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(b in or near Kufstein, Tyrol, ?June 16, 1712; d Augsburg, before Sept 7, 1761).

German draughtsman and painter. Kilian, his earliest biographer, stated that after training as a blacksmith with his father, he learnt the art of glass painting in Salzburg. Following travels through Austria, Hungary and Italy, Baumgartner was authorized in late 1733 to live in Augsburg, on condition that he only worked as a glass painter.

Only a few examples of Baumgartner’s own glass paintings have survived; however, he must have meanwhile worked intensively on drawings for copperplate engraving. There are hundreds of these drawings; they were made with extreme care, often on tinted paper and often on a very large scale, for publishers in Augsburg such as Klauber, Engelbrecht and Kilian. Designs in oil on canvas for engravings, such as Moses Ordering the Killing of the Midianite Women (1760; Augsburg, Schaezlerpal.), were a particular speciality of Baumgartner. By far the largest series numerically is for a calendar of saints, the ...

(d Paris, March 22, 1772).

French cabinetmaker of German birth. About 1749 he became Marchand Ebéniste Privilégié du Roy Suivant la Cour et Conseils de Sa Majesté. He was active during the reign of Louis XV and was the only French cabinetmaker who was equally competent in both the Louis XV and Neo-classical styles. His pieces were few but of an extremely high standard; he employed fine wood marquetry, Japanese lacquer and Boulle marquetry, as well as producing rigorous bronzes. Although he was little known to the general public of his own day, such leading dealers as Léger Bertin, Hébert, Charles Darnault, Lazare Duvaux, Poirier and Claude-François Julliot gave him commissions, and through them he was patronized by a fashionable élite. His extant works in the Louis XV style include desks fitted with porcelain plaques, a series of sumptuous marquetry commodes (e.g. c. 1755; Toledo, OH, Mus. A.) and an astonishing upright writing-table (1758...

(b Mantua, Sept 23, 1690; d Mantua, Aug 18, 1769).

Italian painter. He was the son of the goldsmith Giovanni Bazzani and trained in the studio of Giovanni Canti (1653–1715). Giuseppe was a refined and cultivated artist (Tellini Perina, 1988) and as a young man profited from the rich collections of art in Mantua, studying the works of Andrea Mantegna, Giulio Romano, 16th-century Venetian painters, especially Paolo Veronese, and Flemish artists, above all Rubens. His earliest works, for example the Assumption (Milan, priv. col., see Caroli, pl. 20), reveal an affinity with contemporary Venetian painters such as Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Federico Bencovich and Andrea Celesti, but Bazzani rapidly absorbed the influence of Antonio Balestra, Domenico Fetti and most of all Rubens and Veronese. The inspiration of the last two artists is apparent in a number of works that may be dated in the 1720s and early 1730s. These include the Miracles of Pius V, the Conversion of a Heretic...

(b Türkheim, bapt April 15, 1688; d Augsburg, April 2, 1762).

German painter, teacher, draughtsman and printmaker. His frescoes and altarpieces and his teaching established him as the dominant figure in the art life of Augsburg in the earlier 18th century. He came from a family of well-known Swabian sculptors, cabinetmakers and painters, with whom he probably initially trained. The Bavarian Duke Maximilian Philip paid for him to study (1702–8) with the Munich court painter Johann Andreas Wolff, after which he was summoned by the Elector of the Palatinate to decorate the court church of St Hubertus in Düsseldorf (1708–9; destr.). In 1710 or 1712 Bergmüller frescoed the church of Kreuzpullach, near Wolfratshausen. In his request for permission to marry and for mastership in Augsburg in 1712, he referred to an otherwise undocumented stay in the Netherlands. He settled permanently in the Imperial Free City in 1713 and attended its Reichstädtische Kunstakademie from 1715. From this time he rose to become the most influential painter and teacher in Augsburg, with apprentices coming from beyond the city, including ...

(b Paris, Jan 1668; d Paris, April 11, 1736).

French painter and draughtsman. In 1678 he was apprenticed to Guy-Louis Vernansal (1648–1729); he later became a pupil of Jean Jouvenet and in 1684–5 of Bon Boullogne. By 1684 he was enrolled at the Académie Royale, Paris, and a year later won the Prix de Rome with his Construction of Noah’s Ark (untraced). He probably arrived in Rome towards the end of 1685, and he stayed until the winter of 1688–9. While in Italy he studied the work of Raphael and the Carracci family, as well as showing an interest in Correggio. He also led a student protest against the teaching régime of the Académie de France in Rome. After some months in Lyon he returned to Paris in 1689 and began to work on minor commissions, including drawings of the statues in the park at Versailles (Paris, Bib. N.). The influence of the Boullogne brothers is evident in his small-scale paintings of this time, such as ...

(b Ancona, c. 1710; d Bologna, Jan 2, 1777).

Italian painter and draughtsman. He was a pupil of Vittorio Bigari, whose Rococo style he reinterpreted in a highly personal manner. Bertuzzi’s work was also indebted to Luca Giordano, Antonio Gionima and Giuseppe Maria Crespi. Bertuzzi’s early paintings, which continue the traditions of Emilian art, include scenes from the Life of the Blessed Franco (1753–4; Medicina, Carmelite church) in which he collaborated with the specialist in perspective, Vincenzo del Buono (fl 1726). A theatrical brilliance also distinguishes Bertuzzi’s five standards with the Mysteries of the Passion (1753; Ancona, Gesù) and his paintings on tempera, the Crucifixion and figures of saints and popes (1750–57; Bologna, Madonna di S Luca), which suggest the inspiration of Crespi. Between 1755 and 1760 Bertuzzi frescoed the small chapel of the palazzo ‘di sopra’ at Bagnarola and executed four large decorative paintings in tempera featuring Old Testament scenes (Milan, Pal. Visconti di Modrone Erba) for the gallery. Bertuzzi’s style is distinguished by his virtuoso execution, most evident in his preparatory oil sketches; significantly, the sketches (Milan, Geri priv. col., see Roli, p. 230) for these pictures have been attributed to various 18th-century Venetian painters, whose style he clearly imitated. In the 1750s and 1760s Bertuzzi collaborated with the landscape painters ...

German family of decorative designers. Brothers Paul Amadeus (fl 1737–52) and Johann Adolf (fl c. 1743) both worked with the Bavarian court architect François de Cuvilliés on Schloss Brühl, a German Electoral castle halfway between Bonn and Cologne; they worked on the interiors of the Falkenlust (...

(b Nantes, May 16, 1667; d Paris, March 19, 1754).

French architect and writer. He maintained the tradition of the Grand Style in France between Jules Hardouin Mansart, who was born in 1646, and Ange-Jacques Gabriel, who died in 1782. His work also provided an important bridge between that of Louis Le Vau in the mid-17th century and those of the architects of the Piranesian generation of Neo-classicists in the mid-18th century, such as Etienne-Louis Boullée, whom he influenced.

His father, Jean Boffrand, was a minor architect and sculptor. Germain Boffrand came to Paris at the age of fourteen to study sculpture, working for three years in the studio of François Girardon. From 1685 he worked as a draughtsman in the Bâtiments du Roi under Jules Hardouin Mansart. Through his uncle, the court poet Philippe Quinault, Boffrand met important artists and aristocrats, who were to prove useful connections later. By the late 1690s he was supervising architect of the new Place Vendôme, Paris, but in ...

[Fr.: ‘swollen’]

Having an outward swelling curve. The term is used with particular reference to French Rococo chests of drawers, which first appear in the bombé shape in the 1740s. The swollen section is normally in the upper half; when it is in the lower half, it is sometimes known as ‘kettle shape’. In colonial America bombé furniture was mostly made in Massachusetts, primarily in Boston but also in centres such as Salem. In American bombé the swollen part is in the lower section in forms such as chests- of-drawers, desk and bookcases, chest-on-chests and dressing tables.

[Santiago]

(b Piacenza, 1705; d Madrid, 18 or Sept 20, 1759).

Italian architect, painter, urban planner and stage designer, active in Spain. He was a pupil in Piacenza of the painters Bartolomeo Rusca (1680–1745), Andrea Galluzzi (fl 1700–1743) and Giovanni Battista Galluzzi (fl c. 1730–40). In 1728 he was one of a number of artists summoned to Spain by the Marchese Annibale Scotti to assist with the construction of royal projects that were already under way and to introduce an Italian influence in place of the French style that had been introduced by the Bourbon kings. He worked at the Aranjuez Palace with the French engineer Léandre Brachelieu (fl c. 1733–9) and then in 1735 became Director of Royal Works of Decoration. He specialized in quadratura painting and, in addition to his work at Aranjuez, where his fresco vault decorations provided fictive trompe l’oeil architectural settings for mythological figures executed by Rusca and ...

(b Dogliani, Dec 27, 1713; d ?Turin, Nov 1770).

Italian architect, draughtsman and engineer. In 1733–6 he was a pupil of Bernardo Antonio Vittone, producing ten plates for Vittone’s Istruzione elementari per indirizzo de’giovani allo studio dell’architettura civile (Lugano, 1760). In 1748 he published a practical handbook on the stability of buildings. Having met Robert Wood in Rome, he accompanied him as architectural draughtsman on an archaeological expedition to Asia Minor and Syria in 1750–51 (sketchbooks in London, Soc. Promot. Hell. & Roman Stud. Lib.), a trip financed by the young John Bouverie. On getting to London in 1751, he prepared the drawings (London, RIBA) for Wood’s books on Palmyra and Baalbek. In 1752–60 Borra undertook commissions for English patrons, creating Rococo interiors in 1755 for the residence of Edward Howard, 9th Duke of Norfolk, in St James’s Square, London (destr. 1938; Music Room reconstr., London, V&A). At Stowe, Bucks, he was responsible for the interior decoration for ...

(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 ...

(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....

(b La Crépelière, Chavagnes-en-Paillers, March 17, 1681; d Valsaín, Spain, Feb 13, 1740).

French sculptor. He studied with Nicolas Coustou and won the Prix de Rome in 1705 with a low relief of Judith before Holofernes (untraced). He was in Rome from 1709 to 1712 and at the Villa Borghese made a marble copy of the Antique group of the Centaur with Cupid (completed 1712; untraced since 1858), which was installed in the park at Marly in 1715.

On his return to Paris, Bousseau was accepted (agrée) by the Académie Royale in 1713 and received (reçu) as a full member in 1715 on presentation of a marble statue of a Soldier Bending his Bow (Paris, Louvre). This well-received work, of which the noted collector Lalive de Jully owned a terracotta version, has a dynamic, Rococo quality in the treatment of the swirling drapery, and in the multiplicity of planes of which it is composed, that owes much to Coustou (e.g. ...

[ReinierReijnier]

(b Wesel, Gelderland, 1702; d Amsterdam, 1788).

Dutch silversmith. In his youth he moved to Amsterdam, where he was active from c. 1734; a silversmith with the initials R.B. received the citizenship of Amsterdam that year. He specialized in delicate bread- and cake-baskets in the Rococo style, all of which have the same basic form: a graceful ogee-shape with an openwork body and curving sides tapering into handles at either end. They are decorated with openwork patterns of trellis or foliage. The rims and bases are trimmed with linked volutes or fillets and groups of flowers and fruits, and Rococo scrolls form the feet (e.g. basket, 1770; Amsterdam, Rijksmus.). In the later 18th century, with increasing mechanization, some components of his baskets were machine-made. Though chiefly known for these elaborately decorated objects Brandt also produced relatively plain ones, for example an inkstand of 1735 (Amsterdam, Rijksmus.), which is undecorated except for a small pierced lid, and a large tureen and salver (...

(b Stockholm, Aug 16, 1759; d Stockholm, Dec 1, 1818).

Swedish painter, also active in England. He studied at the Kungliga Akademi för de Fria Konsterna in Stockholm from the late 1770s until 1787, when he painted King Gustav III in the prevailing Rococo style. Later that year he visited England, France and Italy, discovering the emergent Neo-classical style as well as the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance. He then settled in London, working briefly in the studio of Joshua Reynolds, whose portrait he painted (1791; Stockholm, Ksthögskolan). Breda specialized in portrait painting and from 1788 exhibited annually at the Royal Academy in London. His style was eclectic, displaying the influence of such contemporaries as Reynolds and Gainsborough, as well as the Italian and Dutch Baroque masters, particularly Rembrandt.

Breda visited Birmingham during the early 1790s, painting portraits of several members of the Lunar Society, including James Watt (1792; London, N.P.G.). In 1795 he visited Paris; on his return to Stockholm the following year he immediately became a sought-after portrait painter and was made a professor at the academy that same year. The nascent Romanticism that can be seen in some of his London portraits developed steadily in the works painted during his later career in Stockholm. He was knighted in ...

German palace in the town of Bruchsal, situated c. 25 km south of Speyer between Heidelberg and Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg. When Damian Hugo Schönborn was elected Prince–Bishop of Speyer in 1719, he initially intended to rebuild the destroyed bishop’s palace that was attached to the north flank of Speyer Cathedral, but the project brought him into conflict with the Protestant municipal authorities. He then decided to construct a new Residenz on the northern edge of Bruchsal, which had been part of the bishopric of Speyer since the 11th century. As war could be expected at any time in the area, the Residenz complex was to consist of individual buildings separated from one another and grouped around courtyards, an arrangement that would help to control the spread of fire. Plans were procured from Maximilian von Welsch, the architect of Damian Hugo’s uncle, Lothar Franz, Elector of Mainz. Von Welsch’s scheme for Schloss Bruchsal is lost, but his ability to arrange larger groups of buildings effectively on a site suggests that he devised the layout of free-standing buildings and interlocked axes. The tall, rectangular block of the palace was placed on an axis formed by a tree-lined avenue and gardens on one side and on the other by a symmetrical arrangement of buildings and a large courtyard that extended over the adjoining Bergstrasse (now Schönbornstrasse). The street was straddled by the Damian Gate at one end, and at the other it was bracketed by long rows of buildings. Work began first on the flanking blocks, to the designs of ...

[Augustusburg]

German Electoral castle, c. 8 km west of the Rhine, halfway between Bonn and Cologne. The medieval castle, a massive rectangular building containing a court and surrounded by a moat, was extensively destroyed by Louis XIV’s troops in 1689. Elector Joseph Clemens of Cologne decided to rebuild the ruin, and in 1715 his architectural adviser, the Parisian court architect Robert de Cotte, submitted plans for the project. No work had begun, however, when Joseph Clemens died in 1723. His nephew and successor, Clemens August, immediately took over the project, employing an experienced local architect, Johann Conrad Schlaun. In his scheme Schlaun incorporated much of the existing fabric. He duplicated the existing north-west tower with another in the south-west and retained the moat around the whole site, creating a C-shaped building that was open to the east. Construction of the two-storey elevation, set on a one-storey base and capped by a mansard roof, was complete by ...

(b Rolle, Vaud, Oct 3, 1758; d Paris, Oct 9, 1815).

Swiss painter. He came of a prosperous Huguenot family and trained to be a merchant before deciding to become an artist. His first tutor was Nicolas Henri Joseph Fassin, who was staying in Geneva at the time; under his guidance, Brun made copies of Flemish masters. In Geneva he became friendly with Pierre-Louis De La Rive, worked in his Geneva studio and accompanied him on a journey to Mannheim and Dresden. In his own painting Brun soon specialized in charming hunting scenes with Rococo overtones in the style of Philips Wouwerman. In 1779 he set out on an Italian journey that lasted several years. In 1783 he travelled from Turin to Paris, where his hunting scenes soon became very popular with the French court: he painted portraits of Marie-Antoinette Hunting and Louis XVI Hunting. He became a member of the Académie Royale in Paris in 1788 but in 1792 fled from the French Revolution to his homeland; there he took part in the Vaudois independence movement. He was burgomaster of Versoix from ...

(b Locarno, ?1723; d Munich, April 1763).

German porcelain modeller of Swiss birth. Although little is known about his early life, he is recorded as joining the Neudeck factory near Munich in November 1754 as Modellmeister; the factory was later moved to the Nymphenburg Palace, from which it then took its name. From that time until his death he produced one of the most remarkable series of porcelain figures ever modelled. Beginning with small Ovidian gods (e.g. Flora, 1755–8; Frankfurt am Main, Mus. Ksthandwk), nude putti with various classical attributes on fairly simple bases, he then made a series of figures of street vendors including an egg seller (e.g. c. 1755; Hamburg, Mus. Kst & Gew.) and a mushroom seller. These early figures do not reflect the full Rococo movement of Bustelli’s later work. They do, however, display one essential characteristic of his entire oeuvre: a tendency to conceive his figures with faceted planiform surfaces, more reminiscent of wood-carving than clay-modelling, which may suggest that he was trained as a wood-carver. His figures seem to carry on in porcelain the rich traditions of the south German Rococo, and his first major compositions, including a Crucifix, a Virgin and a St John, are all in the direct tradition of south German ecclesiastical sculpture; at one time they were even ascribed to the sculptor ...