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(b Jan 25, 1930; d Lomé, Jan 4, 2010).

Togolese painter, sculptor, engraver, stained glass designer, potter and textile designer. Beginning in 1946, he received his secondary education in Dakar, where he also worked in an architecture firm. He travelled to France and received his diplôme supérieur from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris. A versatile artist, Ahyi is best known for his murals and for monumental stone, marble and cement public sculptures. His work reflects the fusion of his Togolese roots, European training and an international outlook, and he counts among his influences Moore, Braque, Modigliani, Tamayo, Siqueiros and Tall. His work combines ancient and modern themes and materials, maternity being a prominent topic. The messages of his larger, public pieces operate on a broad level to appeal to the general populace, while smaller works often reflect his private engagement with challenges confronting the human condition. His compositions are both abstract and figurative and evoke the heroism and hope of the two world wars, Togo's colonial period and the struggle for independence from France, as well as the political efforts of the peoples of Vietnam, South Africa and Palestine. Ahyi has won numerous international prizes, including the prize of the city of Lyon (...

(b ?Milan, 1527; d Milan, July 11, 1593).

Italian painter, draughtsman and tapestry designer, active also in Austria and Bohemia. He came from a distinguished Milanese family that included a number of archbishops of the city; his father was the painter Biagio Arcimboldo. Giuseppe is first documented in 1549, working with his father for Milan Cathedral; he received payments until 1558 for supplying paintings, designs for an altar baldacchino and stained-glass windows for the cathedral: the Story of Lot and the Life of St Catherine in the south transept windows are usually attributed to him. He collaborated with Giuseppe Meda in designing the gonfalone of St Ambrose in Milan, probably sometime soon after 1558. In 1556 he received a commission to paint the south wall and vault of the south transept of Monza Cathedral, also in Lombardy, a work that must have been completed by 1562. Portions of a fresco of the Tree of Jesse on the south wall there can be attributed to him. In ...

(b Mennecy, Seine-et-Oise, Feb 3, 1895; d Paris, June 6, 1979).

French painter, sculptor, draughtsman, graphic artist, ceramicist and tapestry designer. He attended the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, from 1911, until he joined the army in 1915. After World War I he devoted himself primarily to painting. In 1922 he met Juan Gris with whose encouragement his early Matisse-influenced rhythmical compositions acquired greater stability. In the late 1920s he was promoted by Tériade as a successor to the Cubists, with such works as The Mirror (1929; Paris, Pompidou), in which a highly simplified figure and its mirror-image are defined by patches of flat colour and fragments of linear contrast, and by the 1940s he was seen as one of the major representatives of the Ecole de Paris. In the 1950s his earlier predilection for curvilinear shapes gave way to a more angular and dynamic geometry, as in the First Race (1952; Paris, Pompidou). His subject-matter was taken from daily life, with marked preferences for the nude in movement, as in ...

French, 20th – 21st century, female.

Active also active in Italy.

Born 31 October 1957, in Bordeaux.

Architect, designer, draughtswoman. Furniture, rug design.

Martine Bedin was awarded a bursary to study architecture in Florence in 1978, and then graduated from the École d'Architecture in Paris. She began her formal research in ...

German, 19th – 20th century, male.

Born 14 April 1868, in Hamburg; died 27 February 1940, in Berlin.

Painter, draughtsman, engraver, architect, designer, decorative artist, graphic designer. Posters, furniture, wallpaper, carpets, glassware, ceramics, table services, jewellery, silverwork, objets d'art, typefaces.

Jugendstil, functional school.

Die Sieben (Group of Seven), Deutscher Werkbund...

German, 20th century, male.

Active in the USA.

Born 15 March 1883, in Stuttgart; died 29 May 1972, in New York.

Painter, sculptor, graphic designer, poster artist, illustrator, architect, designer, decorative artist. Designs for carpets, advertising art, furniture, lamps, wallpaper.

Jugendstil.

Deutscher Werkbund.

Lucian Bernhard studied painting at the Kunstakademie in Munich, but taught himself design. He was active in Berlin. In ...

[Lancelot]

(b ?Poperinghe, 1488; d Bruges, bur March 4, 1581).

South Netherlandish painter, draughtsman, designer, architect, civil engineer, cartographer and engraver. He is said to have trained as a bricklayer, and the trowel he used to add as his housemark next to his monogram lab testifies to this and to his pretensions as an architectural designer. In 1519 he was registered as a master painter in the Bruges Guild of St Luke, where he chose as his speciality painting on canvas. The following year he collaborated with the little-known painter Willem Cornu in designing and executing 12 scenes for the Triumphal Entry of Emperor Charles V into Bruges. From then onwards Blondeel received regular commissions, mainly as a designer and organizer. Records of legal actions show that he was sometimes late with commissions; he took seven years to execute a Last Judgement ordered in 1540 for the council chamber at Blankenberge, and in 1545 the Guild of St Luke summoned him for his failure to supply their guild banner on time. Blondeel was married to Kathelyne, sister of the wood-carver ...

(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....

[Candido, Pietro di PietroWitte, Pieter de]

(b Bruges, c. 1548; d Munich, March 1628).

Netherlandish painter, tapestry designer and draughtsman, active in Italy and Germany. He was one of several Italian-trained Mannerist artists employed by the courts of Europe and was the leading figure in Munich from 1600 to 1628. His versatility led Sandrart to describe him as a ‘universal painter’. When he was about ten years old he emigrated to Florence with his parents—his father, Pieter de Witte (fl c. 1547–62), being a tapestry weaver who found employment in the Medici tapestry factory founded in 1546. The family name later changed to Candido, but the son was usually called Candid north of the Alps, where he returned in 1586. Very little is known about him as a person, and there is no portrait of him. He married and had five children, including a son Wilhelm (fl 1613–25), who was a painter though he later (1625) became a court ...

(b Aelst [now Aalst], Aug 14, 1502; d Brussels, Dec 6, 1550).

South Netherlandish painter, sculptor, architect and designer of woodcuts, stained glass and tapestries. Son of the Deputy Mayor of the village of Aelst, he was married twice, first to Anna van Dornicke (d 1529), the daughter of the Antwerp painter Jan Mertens, who may have been his teacher; they had two children, Michel van Coecke and Pieter van Coecke II (before 1527–59), the latter of whom became a painter. He later married Mayken Verhulst, herself a painter of miniatures and the mother of three children, Pauwel, Katelijne and Maria; they are shown with their parents in Coecke’s Family Portrait (Zurich, Ksthaus). Mayken is credited with having taught the technique of painting in tempera on cloth to her son-in-law, Pieter Bruegel the elder, who married Maria in 1563. (For family tree see Bruegel family.) Van Mander also stated that Bruegel was Coecke’s apprentice, an allegation no longer universally accepted in view of their substantial stylistic differences. Although the names of other students of Coecke’s, including ...

(b Waelhem, Feb 23, 1779; d Ghent, Nov 22, 1843).

Belgian painter, designer and printmaker. The son of the painter and architect, Pierre-François De Noter the elder (1747–1830), and brother of Jean-Baptiste De Noter (1786–1855), a painter of architectural views, he had an early grounding in the arts. He was taught by Guillaume-Jacques Herreyns at the Mechelen Academie and attended Jan Frans Van Geel’s sculpture class until 1793, when the French invasion prevented further study. One of his earliest commissions, shared with his father and Herreyns, was the decoration (begun shortly after 1793) of the SS Pieter en Pauwelkerk in Mechelen. This project had a determining influence on his career. The French had transformed the church into a Temple of Reason, and it seems likely that the damage done by them to the suppressed religious institutions of the Low Countries awakened the interest of Pierre-François De Noter and his brother in the architectural heritage of the Flemish towns. Pierre-François worked as a designer for a printed fabric manufacturer and as a printer before devoting himself to painting. He settled in Ghent in ...

From the time John Cassian established the first female foundation in Marseille in ad 410, monastic women lived in varying states of enclosure and were surrounded by diverse images and objects that contributed to their devotion, education and livelihood. The first rule for women, written in 512 by St Caesarius of Arles, emphasized their strict separation from men and the world, as did the Periculoso, a directive issued by Pope Boniface VIII (reg 1294–1303) in 1298. Various architectural solutions developed throughout the Middle Ages to reconcile the necessities of enclosure with the access required by male clerics to celebrate Mass and provide pastoral care. Nuns’ choirs, where the women would gather for their daily prayers, were often constructed as discreet spaces in the church, which allowed women to hear or see the Mass without interacting with the cleric, as in the 10th-century choir in the eastern transept gallery at St Cyriakus in Gernrode, Germany. In some Cistercian examples, the nuns’ choir appeared at the west end of the nave. Dominican and Franciscan architecture was largely varied. Double monasteries, which housed men and women, also required careful construction. A 7th-century text describing the church of St Brigida in ...

(b Nordhausen, June 16, 1894; d Berlin, March 19, 1975).

German textile designer, interior designer, and muralist. Geyer-Raack specialized in painting at the Kunst- und Gewerbemuseums, Berlin, and was heavily influenced by her professor, the architect and interior designer Bruno Pauls. In 1920 and 1921, during her studies, she participated in summer courses at the Bauhaus in Weimar, at the height of the formalization of the Bauhaus philosophies, probably studying under Johannes Itten and Oskar Schlemmer. Upon completion of her coursework she continued to develop her skills, studying in Paris throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In 1924 she opened her own art and design studio where some of her first projects were designing textiles and carpets for DeWeTex and Rasch. She also began painting murals, using many techniques, including fresco, which eventually led to a long career working for private clients and on public projects. Her work in murals and textiles led her to design wallpaper and complete interiors for clients. Collaborating with the architectural firm B. Paul Umbau in ...

British, 19th century, female.

Born 1867, in Glasgow; died 1952.

Painter, embroiderer. Flowers.

Maggie Hamilton was the sister of Glasgow School painter James Whitelaw Hamilton. She married the artist and architect, Alexander Nisbet Paterson in 1897. Between 1891 and 1901 she exhibited her paintings of flowers and still-lifes in Germany....

Swedish, 18th century, male.

Active in Stockholm.

Painter. Genre scenes, architectural views.

For a long time Gustaf Hillerström was a weaver at the Gobelins factory. He favoured comic subjects.

Flemish School, 17th century, male.

Born 1636, in Mechelen; died 1682, in Mechelen.

Painter. Architectural views. Decorative schemes, designs for tapestries (?).

Daniel Janssens was a pupil of Jac van Hornes and was a master artist in Mechelen in 1660. His pupils included Gillis Vermeulen in Antwerp in ...

French, 19th century, male.

Born 26 December 1840, in Lyons; died 27 January 1867, in Lyons.

Painter, draughtsman. Portraits, landscapes.

Anthelme Jullien was the son of a weaver. While still quite young he went to work for an architect. He followed courses given by Vibert and Danguin at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyons from ...

(b Rouen, 1735; d Paris, 1802).

French painter, printmaker and designer. He came from a family of architects and engravers that had been active in Rouen since the 16th century, and he may have been distantly related to Jean de La Vallée. He first studied under Jean-Baptiste Descamps at the newly established Académie des Arts du Dessin in Rouen and in 1755 went to Paris and entered the studio of Jean-Baptiste-Marie Pierre. In 1759 he won the Prix de Rome with Elisha Multiplying the Poor Widow’s Oil (untraced), and from 1759 he was at the Ecole des Elèves Protégés in Paris. Already by this time he seems to have been producing landscapes in the manner of Nicolas Poussin and had begun to be referred to by the name Lavallée-Poussin. He was in Rome from 1761 to 1777, for part of the time at the Académie de France. He then stayed with Louis-Auguste Le Tonnelier, Baron de Breteuil, the Maltese Ambassador, whose house, the Garden of Malta, Lavallée decorated in ...

(b Lisbon, May 19, 1921).

Portuguese painter, printer, tapestry designer and illustrator. He studied architecture and painting, without completing either course, at the Escola Superior de Belas Artes in Lisbon. His early works show an affinity with Neo-Realism in their melancholic atmosphere and ironic depiction of daily life in Lisbon. This tendency was tempered by his love of Bonnard and interest in the abstract qualities of colour and light. A sojourn in London (1962–4) marked the beginning of a new phase in which a revivalism deriving from the influence of British Pop art overlaid his own innate nostalgic lyricism. The canvases treated with photosensitive emulsion of the late 1960s and early 1970s are of a greater eroticism and violence, and were followed by paintings on intimist themes with a local flavour and an emphasis on light.

Austrian, 19th – 20th century, male.

Born 22 December 1867, in Troppau (now Opava in the Czech Republic); died 8 August 1908, in Düsseldorf.

Painter, architect, draughtsman, lithographer, decorative designer. Designs (objets d'art, furniture, decorative motifs, fabrics, jewellery, ceramic).

Vienna Secession, Wiener Werkstätte, Die Sieben (Group of Seven), Deutscher Werkbund...