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Article

Aleu y Teixidor, Andrés  

Carlos Cid Priego

(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 ...

Article

Couture, Thomas  

Albert Boime

(b Senlis, Dec 21, 1815; d Villiers-le-Bel, March 3, 1879).

French painter and teacher. A student of Antoine-Jean Gros in 1830–38 and Paul Delaroche in 1838–9, he demonstrated precocious ability in drawing and was expected to win the Prix de Rome. He tried at least six times between 1834 and 1839, but achieved only second prize in 1837 (entry untraced). Disgusted with the politics of the academic system, Couture withdrew and took an independent path. He later attacked the stultified curriculum of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and discouraged his own students from entering this institution. He first attained public notoriety at the Paris Salon with Young Venetians after an Orgy (1840; Montrouge, priv. col., see Boime, p. 85), the Prodigal Son (1841; Le Havre, Mus. B.-A.) and the Love of Gold (1844; Toulouse, Mus. Augustins). These early canvases are treated in a moralizing and anecdotal mode; the forms and compositional structures, like the debauched and corrupt protagonists, are sluggish and dull. Yet what made his work seem fresh to the Salon audience was his use of bright colour and surface texture derived from such painters as Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps and Eugène Delacroix, while his literary bent and methodical drawing demonstrated his mastery of academic tradition. The critics Théophile Gautier and Paul Mantz (...

Article

Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique  

Patricia Condon

(b Montauban, Aug 29, 1780; d Paris, Jan 14, 1867).

French painter. He was the last grand champion of the French classical tradition of history painting. He was traditionally presented as the opposing force to Delacroix in the early 19th-century confrontation of Neo-classicism and Romanticism, but subsequent assessment has shown the degree to which Ingres, like Neo-classicism, is a manifestation of the Romantic spirit permeating the age. The chronology of Ingres’s work is complicated by his obsessive perfectionism, which resulted in multiple versions of a subject and revisions of the original. For this reason, all works cited in this article are identified by catalogue raisonné number: Wildenstein (w) for paintings; Naef (n) for portrait drawings; and Delaborde (d) for history drawings.

His father, Jean-Marie-Joseph Ingres (1755–1814), a decorative painter and sculptor as well as an amateur musician, taught him the basics of drawing and also the violin. In accord with contemporary academic practice, Ingres devoted much of his attention to copying from his father’s collection of prints after such masters as Raphael, Titian, Correggio, Rubens, Watteau and Boucher; none of these copies survives. The earliest known drawings, some signed ...

Article

Magni, Pietro  

Marica Magni

(b Milan, Oct 21, 1817; d Milan, Jan 20, 1877).

Italian sculptor. He studied briefly at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan and subsequently attended the studio of the Neo-classical sculptor Abbondio Sangiorgio (1798–1879). In his later artistic activity he was deeply influenced by the purity of the work of the Tuscan sculptor Lorenzo Bartolini, whose Trust in God (1834–6; Milan, Mus. Poldi Pezzoli) he saw at the annual exhibition at the Brera in 1837. He made the traditional study trip to Rome, where, in 1849, during the unrest of the Risorgimento, he joined Giuseppe Garibaldi’s ranks. Later returning to Rome, he achieved public prominence with his statue of David Launching his Slingstone (Milan, Gal. A. Mod.), which won the Premio Canonica at the Brera in 1850 and was exhibited there in 1851 and at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855. At the Brera exhibition of 1853 he received great acclaim for his sober representation of ...

Article

Palagi, (Filippo) Pelagio  

Roberta J. M. Olson

(b Bologna, 15 May ?1775–7; d Turin, March 6, 1860).

Italian painter, architect, designer and collector. At the age of 12 he began to frequent the house in Bologna of his patron Conte Carlo Filippo Aldrovandi Marescotti (1763–1823), whose collections and library provided his early artistic education and engendered his taste for collecting. From 1795 he worked on several decorative schemes with the theatre designer and decorator Antonio Basoli (1774–1848), and it was perhaps in theatre designs that Palagi was first exposed to an eclectic range of motifs from exotic cultures. He was influenced by the linear, mannered style of Felice Giani, with whom he frequented the important evening drawing sessions at the house of the engraver Francesco Rosaspina (1762–1841). Beginning in 1802, he participated in the informal Accademia della Pace, Bologna, as well as studying at the Accademia Clementina, and was elected to the Accademia Nazionale di Belle Arti of Bologna in 1803...

Article

Rude, François  

Philip Ward-Jackson

(b Dijon, Jan 4, 1784; d Paris, Nov 3, 1855).

French sculptor. He was of working-class origins and Neo-classical training. After 1830 he identified with the emergent group of Romantic sculptors in France, at the same time retaining his own strong sense of monumentalism. His massive stone relief on the Arc de Triomphe, Paris, popularly known as ‘La Marseillaise’ (1833–6), and his bronze allegory Napoleon Awakening to Immortality (1845–7; Fixin, Parc Noisot) are memorable nostalgic celebrations of the military heroism of the Revolutionary period.

Rude was the son of a Dijon stovemaker and locksmith who supported the aims of the French Revolution to the extent of enrolling his infant son, in 1793, in one of the juvenile battalions known punningly as ‘Les Royals Bonbons’. François was early apprenticed to his father, but his interest in art was awakened in 1800, when he attended a prize-giving ceremony at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Dijon. François Devosges, founder and director of this regional school, subsequently persuaded Rude’s father to allow his son to attend its courses in his spare time. After four years of such study François Rude received his first commission, from a local tax inspector, ...

Article

Tieck, (Christian) Friedrich  

Jutta von Simson

(b Berlin, Aug 14, 1776; d Berlin, May 12, 1851).

German sculptor. He was initially apprenticed to Christian Friedrich Heinrich Siegismund Bettkober (1746–1809), while simultaneously attending drawing-classes at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin under Johann Gottfried Schadow, to whose studio he moved in 1794. His brother Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853), the Romantic poet, introduced him to the literary circle of the Romantics. From 1798 he spent three years in Paris, where he entered Louis David’s studio. In 1801, on his return journey, he met Goethe in Weimar and sculpted his portrait bust (Weimar, Goethe-Nmus. Frauenplan). Through Goethe’s mediation, he received the commission for decorative relief panels (e.g. the Prince as Protector of the Arts and Sciences, 1801–5; all in situ) for the Schloss in Weimar. In 1805 he won a scholarship to Rome, where he met Christian Daniel Rauch and they began a friendship that would be decisive for the future direction of Tieck’s life. In Carrara between ...

Article

Schwanthaler, Ludwig (Michael) von  

Norbert Götz

(b Munich, Aug 26, 1802; d Munich, Nov 14, 1848).

Bavarian and Austrian sculptor, son of Franz Jakob Schwanthaler. He first trained with his father and then (1819–22) attended the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, established in Munich in 1808. As a pupil of Albrecht Adam, he first trained as a painter of battle pictures but then turned increasingly to sculpture. After his father’s death he took over his studio, receiving his first official commission in 1824 from Maximilian I Joseph of Bavaria (reg 1806–25), for a cycle of reliefs with scenes from ancient mythology for a table centre. Schwanthaler was appointed a court sculptor, most of his activity being connected with the works of art and buildings commissioned by Ludwig I, King of Bavaria, from 1825. Periods spent by Schwanthaler in Rome in the years 1826–7 and 1832–4 were to have a crucial impact on his further development as a practising artist: in Bertel Thorvaldsen’s studio he saw how an up-to-date large-scale artist’s studio of European renown was run as a business, and he adopted this as a model for his own studio in Munich. There he soon became a much sought-after sculptor, both at court and among the middle classes. At times he had as many as 50 pupils working in his studio. In ...