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(b Geneva, March 24, 1767; d London, Dec 27, 1849).

English painter of Swiss birth. Born into a wealthy and politically influential Huguenot family, Agasse spent his early childhood at the country estate of Crévin, where he may have developed the interest in animals and natural history that was to guide his later career as an artist in England. Agasse trained first at the Ecole du Colibri in Geneva and subsequently in Paris under Jacques-Louis David (beginning in 1787) and possibly under Horace Vernet. His early artistic output consisted chiefly of unpretentious silhouette ‘cut-outs’ in the style of Jean-Daniel Huber. At this time he also undertook a serious study of dissection and veterinary science.

Agasse first visited England in his early 20s, at the invitation of the Hon. George Pitt, 1st Baron Rivers (?1722–1803), whom he had met in either Geneva or Paris c. 1790. He stayed briefly at Rivers’s home, Stratfield Saye, Hants, before returning to Europe for another decade, then emigrated permanently to England in ...

Slav, 19th century, male.

Born 1828; died 1890, in Yugoslavia.

Draughtsman.

Aleksandrovich was reputed to be among the best Romantic draughtsmen and Slav colourists. He is noted for his painting of a Grape-picker and other portraits of women.

(b Tarragona, 1832; d Barcelona, 1901).

Spanish sculptor. He entered the Escuela de Bellas Artes de la Lonja, Barcelona, when still very young and was a student of the Neo-classical artist Damián Campeny y Estrany, who was also influenced by Romanticism and naturalism. In 1855 Aleu y Teixidor applied for the Chair in Modelling at the Escuela, a position to which he was eventually appointed after the committee had been involved in intrigues and disputes. He taught Catalan sculptors for half a century and wielded an enormous, though not entirely positive, influence. He became Deputy Director of the Escuela de Bellas Artes, belonged to the Academia de Ciencias y Artes of Barcelona and won first prize at the Exposición Nacional de Madrid in 1871.

Almost all the work of Aleu y Teixidor is in Barcelona. The best is the over life-size stone sculpture of St George (1871) for the façade of the Palau de la ...

(b Waccamaw, SC, Nov 5, 1779; d Cambridgeport, MA, July 9, 1843).

American painter. The son of a prominent South Carolina plantation owner of English descent, he began to draw around the age of six, and he moved to his uncle’s home in Newport, RI, at the age of eight. While there he came into contact with the portrait painter Samuel King, but it was the exhibited portraits of Robert Edge Pine that offered him inspiring models of glazing and colouring. Dubbed ‘the Count’ by his Harvard College classmates for his way with fashion, Allston explored alternatives to the portrait tradition with landscapes, as well as with depictions of irrational figures, for example Man in Chains (1800; Andover, MA, Phillips Acad., Addison Gal.). After graduating in 1800, he sold his patrimony to fund study abroad.

In 1801 Allston went with Edward Greene Malbone to London, where he frequented the circle of Benjamin West and studied drawing at the Royal Academy. In late ...

(b Lisbon, Aug 26, 1839; d Genoa, Nov 30, 1915).

Portuguese painter, architect and restorer, active in Italy. He came from a middle-class family with trading interests in Italy. In 1854 Andrade went to Genoa, and friendships there with such artists as Tammar Luxoro (1824–99) led him to study painting with Alexandre Calame and later to study architecture at the Accademia Ligustica di Belle Arti. He travelled widely, and in Italy he came into contact with Antonio Fontanesi and Carlo Pittura (1835/6–91), with whom he became one of the most active painters of the Scuola di Rivara. According to Telamaro Signorini, Andrade was among the painters who frequented the Caffè Michelangiolo in Florence. The influence of the macchiaioli painters is also evident from 1863 in his paintings, especially in Return from the Woods at Dusk (1869; Genoa, Mus. Accad. Ligustica B.A.)

Lucília Verdelho da Costa

Andrade’s work represents a transition from the Romantic school of Calame to the Naturalism of the Barbizon school. His landscapes show careful observation of nature. The locations in northern Italy seem to have been chosen for their melancholy and serenity, as in the landscapes of Fontanesi. Andrade’s pastoral scenes at dawn or dusk are seen through morning mists or against sunsets, or they depict uninhabited countryside. Most of these works, for example ...

(b Lisbon, Oct 26, 1818; d Lisbon, April 3, 1879).

Portuguese painter. He belonged to the first generation of romantic artists in Portugal and specialized in paintings of landscapes and animals. From 1837 until 1844 he attended the Academia de Belas-Artes in Lisbon, where, with other pupils, he protested against the teaching methods of the Academia, which was dominated by the classical tradition of António Manuel da Fonseca.

Anunciação was to advocate the practice, new in Portugal, of painting out of doors. In fact, however, his landscapes were rather stiff and conventional, effects emphasized by his continued use of sepia glazes. They show the influence of the classical landscape tradition of Pierre Antoine Quillad and Jean Pillement, who worked in Portugal, on the one hand, and, on the other, that of the genre painting of Auguste Roquement (1804–52), whom Anunciação much admired. In his scenes of shepherds or herdsmen the landscapes are always subordinate to the main themes and are intended to complete the compositions with backgrounds of foliage and trees....

Park near Łowicz, Poland. The best-preserved 18th-century Romantic landscape park in Poland, it was founded in 1778 by the patron and collector Princess Helena Radziwiłł (1749–1821). She competed as a patron with Princess Izabela Czartoryska, and Arkadia was a response to the latter’s park (destr.), also called Arkadia, at Powązki, outside Warsaw. Princess Helena Radziwiłł conceived the literary and philosophical idea of the park, and in order to realize her project she employed Simon Bogumił Zug as designer.

The park covers c. 30 ha on the banks of an artificially formed lake, with the Isle of Sacrifices and the River Łupia. An area of wild, unimproved nature, the Elysian Fields, is laid out on the west bank. An English-style park, complete with pavilions, classical ruins, tombs, altars and grottoes, is situated on the east bank. The park is so designed and landscaped that the footpaths, lined with trees and shrubs, lead the visitor to its main feature, the Neo-classical Temple of Diana, from where there is a panoramic view of the lake and the park. The temple, designed by ...

(b Paris, March 24, 1775; d Paris, May 15, 1835).

French painter . After studying in Jacques-Louis David’s studio, at the age of 18 Auzou exhibited a Bacchante and a Study of a Head in the Salon of 1793. She exhibited regularly at the Salon until 1817. She was awarded a Prix d’Encouragement for Departure for a Duel in 1806 and a medal for Agnès de Méranie (untraced) in 1808. In 1810 Vivant Denon drew the Emperor Napoleon’s attention to the ‘genre anecdotique’, which he maintained was unique to the French school. Denon cited Auzou as well as Pierre-Nolasque Bergeret, Jean-Antoine Laurent, Fleury-François Richard and Adolphe-Eugène-Gabriel Roehn (1780–1867) among the practitioners of this distinctive genre.

Auzou’s oeuvre consists of portraits (e.g. Portrait of a Musician; Manchester, NH, Currier Gal. A.) and genre scenes, a great many of which still belong to the artist’s descendants. In the early genre scenes she took her inspiration from history and Greek mythology or used playfully erotic subjects in the style of Louis-Philibert Debucourt. Later she sought inspiration in the history of the French kings (e.g. ...

(Konstantinovich)

(b Feodosiya [now Kaffa], July 29, 1817; d Feodosiya, June 2, 1900).

Russian painter of Armenian descent. The son of an Armenian merchant, throughout his life he kept his links with the ancient traditions of Armenian Christian culture. He studied at the Academy of Arts, St Petersburg, in 1833–7 under Maksim Vorob’yov (1787–1855), a prominent Russian landscape painter of the Romantic period. From 1845 Ayvazovsky worked predominantly in Feodosiya, an ancient city in the Eastern Crimea. He travelled widely in Russia and Europe, the Near East, Africa and America. Ayvazovsky’s first significant paintings testify to his attentive assimilation of the canons of Romantic seascape painting, going back to Claude Lorrain, as well as the influence of Vorob’yov and the late works of Sil’vestr Shchedrin. In Ayvazovsky’s early works the accurate rendering of views is combined with a classicist rationality of composition, as in View of the Seashore in the Environs of St Petersburg (1835; Moscow, Tret’yakov Gal.)

A purely Romantic view of the world and exaltation in the face of the boundless, eternally changing sea find mature expression in the works of the 1840s, when Ayvazovsky gained renown throughout Europe. A number of foreign academies made him an honorary member, and J. M. W. Turner wrote an enthusiastic ode in honour of one of his pictures. The best-known work of this period is the ...

(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 Lisbon, Jan 15, 1829; d Lisbon, June 17, 1894).

Portuguese sculptor. Between 1846 and 1852 he studied drawing and history painting under António Manuel da Fonseca at the Academia de Belas-Artes in Lisbon. In 1854 he became a drawing teacher at the Universidade de Coimbra, and in 1860 he taught sculpture at the Academia de Belas-Artes.

In 1856 Bastos modelled his most significant work, the figurative terracotta bas-relief Colera Morbus (Lisbon, Mus. N. A. Contemp.), and in 1861 he exhibited at the Academia a version carved in marble (Sintra, Pal. N. Pena) that was bought by King Luís. It was an innovative work that first expressed the romantic style in Portuguese sculpture: the treatment is both dynamic and expressive, and because of its sense of movement the subject seems almost alive. Bastos, however, did not continue with this trend, and his Monument to Camóẽs (1860; Lisbon, Praça de Camóẽs) conforms to a more conventional academic treatment. His other sculptures of this type include the statue of ...

(Domínguez)

(b Seville, 1833; d Madrid, Sept 1870).

Spanish painter. He was the son of the painter José Domínguez Bécquer (1810–41). Orphaned at an early age, he was brought up by his father’s first cousin, the painter Joaquín Domínguez Bécquer (1819–79), who undertook his artistic training. Valeriano’s first works were small costumbrista paintings of local customs and manners that were intended for a quick, cheap sale. These scenes of everyday life are often serious and pessimistic, in contrast to the more superficial treatment given to such subjects by other Sevillian artists. Bécquer’s portraits of his close friend, the English consul Francis Williams and his wife Elvira (both Seville, priv. col.; see 1974 exh. cat., nos 9 and 10), also date from this period in Seville. After the breakup of his marriage in 1862, he moved to Madrid to join his brother, the celebrated Romantic poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836–70). There, in 1864...

French, 19th century, male.

Born 29 April 1834, in Boulogne-sur-Seine.

Painter. Genre scenes, landscapes, seascapes.

Studied under Claude Jacquand and exhibited from 1857 to 1869. Painted somewhat romanticised scenes of London, medieval houses and canals, but adopted a more true-to-life approach in his rendering of seascapes and brightly lit fishing scenes....

(Ferdinand)

(b Odense, March 20, 1804; d Vicenza, Nov 14, 1832).

Danish painter. He studied (1820–26) at the Kunstakademi in Copenhagen, under C. W. Eckersberg and others. His earliest paintings reveal remarkable skill in the emulation of models: the clarity and detail in the View of Nyhavn (early 1820s; Copenhagen, Hirschsprungske Saml.) is very much in the objective, closely observant spirit of Eckersberg; and the delicate use of light and colour in the Self-portrait of 1821 (Copenhagen, Hirschsprungske Saml.) recalls the work of Jens Juel. Bendz painted portraits to earn a living while still at the Academy, and some of his more extreme and disturbing early works are themselves adaptations of the portrait genre. In the Raffenberg Family (1823; Copenhagen, Kstforen.) the hermetic idyll of the traditional family portrait is shattered by a picture within a picture: at the centre of the composition is the portrait of the dead husband and father. Bendz creates an image of alarming tension, exaggerated by the enamelled perfection of the painting’s finish....

French, 20th century, male.

Born 1930, in Chatou.

Painter (including gouache).

Nuagisme.

Gérard studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Toulon from 1949 to 1952, and travelled to Germany the following year, where he was inspired by the Romanticism of Schloss Benrath (near Düsseldorf); his pseudonym combines the castle's name with Nietzsche's first name, Friedrich. He lives and works in Paris....

(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 Laon, March 5, 1743; d Paris, March 1, 1811).

French painter and draughtsman. In 1764 he entered the studio of Noël Hallé, whose work strongly influenced his early paintings. Alexander Cutting the Gordian Knot (Paris, Ecole N. Sup. B.-A.), with which he won the Prix de Rome in 1767, is a brilliant exercise in the grand academic style as conceived by the followers of François Boucher. After a period at the Ecole Royale des Elèves Protégés he completed his training at the Académie de France in Rome from 1771 to 1774. Although he impressed the then director of the Académie, Charles-Joseph Natoire, and formed friendships with the painters François-Guillaume Ménageot, François-André Vincent and Joseph-Benoît Suvée and the architects Pierre-Adrien Pâris and Jean-Jacques-Marie Huvé (1742–1808), his artistic activity during his years in Rome is obscure. A number of spectacular drawings in red chalk, such as those of the Villa d’Este, Tivoli (Orléans, Mus. B.-A.) and the Villa Colonna and Villa Negroni...

French, 19th century, male.

Born 20 April 1807, in Ceva (Piedmont), to a French father and an Italian mother; died 29 April 1841, in Paris.

Draughtsman.

Louis, called Aloysius, was a Romantic poet, journalist, short-story writer and playwright. He spent his childhood in Dijon, where he was fascinated by the medieval churches and houses that still survived in this former capital of the Duchy of Burgundy; he was also enthusiastic about the engravings of Jacques Callot and the tales of Hoffmann. After various unsuccessful attempts at journalism, he went to Paris and struck up friendships with Sainte-Beuve, Victor Pavie and, above all, David d'Angers. He also knew the great Romantic writers such as Victor Hugo. His friends encouraged him to publish his prose poems, inspired by the Middle Ages and Dijon, that he entitled ...

Swiss, 18th – 19th century, male.

Born 27 February 1767, in Geneva; died 21 February 1830, in Geneva.

Miniaturist.

Bertz was the son of Jeanne Françoise Marguerite Esther. In 1789 he was romantically linked with Madeleine-Thérèse Rouz, wife of Louis Barette.

(b Florence, Nov 28, 1784; d Florence, Sept 13, 1855).

Italian painter and teacher. A leading exponent of academic Romanticism in Italy, he initially received drawing lessons from his friend Luigi Sabatelli. From 1786 he attended the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence, where he studied under Giuseppe Piattoli (c. 1743–1823), Jean-Baptiste Desmarais (1756–1813) and Pietro Benvenuti. In 1811 he was made the Accademia’s Aiuto Maestro di Disegno e Figura, and in 1812 he won the Concorso Triennale. In 1815–16 he made the first of several visits to Bologna, where he admired and studied its 17th-century painters. This marked the beginning of his romantic turn. Paolo and Francesca (1816; ex-Alari priv. col., Milan; engraved by Giuseppe Cozzi in 1832, see Spalletti, p. 145), commissioned by the Conte Sante Alari of Milan, was the first Florentine work depicting a literary Romantic subject. Probably inspired by Sabatelli, it reflected a new Romantic ferment in the arts after the departure of the Bonapartes; two plays and a novel on the same theme were published around ...