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Article

Adams, Tate  

(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

Ali, Wijdan, Princess  

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

Beruete (y Moret), Aureliano  

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

Bossi, Giuseppe  

Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò

(b Busto Arsizio, Nov 11, 1777; d Milan, Dec 15, 1815).

Italian painter, collector and writer. He studied painting at the Accademia di Brera in Milan. Between 1785 and 1801 he lived in Rome, where he met such Neo-classical artists as Angelica Kauffman and Marianna Dionigi (1756–1826) as well as writers, scholars and archaeologists, notably Jean-Baptiste Séroux d’Agincourt, Giovanni Gherardo de Rossi (1754–1827) and Ennio Quirino Visconti. While in Rome he studied Antique and Renaissance works, making copies of the statues in the Museo Pio-Clementino and the frescoes by Raphael and Michelangelo in the Vatican, also furthering his studies of the nude in the Accademia di Domenico Conti and making anatomical drawings of corpses in the Ospedale della Consolazione. On his return to Milan in 1801 he became secretary to the Accademia di Brera, a post he held until 1807. During this period he devoted all his efforts to the restructuring of the Brera, providing it with new statutes and a major library and also founding the adjoining art gallery. He prevented numerous works from being smuggled abroad or dispersed and was responsible for their inclusion in the ...

Article

Brown, Percy  

S. J. Vernoit

(b 1872; d Srinagar, 1955).

English art historian, museum curator, educationalist, painter and collector. In 1899, after a short period of training as an archaeologist in Egypt, Brown went to India, where he served as curator of Lahore Museum and principal of the Mayo School of Art, Lahore. While working in these posts, he was also assistant director of the Delhi Exhibition of 1902–3 (see Delhi, §II), under George Watt. In 1909 he took up employment in Calcutta as principal of the Government School of Art and curator of the art section of the Indian Museum. In 1927 he retired from the Indian Educational Service to take up an appointment as secretary and curator of the Victoria Memorial Hall in Calcutta, where he remained until 1947. After this he lived on a houseboat on the Dal Lake in Srinagar, Kashmir.

Brown’s earliest publications included a contribution to the catalogue of the Delhi Exhibition and a descriptive guide to the Department of Industrial Art at Lahore Museum in ...

Article

Byzantine influence in Western medieval art  

Rebecca W. Corrie

In the 20th century, discussion of the relationship between Byzantine art and the art of the Latin West evolved in tandem with scholarship on Byzantine art itself. Identified as the religious imagery and visual and material culture of the Greek Orthodox Empire based at Constantinople between ad 330 and 1453, studies of Byzantine art often encompassed Post-Byzantine art and that of culturally allied states such as Armenian Cilicia, Macedonia, and portions of Italy. As such fields as Palaiologan family manuscripts and wall paintings, Armenian manuscripts, and Crusader manuscripts and icons emerged, scholars identified new intersections between Western medieval and Byzantine art. Subtle comparisons emerged with the recognition that Byzantine art was not static but changed over time in style and meaning, although most analyses identified Byzantine art as an accessible reservoir of the naturalistic, classicizing styles of antiquity. Scholars considering the 7th-century frescoes at S Maria Antiqua and mosaics at S Maria in Cosmedin, both in Rome, and the 8th-century frescoes at Castelseprio and Carolingian manuscripts such as the Coronation Gospels of Charlemagne (Vienna, Schatzkam. SCHK XIII) used formal comparisons with works such as pre-iconoclastic icons at St Catherine’s Monastery on Sinai, along with the history of Byzantine iconoclasm, to argue for the presence of Greek painters in the West. Similarly, Ottonian and Romanesque painting and luxury arts, such as ivories, provided examples of the appropriation of Byzantine imperial imagery. Yet the study of works such as the great 12th-century ...

Article

Desboutin, Marcellin(-Gilbert)  

(b Cérilly, nr Moulins, Aug 26, 1823; d Nice, Feb 18, 1902).

French painter, printmaker, collector and writer. Born into a wealthy, aristocratic family, he showed an early talent for drawing but initially trained and registered as a lawyer, though he never practised. In 1845 he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, studying first under the sculptor Louis-Jules Etex (1810–89) and from 1847–8 under Thomas Couture. From 1849 to 1854 he travelled—to England, Belgium, the Netherlands and finally to Italy, where in 1854 he bought the historic Villa dell’Ombrellino in Bellosguardo outside Florence. He lived there until his return to Paris in 1872, building up an art collection and making engravings. The content of his purportedly large collection has not been established, though he is known to have had a particular love for early Italian Renaissance works and also paintings from the Spanish school. While in Italy he wrote several plays, of which one, Maurice de Saxe, was performed at the Comédie Française, Paris, in ...

Article

Dreier, Katherine S(ophie)  

Ruth L. Bohan

(b New York, Sept 10, 1877; d Milford, CT, March 29, 1952).

American patron, painter, and writer. Dreier studied art at the Brooklyn Students League (1895–7) and the Pratt Institute (1900–01) and privately with Walter Shirlaw for five years. These studies were supplemented by extensive study and travel in Germany, France, and England. Dreier was also active in several Progressive Era reforms, including women’s suffrage, and in 1920 she wrote a book on social reform in Argentina. In 1914 she launched her first effort to stimulate free artistic expression with the founding of the Cooperative Mural Workshops in New York, an art school and workshop modelled on the traditions of John Ruskin and William Morris. Two years later, while active in the Society of Independent Artists, Dreier met Marcel Duchamp (see fig.) and in 1920, with Duchamp’s assistance, founded and became president of the Société Anonyme, Inc, one of the most important and broad-ranging promoters of international modern art in the USA during the 1920s. Dreier’s strong organizational skills, together with her unyielding commitment to modernism’s international significance, sustained the organization’s ambitious exhibition and publication efforts throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s. Dreier provided much of the organization’s financial support and through her extensive correspondence and personal connections with European artists, particularly in Germany, helped nurture an impressive international community of artists that stands as one of the organization’s most enduring legacies. In ...

Article

Dubuffet, Jean(-Philippe-Arthur)  

Roger Cardinal

(b Le Havre, July 31, 1901; d Paris, May 12, 1985).

French painter, sculptor, printmaker, collector and writer (see fig.). He was temperamentally opposed to authority and any suggestion of discipline and devised for himself a coherent, if rebellious, attitude towards the arts and culture. For all his maverick challenges to the values of the art world, Dubuffet’s career exemplified the way in which an avant-garde rebel could encounter notoriety, then fame and eventual reverence. His revolt against beauty and conformity has come to be seen as a symptomatic and appreciable influence in 20th-century culture.

The son of a prosperous and authoritarian wine-merchant in Le Havre, Dubuffet left home for Paris at 17 to pursue irregular studies in the arts. But, growing sceptical of the artist’s privileged status and savouring an affinity with ‘the common man’, he abandoned painting in ...

Article

Gao Fenghan  

Ju-Hsi Chou

[Kao Feng-han; hao Nanfu Shanren]

(b Jiaozhou (modern Jiao xian), Shandong Province, 1683; d ?Shandong Province, 1748–9).

Chinese painter, calligrapher, seal-carver, collector and poet. The son of a minor official in charge of local education, Gao developed an interest in poetry, painting and seal-carving in his early youth, when he also began to collect old seals and inkstones. The great poet Wang Shizhen took a liking to him and left instructions before his death that Gao be admitted into the ranks of his disciples. A relative of the poet, Wang Qilei, also provided Gao with some formal instruction in the art of painting, beyond what he could learn from his father, an amateur painter of orchids and bamboo. Gao’s official career did not begin until 1729, when he took up an appointment as assistant magistrate of She xian, Anhui Province. In 1734 a new assignment took him to Taizhou, east of Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province. In 1736, having become entangled in a legal dispute involving a chief commissioner of the salt gabelle, he was briefly imprisoned; this and his deteriorating health, which resulted in the paralysis of his right hand, inevitably led to his resignation from officialdom....

Article

Filla, Emil  

Vojtěch Lahoda

(b Chropyně, Moravia [now Czech Republic], April 4, 1882; d Prague, Oct 6, 1953).

Czech painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer and collector. After a short period at a business school and in an insurance office in Brno, he became a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (1903). In 1904 he won the Academy’s first prize. At the end of the year he set out on a lengthy journey to Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Italy. He became absorbed in the Old Masters, especially Rembrandt. His own style passed from Post-Impressionism to a more expressive dominance of colour. In 1907 he took part in the first exhibition of The Eight (see Eight, the) with a programme painting, the Reader of Dostoyevsky (Prague, N.G., Trade Fair Pal.), partly influenced by the Munch exhibition in Prague in 1905. At the same time the picture is a very personal manifesto reflecting the Angst and scepticism of his generation. At the second exhibition of The Eight in ...

Article

Gallatin, A(folbert) E(ugene)  

Gail Stavitsky

(b Villanova, PA, July 23, 1881; d New York, June 15, 1952).

American collector, painter and critic. He was a great-grandson of Albert Gallatin, Secretary of the Treasury under President Jefferson and President Madison and one of the founders of New York University. Around 1900 he began establishing his reputation as a leading connoisseur of Aubrey Beardsley and James McNeill Whistler through his extensive writing and collecting of their work. Frequent visits to Paris and Europe from 1921 to 1938 resulted in Gallatin’s conversion to acquiring modernist art through his contacts with artists, dealers and collectors. In 1927 he opened his collection to the public as the Gallery of Living Art, in the South Study Hall of New York University’s Main Building. It was the first museum in the USA devoted exclusively to modern art. As its director Gallatin developed the collection into a significant survey focusing on Cubism, De Stijl, Neo-plasticism and Constructivism. Works by Picasso, Braque, Gris, Léger, Mondrian, Jean Hélion, ...

Article

Garavito, Humberto  

Jorge Luján-Muñoz

(b Quetzaltenango, Jan 26, 1897; d Guatemala City, Jun 1, 1970).

Guatemalan painter, collector, and writer. He began his artistic studies in Quetzaltenango, where he was fortunate to come into contact with the Spanish painter Jaime Sabartés (1881–1968) and Carlos Mérida, with whom he became friends. He continued his studies in Guatemala City and then in Mexico City at the Real Academia de San Carlos, where his fellow students included Rufino Tamayo, Roberto Montenegro, and Miguel Covarrubias. He returned briefly to Guatemala only to leave for Europe. He studied in Madrid at the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando and from 1924 to 1925 lived in Paris. He returned to Guatemala City in 1927 and in 1928 became director of the Academia de Bellas Artes. By then he had developed a style derived from French Impressionism, although he gradually moved toward a more naturalistic style, perhaps in response to the taste of his clients.

Garavito generally painted in oils on a medium or small scale, concentrating on the beautiful Guatemalan landscape, of which he can in a sense be considered the “discoverer.” His preferred subjects were the mountains, volcanoes, and lakes of the Guatemalan high plateau, and he was the first to incorporate in his works the Indians in their brightly colored clothes. He was the central figure and teacher of a group of figurative painters and painters working in a naturalistic style, such as ...

Article

Goncourt, de family  

David Scott

French family of writers, critics, printmakers, painters and collectors. Edmond de Goncourt (b Nancy, 26 May 1822; d Champrosay, 16 July 1896) and his brother Jules de Goncourt (b Paris, 17 Dec 1830; d Paris, 20 June 1870) were born into a minor aristocratic family. Their father, Marc-Pierre Huot de Goncourt, died in 1834, and after the death of their mother, Annette-Cécile Guérin, in 1848 they were sufficiently well-off to set up as painters. Jules was notably talented, his etchings being published in 1876. However, the Goncourts soon turned to literature, in which, in a remarkable collaboration that lasted until the death of Jules in 1870, they made their name, first as journalists and historians, and a little later as novelists and art critics. Their finest and best-known works, such as L’Art du XVIIIe siècle (published in 12 fascicles between 1859 and 1875) and Manette Salomon...

Article

Ye Gongchuo  

Elizabeth F. Bennett

[Yeh Kung-ch’uozi Yufu, Yuhuhao Xiaan, Juyuan]

(b Panyu, Guangdong Province, 1881; d 1968).

Chinese calligrapher, painter, archaeologist, collector, poet and government official. He was born into a wealthy, scholarly family, received a classical education and as a youth of 16 founded a school in Guangzhou (Canton) and a publishing company in Shanghai; at 17 he enrolled in law school at the Imperial University in Beijing. His studies were interrupted two years later by the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, whereupon Ye moved to Wuchang, Hubei Province, and taught history, geography and modern languages for four years. In 1906 he began his official career as a specialist in railways and communications. After 1911, Ye held various positions in the Republican government and was instrumental in the establishment of Jiaotong University in Shanghai; he also served as director of classics for several years at Peking [Beijing] University. After the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), he gave up his government career and devoted himself to the arts and research, although he continued to serve on educational and cultural committees for the rest of his life. In particular, he became involved in the committee to organize the simplification of Chinese characters. In ...

Article

Goupy, Joseph  

Richard Jeffree

(b Nièvre, 1686; d London, before April 3, 1770).

English painter, printmaker, collector and curator of French birth. A nephew of the French-born portrait painter Louis Goupy (c. 1674–1747), he visited Malta early in his career, producing four panoramic views of the port of Valletta (Melbourne Hall, Derbys), later engraved by Antoine Benoist. In 1711 he was among the first subscribers to Godfrey Kneller’s Academy in London. Goupy’s speciality from then on appears to have been the production of small copies in pastel or gouache of Old Master paintings; they were widely admired and initially fetched high prices. Through his acquaintance with Marco Ricci, Goupy painted sets for productions by the Royal Academy of Music during the 1720s. These included several operas by George Frideric Handel, with whom he developed a close friendship; it ended with the publication of the True Representation and Character of the Charming Brute (1730), the print made after Goupy’s savage caricature (gouache; Cambridge, Fitzwilliam) of the composer as a bewigged hog playing the organ....

Article

Grubicy [Grubicij] (De Dragon), Vittore  

Clare Hills-Nova

(b Milan, Oct 15, 1851; d Milan, Aug 4, 1920).

Italian painter, dealer, critic and collector of Hungarian origin. Around 1870 he frequented the circle of Scapigliati, Gli and in 1870–71 visited London. Grubicy’s acquaintance with the art galleries there inspired him to start his own gallery in Milan, specializing in the Scapigliati artists, particularly Tranquillo Cremona and later Daniele Ranzoni. After Cremona’s death in 1878, Grubicy extended his interest to younger Lombard artists, primarily Giovanni Segantini (whose Choir of S Antonio impressed him at the 1879 annual exhibition at the Brera, Milan), Emilio Longoni (1859–1932) and later Angelo Morbelli. Grubicy became Segantini’s dealer and they were in close collaboration from this time. Between 1882 and 1885 Grubicy was in the Low Countries and probably informed Segantini of Millet and The Hague school. During his visit Grubicy also began to draw (e.g. Housemaid Washing, 1884; Milan, Castello Sforzesco) and to paint (e.g. The Hague: My First Work, 1884...

Article

Hendriks, Wybrand  

Frans Grijzenhout

(bapt Amsterdam, June 21, 1744; d Haarlem, Jan 23, 1831).

Dutch painter, draughtsman, Curator and collector. He was the son of a sculptor of modest means, and presumably he, together with his brothers, first trained in his father’s workshop. In 1765 Wybrand became an active member of the Amsterdam Drawing Academy, where from 1772 to 1774 he won top prizes. Until 1772 he worked as a landscape painter in the Amsterdam wallpaper factory of Johannes Remmers. The staffage in Hendriks’s landscapes was added by Willem Joseph Laquy (1738–98). In 1772 Hendriks bought his own small wallpaper factory in Amsterdam, which he ran until 1776. Around 1775 he made a short trip to England with Hendrik Meijer (1737–93), a Haarlem painter, etcher and wallpaper manufacturer, and in 1776 moved to Haarlem, where he painted still-lifes and made watercolour copies after 17th-century masters for collectors. From 1782 to 1785 Hendriks was in Ede, where he drew and painted mostly landscapes. He returned to Haarlem in ...

Article

Kimura Kenkadō  

Tadashi Kobayashi

[Sansai]

(b Osaka, 1736; d Osaka, 1802). Japanese collector, scholar, poet, painter and calligrapher. As a boy he undertook the study of medicinal herbs at the apothecary’s shop owned by his father and other relatives. According to tradition he began to have an interest in art when he was about five or six and studied with the Kanō-school master Ōoka Shunboku. He also learnt bird-and-flower painting (kachōga) under Kakutei, a Zen priest from Nagasaki. He first met the literati painter Ike Taiga (see Ike Taiga) when he was 15, and became his pupil. Taiga’s influence is evident in his Bunjinga (literati painting; see Japan §VI 4., (vi), (d)) and also in his calligraphy, in which he excelled. Kenkadō also studied seal-carving with Kō Fuyō, a friend of Taiga, and poetry with Katayama Hokkai. He became one of the most erudite and well-known literati in the region. By profession he was a sake brewer and amassed a fortune, which, however, he forfeited when he incurred the wrath of the authorities. He collected a vast range of objects including calligraphy, old writings and paintings, maps, ceramics, utensils for the ...

Article

Le Brun [Lebrun; LeBrun], Jean-Baptiste-Pierre  

JoLynn Edwards

(b Paris, Feb 16, 1748; d Paris, Aug 6, 1813).

French dealer, collector, writer, and painter. He was the son of a painter and picture dealer, Pierre Le Brun (c. 1703–1771), and great-nephew of Charles Le Brun. He studied painting with Jean-Baptiste Deshays, François Boucher, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard before becoming a leading connoisseur and art dealer. In 1776 he married the painter Louise-Elisabeth Vigée (see Vigée Le Brun [Vigée-Le Brun; Vigée-Lebrun], Elisabeth-Louise). He was curator of paintings to the King’s younger brother, Charles-Philippe de Bourbon, Comte d’Artois (later Charles X), and to Louis-Philippe-Joseph, Duc d’Orléans (1747–93), and subsequently acted as intermediary for foreign collectors, including Catherine the Great of Russia. His European art networks spanned England, Holland, Flanders, Italy, Spain, and Russia that he exploited to buy and sell art. In addition to his auction catalogues, Le Brun produced a series of erudite books and pamphlets and in some of his articles (1771–81...