. The translucent colour and painterly refinement of the ...

(b Paris, Oct 17, 1723; d Paris, Dec 15, 1769).

French painter. A pupil of François Boucher, whose younger daughter he married in 1758, he specialized in miniatures painted in gouache, which he first exhibited at the Salon of 1761. He was received (reçu) as a member of the Académie Royale in 1763 with a small gouache of a historical subject, Phryne Accused of Impiety before the Areopagite (Paris, Louvre), and he later painted illustrations of biblical episodes. However, he made his name as a painter of libertine scenes in contemporary settings, which he exhibited regularly at the Salon from 1763 until 1769. Some of his work is directly inspired by Boucher’s scenes of pastoral love, but the ostensibly moral themes and careful attention to detail of such paintings as the Modest Model (exh. Salon 1769; Washington, DC, N.G.A.) demonstrate that he was also influenced by Jean-Baptiste Greuze. His pictures were condemned for their immorality, both by the Archbishop of Paris, who in ...

(b in or near Kufstein, Tyrol, ?June 16, 1712; d Augsburg, before Sept 7, 1761).

German draughtsman and painter. Kilian, his earliest biographer, stated that after training as a blacksmith with his father, he learnt the art of glass painting in Salzburg. Following travels through Austria, Hungary and Italy, Baumgartner was authorized in late 1733 to live in Augsburg, on condition that he only worked as a glass painter.

Only a few examples of Baumgartner’s own glass paintings have survived; however, he must have meanwhile worked intensively on drawings for copperplate engraving. There are hundreds of these drawings; they were made with extreme care, often on tinted paper and often on a very large scale, for publishers in Augsburg such as Klauber, Engelbrecht and Kilian. Designs in oil on canvas for engravings, such as Moses Ordering the Killing of the Midianite Women (1760; Augsburg, Schaezlerpal.), were a particular speciality of Baumgartner. By far the largest series numerically is for a calendar of saints, the ...

(b Mantua, Sept 23, 1690; d Mantua, Aug 18, 1769).

Italian painter. He was the son of the goldsmith Giovanni Bazzani and trained in the studio of Giovanni Canti (1653–1715). Giuseppe was a refined and cultivated artist (Tellini Perina, 1988) and as a young man profited from the rich collections of art in Mantua, studying the works of Andrea Mantegna, Giulio Romano, 16th-century Venetian painters, especially Paolo Veronese, and Flemish artists, above all Rubens. His earliest works, for example the Assumption (Milan, priv. col., see Caroli, pl. 20), reveal an affinity with contemporary Venetian painters such as Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Federico Bencovich and Andrea Celesti, but Bazzani rapidly absorbed the influence of Antonio Balestra, Domenico Fetti and most of all Rubens and Veronese. The inspiration of the last two artists is apparent in a number of works that may be dated in the 1720s and early 1730s. These include the Miracles of Pius V, the Conversion of a Heretic...

(b Türkheim, bapt April 15, 1688; d Augsburg, April 2, 1762).

German painter, teacher, draughtsman and printmaker. His frescoes and altarpieces and his teaching established him as the dominant figure in the art life of Augsburg in the earlier 18th century. He came from a family of well-known Swabian sculptors, cabinetmakers and painters, with whom he probably initially trained. The Bavarian Duke Maximilian Philip paid for him to study (1702–8) with the Munich court painter Johann Andreas Wolff, after which he was summoned by the Elector of the Palatinate to decorate the court church of St Hubertus in Düsseldorf (1708–9; destr.). In 1710 or 1712 Bergmüller frescoed the church of Kreuzpullach, near Wolfratshausen. In his request for permission to marry and for mastership in Augsburg in 1712, he referred to an otherwise undocumented stay in the Netherlands. He settled permanently in the Imperial Free City in 1713 and attended its Reichstädtische Kunstakademie from 1715. From this time he rose to become the most influential painter and teacher in Augsburg, with apprentices coming from beyond the city, including ...

(b Paris, Jan 1668; d Paris, April 11, 1736).

French painter and draughtsman. In 1678 he was apprenticed to Guy-Louis Vernansal (1648–1729); he later became a pupil of Jean Jouvenet and in 1684–5 of Bon Boullogne. By 1684 he was enrolled at the Académie Royale, Paris, and a year later won the Prix de Rome with his Construction of Noah’s Ark (untraced). He probably arrived in Rome towards the end of 1685, and he stayed until the winter of 1688–9. While in Italy he studied the work of Raphael and the Carracci family, as well as showing an interest in Correggio. He also led a student protest against the teaching régime of the Académie de France in Rome. After some months in Lyon he returned to Paris in 1689 and began to work on minor commissions, including drawings of the statues in the park at Versailles (Paris, Bib. N.). The influence of the Boullogne brothers is evident in his small-scale paintings of this time, such as ...

(b Ancona, c. 1710; d Bologna, Jan 2, 1777).

Italian painter and draughtsman. He was a pupil of Vittorio Bigari, whose Rococo style he reinterpreted in a highly personal manner. Bertuzzi’s work was also indebted to Luca Giordano, Antonio Gionima and Giuseppe Maria Crespi. Bertuzzi’s early paintings, which continue the traditions of Emilian art, include scenes from the Life of the Blessed Franco (1753–4; Medicina, Carmelite church) in which he collaborated with the specialist in perspective, Vincenzo del Buono (fl 1726). A theatrical brilliance also distinguishes Bertuzzi’s five standards with the Mysteries of the Passion (1753; Ancona, Gesù) and his paintings on tempera, the Crucifixion and figures of saints and popes (1750–57; Bologna, Madonna di S Luca), which suggest the inspiration of Crespi. Between 1755 and 1760 Bertuzzi frescoed the small chapel of the palazzo ‘di sopra’ at Bagnarola and executed four large decorative paintings in tempera featuring Old Testament scenes (Milan, Pal. Visconti di Modrone Erba) for the gallery. Bertuzzi’s style is distinguished by his virtuoso execution, most evident in his preparatory oil sketches; significantly, the sketches (Milan, Geri priv. col., see Roli, p. 230) for these pictures have been attributed to various 18th-century Venetian painters, whose style he clearly imitated. In the 1750s and 1760s Bertuzzi collaborated with the landscape painters ...

[Santiago]

(b Piacenza, 1705; d Madrid, 18 or Sept 20, 1759).

Italian architect, painter, urban planner and stage designer, active in Spain. He was a pupil in Piacenza of the painters Bartolomeo Rusca (1680–1745), Andrea Galluzzi (fl 1700–1743) and Giovanni Battista Galluzzi (fl c. 1730–40). In 1728 he was one of a number of artists summoned to Spain by the Marchese Annibale Scotti to assist with the construction of royal projects that were already under way and to introduce an Italian influence in place of the French style that had been introduced by the Bourbon kings. He worked at the Aranjuez Palace with the French engineer Léandre Brachelieu (fl c. 1733–9) and then in 1735 became Director of Royal Works of Decoration. He specialized in quadratura painting and, in addition to his work at Aranjuez, where his fresco vault decorations provided fictive trompe l’oeil architectural settings for mythological figures executed by Rusca and ...

(b Arcisate di Como, 1727; d Parma, Nov 4, 1792).

Italian stuccoist, printmaker, painter and collector. Before studying anything else he learned stucco decoration from his father Pietro Luigi (d 1754), who worked in Germany from 1743 until his death. Stucco work always remained Bossi’s main activity, alongside that of printmaking, especially etching. His experiments in the latter field followed in the tradition of the great Venetian printmakers. He was encouraged by Charles-François Hutin, who was in Dresden from 1753 to 1757 and whom he followed to Milan and Parma. His first etching, based on a work by Bartolomeo Nazari (1693–1758), was done in Milan in 1758. From 1759 on he was in Parma, where he produced some plates for the Iconologie tirée de divers auteurs (1759) by Jean-Baptiste Boudard, and where he executed the stucco trophy decoration for the attic of S Pietro, the construction of which began in 1761. From this date Bossi also collaborated with the designer ...

(b Paris, Sept 29, 1703; d Paris, May 30, 1770).

French painter, draughtsman and etcher. Arguably it was he, more than any other artist, who set his stamp on both the fine arts and the decorative arts of the 18th century. Facilitated by the extraordinary proliferation of engravings, Boucher successfully fed the demand for imitable imagery at a time when most of Europe sought to follow what was done at the French court and in Paris. He did so both as a prolific painter and draughtsman (he claimed to have produced some 10,000 drawings during his career) and through engravings after his works, the commercial potential of which he seems to have been one of the first artists to exploit. He reinvented the genre of the pastoral, creating an imagery of shepherds and shepherdesses as sentimental lovers that was taken up in every medium, from porcelain to toile de Jouy, and that still survives in a debased form. At the same time, his manner of painting introduced the virtuosity and freedom of the sketch into the finished work, promoting painterliness as an end in itself. This approach dominated French painting until the emergence of Neo-classicism, when criticism was heaped on Boucher and his followers. His work never wholly escaped this condemnation, even after the taste for French 18th-century art started to revive in the second half of the 19th century. In his own day, the fact that he worked for both collectors and the market, while retaining the prestige of a history painter, had been both Boucher’s strength and a cause of his decline....

[Hülfgott]

(b Frankfurt an der Oder, March 16, 1694; d Vienna, July 22, 1756).

Austrian painter. He attended school in Hamburg but later lived in Regensburg, where his acquaintance with Christoph Ludwig Agricola led him to take up landscape painting. About 1720 he went to Vienna. From 1726 to 1728 Brand studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna, was elected as one of its first honorary members in 1751 and became an academic advisor in 1754. In 1738 Brand is mentioned as an imperial court painter, a position he held for the rest of his life.

Brand belongs to a group of minor Austrian painters of cabinet pictures that included Karl Aigen (1684–1762), Josef Orient (1677–1747), Franz de Paula Ferg, Franz Christoph Janneck and his son Johann Christian Brand, and his work is not always easily distinguishable from theirs. Brand’s earliest works, such as Landscape with Trees, a Village and Peasants (Prague, N.G., Šternberk Pal.), have dark tonalities, which later become brighter, reflecting the influence of the Rococo, as in ...

(b Stockholm, Aug 16, 1759; d Stockholm, Dec 1, 1818).

Swedish painter, also active in England. He studied at the Kungliga Akademi för de Fria Konsterna in Stockholm from the late 1770s until 1787, when he painted King Gustav III in the prevailing Rococo style. Later that year he visited England, France and Italy, discovering the emergent Neo-classical style as well as the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance. He then settled in London, working briefly in the studio of Joshua Reynolds, whose portrait he painted (1791; Stockholm, Ksthögskolan). Breda specialized in portrait painting and from 1788 exhibited annually at the Royal Academy in London. His style was eclectic, displaying the influence of such contemporaries as Reynolds and Gainsborough, as well as the Italian and Dutch Baroque masters, particularly Rembrandt.

Breda visited Birmingham during the early 1790s, painting portraits of several members of the Lunar Society, including James Watt (1792; London, N.P.G.). In 1795 he visited Paris; on his return to Stockholm the following year he immediately became a sought-after portrait painter and was made a professor at the academy that same year. The nascent Romanticism that can be seen in some of his London portraits developed steadily in the works painted during his later career in Stockholm. He was knighted in ...

(b Rolle, Vaud, Oct 3, 1758; d Paris, Oct 9, 1815).

Swiss painter. He came of a prosperous Huguenot family and trained to be a merchant before deciding to become an artist. His first tutor was Nicolas Henri Joseph Fassin, who was staying in Geneva at the time; under his guidance, Brun made copies of Flemish masters. In Geneva he became friendly with Pierre-Louis De La Rive, worked in his Geneva studio and accompanied him on a journey to Mannheim and Dresden. In his own painting Brun soon specialized in charming hunting scenes with Rococo overtones in the style of Philips Wouwerman. In 1779 he set out on an Italian journey that lasted several years. In 1783 he travelled from Turin to Paris, where his hunting scenes soon became very popular with the French court: he painted portraits of Marie-Antoinette Hunting and Louis XVI Hunting. He became a member of the Académie Royale in Paris in 1788 but in 1792 fled from the French Revolution to his homeland; there he took part in the Vaudois independence movement. He was burgomaster of Versoix from ...