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(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, ...

(b Venice, 1605; d Venice, Jan 1, 1681).

Italian art critic, dealer, engraver, restorer and painter. His place in history rests firmly on the hyperbolic 681-page poem La carta del navegar pitoresco (Venice, 1660), whose title and subtitle may be translated as ‘The map of pictorial navigation. Dialogue between a dilettante Venetian senator and a professor of painting, under the names of Ecelenza and Compare; divided into eight winds which lead the Venetian boat across the high seas of painting as the dominant power of that sea to the confusion of him who does not understand compasses’. It is an intensely patriotic and polemical defence of Venetian painting written in Venetian dialect and directed against those Roman and Tuscan standards represented by Giorgio Vasari. As the full title suggests, Boschini is enamoured with Giambattista Marino’s metaphoric language and frankly espouses a personal reading of art history from the perspective of an artist (he who ‘understands compasses’). The apparently unstructured exposition rejects objective, comprehensive and logically organized theories of art in favour of an eccentric art criticism that attempts to capture the immediacy and pleasure of vision itself....

(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 ...

(bapt Amsterdam, Jan 25, 1626; bur Amsterdam, Dec 22, 1679).

Dutch businessman, collector, painter, draughtsman and etcher. Though now considered the outstanding marine painter of 17th-century Holland, he was not a professional artist nor a member of the Amsterdam Guild of St Luke. His father owned a successful dye-works in Amsterdam, in which both Jan and his brother Louis were active. Their father enjoyed a long life and probably managed the firm until close to his death in 1674, when Jan inherited it. This left Jan with plenty of spare time to pursue his hobby, painting. He married Annetje Jansdr. (Anna Grotingh) before 1653. He died a widower, survived by his seven children, who inherited his considerable fortune. His last will shows that in addition to the dye-works and immense cash assets, van de Cappelle owned extensive properties and an art collection that must be rated among the most important of his time.

Apart from his involvement with the arts, Jan shared his countrymen’s love of ships and sailing. He owned a pleasure yacht, moored in the ‘oude yacht haven’, which must have taken him on many trips along the Dutch coast and rivers, giving him an opportunity to sketch and draw from nature....

(b Norwich, Dec 22, 1768; d Norwich, April 22, 1821).

English painter, printmaker, collector and teacher. The son of a journeyman weaver, he was apprenticed to a coach and sign painter, Francis Whisler, from 1783 to 1790. He presumably continued in this trade and during the 1790s consolidated his artistic training. Early local influences upon Crome included William Beechey and John Opie, but the friendship of Thomas Harvey, a patron, collector and amateur artist, was the most significant. Harvey’s collection included works by Dutch 17th-century masters such as Aelbert Cuyp, Jacob van Ruisdael and Meindert Hobbema, and also works by Gainsborough and Richard Wilson. The earliest record of Wilson’s influence is provided by two oils entitled Composition in the Style of Wilson (untraced), dated 1796 and 1798 in Crome’s Memorial Exhibition of 1821. The Dutch influence was also strong throughout Crome’s career. Crome’s early acquaintance with Harvey and his collection almost certainly encouraged him to become a collector, and the Yarmouth banker ...

(b Paris, July 19, 1834; d Paris, Sept 27, 1917).

French painter, draughtsman, printmaker, sculptor, pastellist, photographer and collector. He was a founder-member of the Impressionist group and the leader within it of the Realist tendency. He organized several of the group’s exhibitions, but after 1886 he showed his works very rarely and largely withdrew from the Parisian art world. As he was sufficiently wealthy, he was not constricted by the need to sell his work, and even his late pieces retain a vigour and a power to shock that is lacking in the contemporary productions of his Impressionist colleagues.

The eldest son of a Parisian banking family, he originally intended to study law, registering briefly at the Sorbonne’s Faculté de Droit in 1853. He began copying the 15th- and 16th-century Italian works in the Musée du Louvre and in 1854 he entered the studio of Louis Lamothe (1822–69). The training that Lamothe, who had been a pupil of Ingres, transmitted to Degas was very much in the classical tradition; reinforced by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which he attended in ...

(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 ...

English family of graphic artists and painters. John Dighton was a print-seller; his son Robert Dighton (i) (b ?London, ?1752; d London, 1814) exhibited drawings annually from the age of 17 (at first calling himself Deighton) at the Society of Artists and the Free Society. Robert entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1772 and contributed to the Academy exhibitions. He eventually settled at 4 Spring Gardens, Charing Cross, where he owned a print shop and gave drawing lessons, calling himself a drawing-master. By the 1790s he had produced many watercolours and coloured engravings, including A Book of Heads, and had become well known as an actor–singer at Sadler’s Wells Theatre.

Robert was often in financial difficulties and as a remedy stole prints from the British Museum, including a Rembrandt landscape that he competently copied and sold to a dealer. When the theft was traced to Dighton in 1806...

(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 ...

(b Montpellier, April 1, 1766; d Montpellier, March 16, 1837).

French painter, printmaker and collector. He was taught by the painter Jean Coustou (1719–91) in Montpellier before entering, in 1783, the studio of David, to whose artistic principles he remained faithful all his life. His career as a history painter began brilliantly when, in 1787, he won the Prix de Rome for Nebuchadnezzar Ordering the Execution of Zedekiah’s Children (Paris, Ecole N. Sup. B.-A.). This early success was consolidated by the four years he spent at the Académie de France in Rome and by the enthusiastic reception of his Death of Abel (1790; Montpellier, Mus. Fabre) at the Salon of 1791.

In 1793 his royalist sympathies forced him to move to Florence, where the poet Vittorio Alfieri and his mistress the Countess of Albany, estranged wife of the Young Pretender, introduced him to the artistic and social life of the city. In the years preceding the French invasion of Tuscany in ...

(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 ...

[Van Ryssel]

(b Lille, July 30, 1828; d Auvers-sur-Oise, Val d’Oise, Jan 9, 1909).

French doctor, collector, painter and engraver. In 1848 he began to study medicine in Paris, where he frequented the Bohemian circles of Amand(-Désiré) Gautier, Gustave Courbet and Champfleury. In 1857 he visited Montpellier, where he met the great collector Alfred Bruyas; it was probably through him that he came to know Paul Guigou, Adolphe Monticelli and Auguste Cézanne, Paul Cézanne’s father. In 1858 Gachet was awarded a doctorate by the University of Montpellier for his thesis Etudes sur la mélancolie. On his return to Paris he established a medical practice; among his patients were the engraver Charles Meryon and Rachel Pissarro, mother of Camille Pissarro. The turning-point in his life came when in 1872 he bought a property at Auvers-sur-Oise; his house there became a haven for the Impressionist painters.

In the same year Gachet began to collect seriously, buying 18 small paintings by Guigou at the latter’s studio sale. He acquired many works from his painter friends and lent ...

(b Besançon, Jan 6, 1806; d Paris, Dec 11, 1894).

French painter, lithographer, illustrator and collector. The son of a blacksmith, he attended the school of drawing in Besançon. He left for Paris and in 1828–9 frequented the Ecole des Beaux-Arts while executing various minor works. He made his début at the Salon in 1831 with a number of drawings. He established himself at the Salons of 1833 and 1834 with such sentimental compositions as Henry IV Writing Verses to Gabrielle, St Lambert at Versailles, Count de Comminges, Fortune-telling and such portraits as Laviron and The Blacksmith (1886; unless otherwise stated, all works are in Besançon, Mus. B.-A. & Archéol.; many drawings in Lille, Mus. B.-A. and Rouen, Mus. B.-A.). His portrait of the Phalansterist Fourier (1836) confirmed the success he had achieved as a history painter with the Last Moments of Leonardo da Vinci (1835).

In 1836 Gigoux travelled to Italy with his students ...

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...

(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....

(b Boston, MA, Dec 7, 1727; d Margate, Kent, Sept 16, 1792).

English painter, engraver and auctioneer of American birth. In 1742 he was apprenticed to the Boston engraver Thomas Johnston, though he abandoned engraving for painting (e.g. the group portrait of his own family, the Greenwood-Lee Family, c. 1747; Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.). In 1752 he went to Paramaribo, Surinam, where in the space of five years he painted 113 portraits, which he recorded along with numerous other events and observations in a notebook. While there he painted his best-known work, Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam (c. 1752–8; St Louis, MO, A. Mus.). It is the only tavern scene conversation piece painted in colonial America and was most likely inspired by a print of William Hogarth’s Midnight Modern Conversation (New Haven, CT, Yale Cent. Brit. A).

Greenwood remained in Surinam until May 1758, when he departed for Amsterdam, where he helped reopen the Amsterdam Art Academy, returned to engraving and produced numerous mezzotints. While in the Low Countries he began buying Dutch Old Masters for English collectors and moved to London by ...

(b London, Aug 6, 1932).

English painter, printmaker and collector. He studied at the Camberwell School of Art (1949) and at the Bath Academy of Art, Corsham (1950–54). He did not seriously exhibit until he was 30. His preference was for emotionally charged figurative groupings in which the figures appeared embedded in the matrix of the picture, as if growing out of their surroundings, such as the Interior of a Museum (1956–9; London, Tate). The often manic humour helped place Hodgkin in the climate of Pop art, although he was not directly associated with the movement; early subjects included Joe Tilson in The Tilsons (1965–7; ex-Stuyvesant priv. col., London), whose goggle eyes stare out from his own gaudy carpentered constructions. Hodgkin was always concerned to make the picture an object, and from 1970 he worked not on canvas but on assertive wooden supports, such as drawing boards or door frames....

(b Rathdrum, Co. Wicklow, Feb 22, 1921; d Dublin, April 7, 1986).

Irish painter, designer, decorative artist, printmaker and collector. During his early career as a businessman he built up an important collection of Irish, English and continental paintings. Mainly self-taught, he began to paint seriously in 1953, holding his first one-man exhibition in Dublin in 1959 and becoming a full-time painter in 1964. His paintings of the late 1950s, such as Ringsend, Morning (1957; Cork, J. B. Kearney priv. col.), are nostalgic evocations of Ringsend and the Dublin docks, which led him in the early 1960s to develop an abstract idiom in which masses are indicated in a crescendo of richly coloured brushstrokes reminiscent of the work of Hans Hartung. In the Circus Pastels (1966–8; e.g. Dublin, G. Lambert priv. col.), he translated the excitement of acrobatic performance with humour and shifts of visual emphasis. The Baggot Street paintings (1968–9; e.g. Dublin, A.C. Ireland) and the Suspended series, in which similarly taut abstract motifs were imposed on a ground of warm colour, were followed by the starker but optimistic ...

(b Paris, Aug 18, 1818; d Paris, Dec 26, 1882).

French photographer, painter, printmaker, and collector. After studying with the sculptor James Pradier and the painters Jean-Pierre Granger (1779–1840) and Paul Delaroche, he made his début at the Salon of 1842, winning a third-class medal there in 1845. He turned to photography in the wave of self-enrichment preceding the 1848 Revolution. With Charles Nègre he experimented with the waxed paper negative process of (Jean-Baptiste-)Gustave Le Gray, from whom he probably received personal instruction before 1850. Unlike other photographers, who later adopted glass negatives, Le Secq continued to use paper, at first employing photographs as studies for his genre paintings.

By 1851 Le Secq excelled at rendering ancient and medieval monuments in a pictorial style that exploited the effects of light and shadow, turning architecture into symbolic fragments evoking a rapidly disappearing historical past, which Le Secq sought to save photographically. After helping found the Société Héliographique in 1851...

(b Berlin, July 20, 1847; d Berlin, Feb 8, 1935).

German painter, draughtsman, printmaker and collector. He dominated the German art world from the 1890s to the 1930s. Although at first a highly controversial figure, after the turn of the century he was showered with honours. His Naturalist and Impressionist works have been consistently admired, despite being banned during the Nazi period. Liebermann’s approach was that of a liberal cosmopolitan, and his work is distinguished by its honesty and commitment to social reform. Influenced by Dutch and French painting, he led the modernist movement in Germany away from the literary art of the 19th century.

The son of a Jewish businessman from Berlin, Liebermann initially studied philosophy, but in 1866 he became a pupil of Carl Steffeck, who had given him occasional drawing tuition. In 1868–72 he studied under Ferdinand Wilhelm Pauwels (1830–1904), Charles Verlat and Paul Thumann (1834–1908) at the Kunsthochschule in Weimar. In 1871...