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Article

(b Cologne, 1552; d Prague, March 4, 1615).

German painter and draughtsman, active also in Italy and Bohemia. One of the foremost painters of the circle gathered at the Prague court of Emperor Rudolf II (see Habsburg, House of family, §I, (10)), he synthesized Italian and Netherlandish influences in his portraits and erudite allegories.

Hans’s surname is derived from his father’s native town. According to Karel van Mander, he probably studied c. 1567–73 with the portrait painter Georg Jerrigh, who had trained in Antwerp. Von Aachen subsequently became a member of the Cologne guild of painters. He travelled to Italy c. 1574, first working in Venice as a copyist and for the painter Gaspar Rem (1542–1615/17), before going in 1575 to Rome, where he copied antique sculptures and the works of Italian masters; he also painted an Adoration of the Shepherds for the church of Il Gesù in Rome (1580s; untraced, but known from an engraving (...

Article

(b Holywood, County Down, Ireland, Jan 26, 1922).

Australian painter, printmaker, book designer, lecturer, collector, gallery director and publisher of limited edition artists’ books, of Irish decent. He worked as a draughtsman before entering war service in the British Admiralty from 1940 to 1949, including five years in Colombo, where he made sketching trips to jungle temples with the Buddhist monk and artist Manjsiro Thero. Between 1949 and 1951 Adams worked as an exhibition designer in London and studied wood-engraving with Gertrude Hermes in her evening class at the Central School of Arts and Crafts (now Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design). In 1951, after moving to Melbourne, Adams began a 30-year teaching commitment at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), where he instructed many of the younger generation of Australian printmakers, including George Baldessin and Jan Senbergs. A brief return to Britain and Ireland in 1957–8 provided experience with Dolmen Press, Dublin, which published his first book of engravings, ...

Article

Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom

[‛Alī Wijdān; Wijdan]

(b Baghdad, Aug 29, 1939).

Jordanian painter and art patron. She studied history at Beirut University College (formerly Beirut College for Women), receiving a BA in 1961. In 1993 she took a PhD in Islamic Art at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. After serving in the Jordanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and representing her country at United Nations meetings in Geneva and New York, Ali founded the Royal Society of Fine Arts in Jordan in 1979 and the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts in 1980 (see Jordan, Hashemite Kingdom of). In 1988 she organized in Amman the Third International Seminar on Islamic Art, entitled ‘Problems of Art Education in the Islamic World’, and in 1989 she organized the exhibition Contemporary Art from the Islamic World at the Barbican Centre, London. In 2001 she founded the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Jordan, and has received numerous awards in recognition of her work in the arts....

Article

Thorsten Opper

Source of a group of Roman and Greek works of art, in particular a group of Greek bronze sculptures and statuettes. In 1900 sponge-divers discovered the remains of an ancient shipwreck in the sea off the Greek island of Antikythera. In one of the first operations of this kind, they salvaged some its cargo. A new investigation of the wreck site took place in 1976 and succeeded in recovering many further objects, as well as (still unpublished) remains of the hull. All the finds are now in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. The ship, which must have foundered in the second quarter of the 1st century bc, carried a mixed cargo of ‘antique’ and contemporary bronze and marble statuary, as well as luxury products such as bronze furniture attachments, rare and expensive types of glass, gold ingots etc. It also contained the so-called Antikythera Mechanism, an elaborate type of astrolabe....

Article

Vincent Lieber

(b Geneva, May 18, 1668; d Geneva, May 25, 1743).

Swiss miniature painter and collector, active in France. He is said to have shown precocious signs of great talent. In 1688 he established himself in Paris as a miniature painter; his talent secured him the protection of such patrons as Philippe II, Duc d’Orléans and later Regent of France, and his mother, Elisabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d’Orléans. Arlaud advised the Duc d’Orléans on the purchase of paintings from the collection of Christina, Queen of Sweden. Later, he himself acquired various works of considerable quality, eventually building up an interesting collection. As he was in contact with Hyacinthe Rigaud and Nicolas de Largillierre, his style naturally reflected their manner, as well as the prevailing taste. He generally executed miniatures in gouache, such as Madame de la Baume (Geneva, Mus. Horlogerie & Emaillerie), sometimes adding highlights in pastels, as in the case of his Self-portrait (1727; Florence, Uffizi). This technique, which was a novelty when Arlaud adopted it, has unfortunately aged badly, and the effect achieved, which was much appreciated at the time, has since become blurred. Arlaud was received at the English court in ...

Article

French, 19th century, male.

Born 1798, in Paris.

Painter, picture dealer. Panoramas.

Charles Arrowsmith studied with Daguerre and painted dioramas alongside him. He exhibited in Paris in 1827, in Douai in 1829, and at the Royal Academy in London in 1830. He was responsible for promoting English watercolourists and introducing them and also Constable to a broader public in France....

Article

(bapt Brussels, Oct 12, 1613; d between 26 April and June 17, 1686).

Flemish painter, draughtsman and collector . He was apprenticed to Jan Mertens on 11 January 1625 and became a master in the Brussels painters’ guild on 3 May 1634. On 10 July 1636 he married Marie Sampels, who bore him eight children. Besides his son Jan Baptist d’Arthois (b 1638) and his brother Nicolaes d’Arthois (b 1617), Jacques had six pupils; one of them, Cornelis van Empel, came from Mechelen, indicating that d’Arthois’s fame extended beyond his native city. He was made chartered tapestry cartoon designer of the city of Brussels in 1655. At the time of his death he owned several houses and a substantial paintings collection, though an expansive lifestyle had left him severely in debt.

D’Arthois, the leading figure of the Brussels landscape school of the second half of the 17th century, is best known as the painter of the Forêt de Soignes, where one of his houses was located. His painted and drawn landscapes, with their bushes, ponds, hollow paths, clay banks and sandy hills, are dominated by tall trees crowned with luxuriant foliage (e.g. ...

Article

Dieuwertje Dekkers

(Constant)

(b The Hague, Dec 18, 1837; d The Hague, Nov 5, 1890).

Dutch painter and collector. From 1855 to 1864 he trained with Johannes Egenberger (1822–97) and Louis Royer (1793–1868) at the Amsterdam Academie. There he met Jozef Israëls, whose fishing subjects were to be a lasting source of inspiration for Artz. Unlike Israëls, however, Artz depicted only the more cheerful sides of the fisherman’s life. Technically, he distinguished himself from Israëls in his use of sharp outlines and bright colour. Between 1866 and 1874 Artz stayed in Paris where he set up his own studio at the suggestion of Courbet. Here he maintained close contacts with his colleagues Jacob Maris and Frederik Kaemmerer (1839–1902) as well as the art dealer Goupil & Co. During this period Artz produced mainly fashionable genre scenes and a number of Japanese subjects. His control over line and colour became more powerful.

In 1874 Artz moved permanently to The Hague where he took up the fisherman genre again. In the early 1880s he established his reputation definitively with such works as ...

Article

Debra Higgs Strickland

Richly illustrated bestiary manuscript (275×185mm, 105 fols; Oxford, Bodleian Lib., Ashmole 1511), written in Latin and illuminated probably in southern England around 1210. The original patron is unknown. It contains the text and illustrations of a complete bestiary, with prefatory Creation scenes and excerpts from Genesis and part of Hugh de Folieto’s Aviarium (Book of Birds). It is a luxury manuscript with lavish use of gold leaf, sometimes tooled, in the backgrounds of the full-page miniatures and numerous smaller framed animal ‘portraits’. Its images are especially notable for their ornamental qualities, evident in both the pictorial compositions and a wide variety of geometric framing devices. The prefatory cycle includes a full-page miniature of Adam Naming the Animals. The Ashmole Bestiary is considered a ‘sister’ manuscript to the Aberdeen Bestiary (Aberdeen, U. Lib., MS. 24), to which it is iconographically very closely related, but owing to major stylistic differences the two manuscripts have been attributed to different artists. The chronological relationship between the two has been disputed: based on proposed workshop methods, Muratova (...

Article

Sophie Page

Astrology is the art of predicting events on earth as well as human character and disposition from the movements of the planets and fixed stars. Medieval astrology encompassed both general concepts of celestial influence, and the technical art of making predictions with horoscopes, symbolic maps of the heavens at particular moments and places constructed from astronomical information. The scientific foundations of the art were developed in ancient Greece, largely lost in early medieval Europe and recovered by the Latin West from Arabic sources in the 12th and 13th centuries. Late medieval astrological images were successfully Christianized and were adapted to particular contexts, acquired local meanings and changed over time.

Astrology developed into a scientific branch of learning in ancient Greece, but because of the opposition of the Church Fathers it was transmitted to early medieval Europe in only fragmentary form in technically unsophisticated textbooks and popular divinatory genres. Literary and scientific texts provided more general ideas about the nature and attributes of the planets which were influential on later iconography. The first significant astrological images appear in 11th-century illustrated astronomical texts (e.g. London, BL, Cotton MS. Tiberius BV), which were acquired and produced by monasteries to aid with time-keeping and the construction of the Christian calendar....

Article

Michelle Lespes

[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....

Article

Laura Mattioli Rossi

Italian family of artists, architects and collectors . Pietro Bagatti Valsecchi (b Milan, 15 April 1802; d Milan, 27 Nov 1864) was adopted by Baron Lattanzio Valsecchi and assumed the latter’s surname and inherited his estate. He gained a degree in mathematics and physics but later devoted himself to painting miniatures on ivory, enamel, glass, metal and porcelain, specializing in these techniques in Paris and Geneva. Returning to Milan, he soon gained considerable recognition for such work and took part in major exhibitions. In 1837 he presented a group of works at the Salon in Paris, including a miniature copy on ivory of Francesco Hayez’s Mary Queen of Scots Mounting the Scaffold (1827; Milan, Bagatti Valsecchi Col.) and a copy on porcelain of Francesco Podesti’s Raphael’s Studio (Milan, Bib. Ambrosiana). In 1842 he was made a noble of the Austrian Empire for his artistic achievements, and the Emperor Ferdinand acquired one of his paintings on porcelain, ...

Article

Lynn Catterson

(b Pieve Santo Stefano, nr. Arezzo, Apr 13, 1836; d Sept 12, 1922).

Italian painter and dealer. Trained as a painter, Stefano Bardini began dealing art in the 1860s, building a business network across Europe and in America. Based in Florence, he specialized in Renaissance art, furnishings, and architectural elements and was responsible for the sale of some of the most important works in collections around the world. Bardini’s clients numbered in the many hundreds and included the German museum agent Wilhelm Bode and John II, Prince of Liechtenstein (reg 1858–1929), the collectors Nélie Jacquemart and her husband Edouard André in Paris, and the American architect and decorator Stanford White.

From 1855 to 1859, during the years leading up to Firenze Capitale, when Florence would be appointed capitol of the newly unified kingdom, Bardini trained as a painter at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence. In the years immediately following, he produced few paintings, evidently because he shifted very quickly to a lifelong career of dealing art. His first documented commercial transaction occurred already in 1866, when he was actively selling paintings—certainly copies made of masterworks in the Uffizi and Palazzo Pitti executed by Florentine painter colleagues. Though his activity as a dealer was likely first conducted in Paris, by 1870 he had begun what would very soon become a flourishing business internationally transacting in fine and decorative art, including frescoes removed from their walls, sculpture in every medium, paintings, maiolica, arms and armor, wooden painted ceilings, furniture, embossed gilded leather to serve as wallpaper and furniture upholstery, architectural fittings such as mantelpieces, as well as carpets and tapestries. Bardini’s social and professional network was as intricate as it was vast; tiny address books dated ...

Article

David Blayney Brown

(Howland)

(b Great Dunmow, Essex, Nov 6, 1753; d Coleorton, Leics, Feb 7, 1827).

Amateur painter and draughtsman, collector and patron. He was the quintessential amateur, whose interests extended to literature and drama as well as to art; he became the leading arbiter of taste of his day. The painter Thomas Hearne described him as the ‘supreme dictator on works of art’. While Beaumont strongly supported new trends in poetry and did much to foster the careers of William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge, he maintained essentially 18th-century standards in his connoisseurship. His love of art had begun at Eton College, where he was taught drawing by Alexander Cozens; it was confirmed in 1771 by a meeting with the engraver William Woollett and Hearne, then Woollett’s pupil. Subsequently Beaumont was guided by a succession of distinguished artists including John Robert Cozens, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Richard Wilson, Thomas Jones, Joseph Farington, Benjamin West, Thomas Girtin and John Constable. His own work, of which there is a large collection in the ...

Article

José Luis Morales y Marín

(de)

(b Madrid, Sept 27, 1845; d Madrid, Jan 5, 1912).

Spanish writer, painter and collector. After pursuing a political career and taking a doctorate in civil and canon law, he dedicated himself to writing on art and produced important studies on Diego Velázquez (1898), Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1901) and other artists. He travelled extensively and enthusiastically in Europe (France, Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, England and elsewhere), studying especially the different national schools of painting. On his travels he also painted landscapes. After working for some time as a copyist in the Museo del Prado, Beruete decided in 1873 to concentrate his efforts on painting and on learning to perfect his craft. He enrolled at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de S Fernando in Madrid and also studied at the studio of Carlos de Haes. Beruete was among the founders of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, and with its members, and with Carlos de Haes, he made several study trips abroad. In Paris he came to know the painting of the Barbizon school, and in Belgium he assimilated the teaching of the generation of landscape artists who had adopted a form of Realism. The fundamental constants of the Spanish pictorial tradition, however, especially the sketching style typical of Velázquez and Francisco de Goya, became the starting-point for Beruete’s own style, enabling him to record his response to landscape, impressions of light and rural settings. Beruete’s achievement was acknowledged by various national and international awards....

Article

Alain Jacobs

(b Antwerp, bapt Nov 20, 1708; d Antwerp, April 17, 1776).

Flemish painter and art dealer. Beschey was taught by Peter Strick; he joined the Guild of St Luke in Antwerp in 1753 and was elected its dean for the financial year 1755–6. In 1754 he was made director of the Antwerp academy, which then had no fewer than five of the Beschey family among its members. Using his influential position at the academy, Beschey sought to revive traditional practices through the study of Rubens. Among his pupils were Pierre Joseph Verhagen, Guillaume-Jacques Herreyns and Andries Cornelis Lens.

The market for Old Master and contemporary paintings was flourishing at this time, and a considerable part of Beschey’s production consisted of pastiches and copies on copper of works by David Teniers II, Jan Breughel I, Frederik de Moucheron and Rubens. Beschey also acted as a dealer, and his house became a meeting-place where art-lovers and artists could study the work of earlier Flemish and Dutch masters....

Article

Swiss, 17th – 18th century, male.

Born 1664 or 1673, in Augsburg; died 1758 or 1766, in Augsburg.

Draughtsman, engraver, picture dealer. Historical subjects, figures, landscapes.

Gabriel Bodenehr the Elder painted historical figures and views, some of which were collected under the title: The Glory and Might of Europe...

Article

Jeremy Howard

(Petrovich)

(b Pomeran’ye, nr Novgorod, March 28, 1824; d Paris, Nov 7, 1896).

Russian painter, collector and teacher. He was the foremost marine painter of the Realist group of Russian artists, the Wanderers, and his work shows the influence of Ivan Ayvazovsky. A graduate of the Russian Navy School, Bogolyubov began to serve in the Russian fleet in 1839, where his outstanding ability at drawing attracted attention. He studied at the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg (1850–53) under Maksim Vorob’yov (1787–1855) and Bogdan Villeval’de (1819–1903). In 1853 he was appointed artist to the Naval General Staff and began to work on sea-battle scenes (including, from 1856 to 1860, depictions of events in the Crimean War). He received stipends from the Academy for study abroad between 1854 and 1860 and worked in Turkey, Greece, Italy, Holland, France and Germany. During this period he worked in Eugène Isabey’s studio in Paris, where he was influenced by the Barbizon school, and in the studio of ...

Article

Lucy Freeman Sandler

Group of twelve manuscripts, primarily Psalter and Book of Hours, nearly all illustrated by in-house artists for members of the Bohun family in the second half of the 14th century. The owner–patrons were the successive earls of Essex, Hereford and Northampton: Humphrey de Bohun VI (1309–61), the 6th Earl of Hereford and 5th Earl of Essex and his nephew Humphrey de Bohun VII (1342–73), the 7th earl of Essex and 2nd Earl of Northampton, Humphrey VII’s wife Joan Fitzalan (d 1419) and their daughters Eleanor (1366–99), who married Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester (see Plantagenet, House of family §(5)), son of King Edward III, and Mary (c. 1369–94), who married Henry of Bolingbroke (1366–1413; from 1399 King Henry IV), son of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. Known to have been active between c. 1360 and ...

Article

(b Bayonne, June 20, 1833; d Monchy-Saint-Eloi, Oise, Sept 8, 1922).

French painter, collector and teacher. He lived in Madrid from 1846 to 1853, where his father owned a bookshop, and there he studied with both José de Madrazo y Agudo and Federico de Madrazo y Küntz. After moving to Paris in 1854, he entered Léon Cogniet’s atelier at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and competed for the Prix de Rome in 1854, 1855 and 1857. He won second prize in 1857 with the Resurrection of Lazarus (Bayonne, Mus. Bonnat), a painting characterized by the jury as frank, firm and powerful, terms applied to his art throughout his career. His early paintings of historical and religious subjects gave way in the late 1860s to the less esteemed field of genre—scenes of Italian life and the Near East—based on sketches made during visits to Italy (1858–60; see fig.) and the Near East and Greece (1868–70).

Bonnat’s final change of career occurred in the mid- to late 1870s, when he became internationally renowned for his portraits, particularly of members of the European and American establishment. His highly realistic technique reflected his frequent use of photographs as models. The portraits, which cost 30,000 francs each, were so desirable that by the 1880s he had to schedule three to four sittings a day to accommodate his long waiting list....