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(b Paris, Sept 24, 1796; d Paris, June 25, 1875).

French sculptor, painter and printmaker. Barye was a realist who dared to present romantically humanized animals as the protagonists of his sculpture. Although he was a successful monumental sculptor, he also created a considerable body of small-scale works and often made multiple casts of his small bronze designs, marketing them for a middle-class public through a partnership, Barye & Cie. His interest in animal subjects is also reflected in his many watercolours. He thus challenged several fundamental values of the Parisian art world: the entrenched notion of a hierarchy of subject-matter in art, wherein animals ranked very low; the view that small-scale sculpture was intrinsically inferior to life-size or monumental work; and the idea that only a unique example of a sculptor’s design could embody the highest level of his vision and craft. As a result of his Romantic notion of sculpture, he won few monumental commissions and endured near poverty for many years....

(b Bordeaux, Jan 30, 1782; d Paris, Feb 21, 1863).

French painter, printmaker and designer. He first trained with Pierre Lacour the elder (1745–1814) in Bordeaux and on going to Paris studied with François André Vincent and then Jacques-Louis David. While a pupil of David, he became friendly with both François-Marius Granet and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Bergeret played a major role in introducing lithography into France, with prints after Poussin and Raphael: his lithograph Mercury (1804), after Raphael’s fresco in the Villa Farnesina, Rome, was one of the earliest examples of the technique. He also contributed greatly to Napoleonic propaganda by designing medals, extravagant pieces of Sèvres porcelain and, most important, the decoration of the Vendôme Column (1806–11; Paris, Place Vendôme) to satisfy Napoleon’s desire for a copy in Paris of Trajan’s Column in Rome. Bergeret was responsible for designing the bas-reliefs on the Vendôme Column, which record the campaigns of 1805 and 1806 (Austerlitz) in the way that those on Trajan’s Column record the Dacian Wars. It was destroyed in ...

(b London, Nov 28, 1757; d London, Aug 12, 1827).

English printmaker, painter and poet. His reputation as a visual artist increased during the 20th century to the extent that his art is as well known as his poetry (see fig.). Yet in his own mind Blake never completely separated the two, and his most original work is to be found in hand-printed books of prophecy, which developed a personal mythology of limitless intellectual ambition. In these books, text and design are completely integrated in what he called ‘illuminated’ printing. He also made many pen and watercolour drawings, prints in various media and a small number of tempera paintings, but even in these his broader aims were primarily theological and philosophical: he saw the arts in all their forms as offering insights into the metaphysical world and therefore potentially redemptive of a humanity he believed to have fallen into materialism and doubt.

French, 19th century, male.

Born 1810, in Paris; died 1870, in Châtenay.

Engraver, dramatist.

A true romantic, Joseph Bouchardy called himself: Bouchardy Saltpetre Heart ( Bouchardy Cœur de salpêtre). He engraved several plates after Géricault, Paul Delaroche and Lorentz.

Russian, 19th century, male.

Born 1801, in Milan, Italy; died 1875, in St Petersburg.

Draftsman, painter, engraver, etcher. Historical subjects, religious subjects.

Active in Rome 1819–1841.

Born in Milan, Fedor Bruni moved to Russia with his family in 1808, where his father worked as a decorative artist at Tsarskoe Selo. The next year he began studying at the school of the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg, where he studied alongside Karl Briullov and Aleksandr Ivanov with the leading teachers Aleksei Egorov, Vasilii Shebuev, and Andrei Ivanov. After ranking second in the Academy’s gold medal competition in ...

[Fidelio] (Antonovich)

(b Milan, Dec 15, 1801; d St Petersburg, Sept 11, 1875).

Russian painter, etcher, teacher and museum director of Italian birth. He was the son of the Swiss artist Antonio Baroffi Bruni (1767–1825), who moved to Russia with his family in 1807, taking the name Anton Osipovich Bruni. In 1809 he became a pupil at the St Petersburg Academy of Arts, where he studied under Aleksey Yegorov (1776–1851), Andrey Ivanov (1776–1848) and Vasily Shebuyev and graduated in 1818. Between 1819 and 1836 he lived in Italy, principally in Rome, where he perfected his skills by copying works by the Old Masters. He also painted portraits in order to earn a living. In his best-known portrait of this time, Princess Zinaida Volkonskaya in the Costume of Tancred (c. 1820; St Petersburg, Rus. Mus.), the sitter’s fantastical, theatrical knight’s costume and her expression of heartfelt languor and radiant sadness are characteristic of Romantic portraiture. In 1824...

(b Madrid, 1823; d 1897).

Spanish painter, watercolourist and illustrator. He trained at the Escuela de Nobles Artes in Seville (1833–40) and subsequently at the Real Academia de S Fernando in Madrid. He became a member of the Academia de S Isabel de Hungria of Seville in 1848, where he taught from 1859 and reformed the teaching of art. His early work shows traces of Neo-classicism, although his art is essentially based on Romanticism. Between 1851 and 1861 he concentrated on portrait painting, depicting mainly female subjects or children; examples include Youth with a Dog (Seville, Neana Col.), Self-portrait (Seville, Mus. B.A.) and Josefa Garvey (Seville, priv. col.). He was an important link between Romanticism and Realism and stimulated a renewed interest in history painting in Spain, a genre he established at the Exposición Nacional in 1856 with his painting Christopher Columbus in the Convent of La Rábida (Madrid, Pal. de las Cortes), which was awarded first prize. He won the same prize in ...

(b Valletta, Jan 4, 1793; d Valletta, April 23, 1852).

Maltese painter and lithographer. He was the most significant Maltese disciple of Tommaso Minardi, whom he met and befriended while studying in Rome at the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca. In Malta he established himself as one of the leading artists of his generation and received prestigious commissions from both the Church and the British administration. He also produced prints intended for the tourist market and was the first Maltese to own a lithographic press. In 1831 he was appointed Professor of Drawing in the School of Design at the University of Malta, in Msida. His works are uneven in quality but they share a common indebtedness to the ideals of Minardi’s Purismo, to which he remained faithful all his life. His major painting, the Visitation of the Virgin (Valletta, Portosalvo Church), demonstrates his admiration for the Renaissance, but he was also influenced by such Neo-classical artists as David, to whom he paid tribute in his large canvases with episodes from the life of St George, ...

(b El Limón, nr Samaná [now in the Dominican Republic], Sept 20, 1819; d Paris, Oct 8, 1856).

French painter and printmaker (see fig.). In 1822 Chassériau moved with his family to Paris, where he received a bourgeois upbringing under the supervision of an older brother. A precociously gifted draughtsman, he entered Ingres’s studio at the age of 11 and remained there until Ingres left to head the Académie de France in Rome in 1834. He made his Salon début in 1836 with several portraits and religious subjects, including Cain Accursed (Paris, priv. col.), for which he received a third-class medal. Among his many submissions in subsequent years were Susanna Bathing (1839, exh. Salon 1839; Paris, Louvre), a Marine Venus (1838; exh. Salon 1839; Paris, Louvre) and the Toilet of Esther (1841, exh. Salon 1842; Paris, Louvre); these three paintings of nude female figures combine an idealization derived from Ingres with a sensuality characteristic of Chassériau.

By 1840–41, when Chassériau rejoined Ingres in Rome, he had begun to turn away from his teacher’s linear stylization. He became increasingly critical of the academic curriculum and passed his time making sketches of the Italian countryside and studying Renaissance frescoes, which later influenced his approach to painting monumental decorations. His best easel paintings of the early 1840s, the portraits of the Dominican friar ...

(b Paris, July 17, 1796; d Paris, Feb 22, 1875).

French painter, draughtsman and printmaker.

After a classical education at the Collège de Rouen, where he did not distinguish himself, and an unsuccessful apprenticeship with two drapers, Corot was allowed to devote himself to painting at the age of 26. He was given some money that had been intended for his sister, who had died in 1821, and this, together with what we must assume was his family’s continued generosity, freed him from financial worries and from having to sell his paintings to earn a living. Corot chose to follow a modified academic course of training. He did not enrol in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts but studied instead with Achille Etna Michallon and, after Michallon’s death in 1822, with Jean-Victor Bertin. Both had been pupils of Pierre-Henri Valenciennes, and, although in later years Corot denied that he had learnt anything of value from his teachers, his career as a whole shows his attachment to the principles of historic landscape painting which they professed....

(b Norwich, May 16, 1782; d London, July 24, 1842).

English painter and etcher.

Cotman was born in the parish of St Mary Coslany, Norwich, the son of Edmund Cotman, a hairdresser, later a haberdasher, and Ann Sell. In 1793 he entered Norwich Grammar School as a ‘freeplacer’. In 1798 he moved to London, where he worked as an assistant to the publisher Rudolph Ackermann. Following in the footsteps of Turner and Thomas Girtin he joined Dr Monro’s ‘Academy’ in 1799 and became a member of the sketching society that had developed around the personality and talent of Girtin. He exhibited at the Royal Academy for the first time in 1800, when he was awarded the large silver palette by the Society of Arts.

Between 1800 and 1805 Cotman embarked on a number of sketching tours that were to have a dramatic effect on his artistic development. In 1800 and 1802 he travelled to Wales in search of the picturesque and saw the castles and mountainous terrain that were to fire his imagination for the rest of his life. On his second trip Cotman was probably accompanied by Paul Sandby Munn (...

(b Bordeaux, July 16, 1804; d Paris, Feb 18, 1868).

French painter, illustrator and writer. His early training was as a theatrical scene painter and a designer of lithographic illustrations. In Bordeaux he studied with Pierre Lacour (ii) (1778–1859) and worked with Thomas Olivier (1772–1839), chief scene designer at the Grand-Théâtre. He subsequently studied in Paris in the studio of the landscape and history painter Julien-Michel Gué (1789–1843) and worked for the decorators of the Théâtre Italien.

From 1827 Dauzats provided lithographic designs for Isidore-Justin-Séverin Taylor’s series Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France (1820–78). He travelled in the French provinces, particularly Champagne, Dauphiné and Languedoc, often sketching the medieval monuments that had come into vogue during the Romantic period.

Dauzats also collaborated on lithographs for many other publications, including Taylor’s Voyage en Orient. For this last project Dauzats travelled to Egypt, Syria, Palestine and Turkey in 1830, a trip that he described in his book ...

(b Paris, May 3, 1803; d Fontainebleau, Aug 23, 1860).

French painter, draughtsman and printmaker. With his brother Maurice-Alexandre (1804–52), the art critic and essayist, he spent some years of his youth at Orsay, in Picardy, ‘in order to learn to rise early and know the hard life of the fields’. The artwork of the peasants stimulated an interest in drawing. He entered the atelier of Etienne Bouhot (1780–1862) in 1816. Towards the end of 1818 he left Bouhot to study under Alexandre-Denis Abel de Pujol, quitting his studio in 1819–20 in order to embark upon a career as an independent professional artist. He had been an inattentive student, who thought that ‘the formula of instruction of the academic doctrine reduced the least examination almost to the proportions of silliness’. Memories of Orsay remained his point of departure throughout his working life, and in this sense he was a self-trained artist. Nevertheless, he admired, and learnt from, the art of such diverse artists as Raphael, Titian, Giovanni da Bologna, Poussin, Rembrandt, Géricault and Léopold Robert....

(b Charenton-Saint-Maurice, nr Paris, April 26, 1798; d Paris, Aug 13, 1863).

French painter, draughtsman and lithographer. He was one of the greatest painters of the first half of the 19th century, the last history painter in Europe (see History painting, §II) and the embodiment of Romanticism in the visual arts. At the heart of Delacroix’s career is the paradox between the revolutionary and the conventional: as the arch-enemy of Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique and as the leading figure of the French Romantic movement, he was celebrated for undermining the tradition of painting established by David, Jacques-Louis, yet he nevertheless enjoyed official patronage from the beginning of the Restoration (1814–30) until the Second Empire (1852–70).

Delacroix disliked the 19th century, hated progress, was conservative in his tastes and manners, but—for Baudelaire, at least—was the most modern of artists, resembling the great painters of the First Republic (1792–1804) and the First Empire (1804–14) in his wish to rival the written word. His subjects, like those of David, were serious and historical, but he replaced the Stoic ideal with one equally grand and dramatic, yet lacking any kind of moral or political certainty. Nevertheless, he was the last representative of the ...

(b Paris, March 20, 1808; d Chaville, Seine-et-Oise, July 14, 1888).

French sculptor, painter, etcher, architect and writer. The son of a decorative sculptor, he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, in 1824 as a pupil of Charles Dupaty (1771–1825), moving in 1825 to the studio of James Pradier. Ingres also took an interest in his education, and Etex’s gratitude towards him and Pradier was later expressed in projects for monuments to them (that to Pradier not executed, that in bronze to Ingres erected Montauban, Promenade des Carmes, 1868–71).

Etex failed three times to win the Prix de Rome, but in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1830 his Republican sympathies gained him a government scholarship that enabled him to spend two years in Rome. There he sculpted the intensely tragic group Cain and his Children Cursed by God, the plaster version of which (Paris, Hôp. Salpêtrière) was one of the great successes of the 1833 Paris Salon. During this period Etex asserted the Republican views that were to earn him the distrust of many of his fellow artists and of the establishment but also gain him the support of the influential critic and politician Adolphe Thiers. He behaved in Romantic fashion as a misunderstood artist, but nevertheless displayed a remarkable tenacity in forwarding his pet projects, including, for instance, schemes for sculptures representing ...

(Edolf)

(b Stockholm, Dec 22, 1868; d Arvika, July 7, 1948).

Swedish painter, printmaker and designer. He trained at the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm in 1891–2. Subsequently he studied with Bruno Liljefors and Carl Larsson, assisting them with such decorative schemes as Larsson’s fresco at the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (1896). In 1897 he moved to the Arvika district of Värmland, where he worked together with his wife, Maja (1873–1961), as painter, craftsman and cabinetmaker, and gathered around him a circle of artists who became known as the Racken group. He first achieved public recognition at the Stockholm Artists Union exhibition in 1898 with some of his snow landscapes, which were an immediate popular success and were often reproduced. He had his first one-man exhibition in Stockholm in 1908, and his paintings were well received when exhibited in Berlin in 1914 and in London in 1927.

Fjaestad’s speciality was the winter landscape. The approach he adopted in such early works as ...

(b Greifswald, Sept 5, 1774; d Dresden, May 7, 1840).

German painter, draughtsman, and printmaker. Along with Phillip Otto Runge, he was the leading artist of the German Romantic movement, notable especially for his symbolic and atmospheric treatment of landscape (see fig.).

After receiving a general education with a private tutor, Friedrich studied drawing and etching from 1790 to 1794 with Johann Gottfried Quistorp (1755–1835), drawing teacher at the university in Greifswald. From 1794 until 1798 he studied at the Akademi for de Skønne Kunster in Copenhagen, where his most important teachers were Nicolai Abraham Abildgaard, Jens Juel, Christian August Lorentzen (1749–1828), and Johannes Wiedewelt (1759–1802). The influence of Danish painting, especially that of Juel and Abildgaard, was strong and is evident even in his later years; Juel’s landscapes were notable for their clarity of composition and Abildgaard encouraged Friedrich’s enthusiasm for the mythology and history of the Scandinavian and Germanic peoples. Friedrich swiftly developed a confident and disciplined manner, as seen in the pen-and-wash drawing ...

(b Kratzau, N. Bohemia, Feb 9, 1800; d Vienna, March 13, 1876).

Bohemian painter, printmaker and teacher. Until he was 18 he was trained by his father, Wenzel Führich, a painter and mason. In 1819, at the academy exhibition in Prague, he made his début with two history paintings. Their success enabled him to study in Prague. Dürer was the first powerful influence on his style; on a visit to Vienna in 1822, medieval and Renaissance art made a similar impression. His illustrations for Ludwig Tieck’s Leben und Tod der heiligen Genoveva (1824–5) attracted the interest of Prince Metternich, who helped him obtain a scholarship to study in Italy. On his arrival in Rome in 1827, Führich made contact with Friedrich Overbeck and other German artists there. He met Joseph Anton Koch (1768–1839) and was commissioned to complete the Tasso room (1827–9) in the Casino Massimo. In Rome he was impressed by Italian Renaissance works, particularly Raphael’s frescoes in the Vatican. On the return journey to Vienna, he admired Fra Angelico’s paintings and the frescoes in the Camposanto in Pisa. After a period in Prague, Führich obtained a teaching post in Vienna in ...

(Valdemar) [Gallén, Axel until 1904]

(b Pori [Swed. Björneborg], Finland, April 26, 1865; d Stockholm, March 7, 1931).

Finnish painter, graphic artist and designer. He learnt the elements of drawing and painting in Helsinki at the School of the Finnish Arts Society and the studio of the painter Adolf von Becker (1831–1909).

His first significant painting, The Boy and the Crow (1884; Helsinki, Athenaeum A. Mus.), shows his ambition to keep abreast of developments in Naturalism, a style introduced to him through the works of young Finnish and Scandinavian painters in Paris. In the autumn of 1884 he arrived in Paris, where he attended the Académie Julian and the studio of Fernand Cormon. In 1885 he completed his oil painting Old Woman with a Cat (Turku, A. Mus.), a veristic study of poverty and deprivation. Gallén’s single-figure compositions of this period followed a formula exploited by Jean-François Millet, Jules Breton and Jules Bastien-Lepage. In these seemingly static images, the life story of the protagonist was suggested through significant attributes, physiognomic elaboration and background details....

(b Paris, 1561; d Paris, c. 1635).

French engraver, draughtsman, print publisher and dealer. He was the son of the goldsmith Pierre Gaultier, but probably not, as has been stated, the son-in-law of Antoine Caron and brother-in-law of Thomas de Leu. His first dated engravings (1576; Linzeler, 13–120) form part of a suite of 108 plates illustrating the New Testament. He was a very prolific engraver—his output reached at least 985 prints—and treated various genres, producing religious engravings, allegories, coats of arms and above all portraits and book illustrations. Although he copied the suite of engravings by Agostino dei Musi and B. Daddi after Raphael’s fresco cycle the Loves of Cupid and Psyche in the Farnesina, Rome (l 163–95), most of his work was from his own drawings. His work was published by a number of print publishers: Pierre Gourdelle (fl 1555–88) and, in 1591, by his wife (e.g. the Salvator Mundi, l...