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Article

Abildgaard, Nicolai Abraham  

Jens Peter Munk

(b Copenhagen, Sept 11, 1743; d Frederiksdal, Copenhagen, June 4, 1809).

Danish painter, designer and architect. His paintings reveal both Neo-classical and Romantic interests and include history paintings as well as literary and mythological works. The variety of his subject-matter reflects his wide learning, a feature further evidenced by the broad range of his creative output. In addition to painting, he produced decorative work, sculpture and furniture designs, as well as being engaged as an architect. Successfully combining both intellectual and imaginative powers, he came to be fully appreciated only in the 1980s.

He studied at the Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi in Copenhagen (1764–72), and in 1767 he assisted Johan Edvard Mandelberg (1730–86) in painting the domed hall of the Fredensborg Slot with scenes from the Homeric epic the Iliad. In 1772 he was granted a five-year travelling scholarship from the Kunstakademi to study in Rome. During his Roman sojourn he extensively copied works of art from the period of antiquity up to that of the Carracci family. His friendships with the Danish painter Jens Juel, the Swedish sculptor Johan Tobias Sergel and the Swiss painter Johann Heinrich Fuseli placed him among artists who were in the mainstream of a widespread upheaval in European art. In these years Abildgaard developed both Neo-classical and Romantic tastes; his masterpiece of the period is ...

Article

Aesthetic Movement  

Term used to describe a movement of the 1870s and 1880s that manifested itself in the fine and decorative arts and architecture in Britain and subsequently in the USA. Reacting to what was seen as evidence of philistinism in art and design, it was characterized by the cult of the beautiful and an emphasis on the sheer pleasure to be derived from it. In painting there was a belief in the autonomy of art, the concept of Art for Art’s Sake, which originated in France as a literary movement and was introduced into Britain around 1860.

The Aesthetic Movement was championed by the writers and critics Walter Pater, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Oscar Wilde. In keeping with Pater’s theories, the artists associated with it painted pictures without narrative or significant subject-matter. Dante Gabriel Rossetti took his inspiration from Venetian art because of its emphasis on colour and the decorative. This resulted in a number of half-length paintings of female figures, such as the ...

Article

Mélida y Alinari, Arturo  

Concha Vela

(b Madrid, July 24, 1849; d Madrid, Dec 15, 1902).

Spanish architect, sculptor and painter, brother of Enrique Mélida y Alinari. He embarked on a military career in 1866 but abandoned it two years later to study architecture, in which he graduated from the Escuela de Arquitectura, Madrid, in 1873 and which was to remain his prime concern. He worked on architectural decoration for the archives and library of the Congreso de los Diputados, the assembly room (Salón de Actos, 1884) of the Ateneo, and the lunettes at S María, Alcoy. He also provided mural and ceiling paintings for various aristocratic mansions in Madrid, including the houses of Zuburu, Veragua, Urquijo and that of the banker Bäuer, the latter in collaboration with the sculptor Mariano Benlliure. In addition he restored the paintings of the façade of the Casa de la Panadería, Madrid. He provided illustrations for several books, including the Leyendas (Madrid, 1901) of José Zorrilla y Moral (...

Article

Alt, Rudolf  

Sepp Kern

(von)

(b Vienna, Aug 28, 1812; d Vienna, March 12, 1905).

Austrian painter, draughtsman and printmaker. He was perhaps the most productive and accomplished watercolour painter in German-speaking Europe in the 19th century. On his frequent travels he produced local views, landscapes and interiors, often commissioned by aristocratic patrons. He studied with his father, Jakob Alt (1789–1872), a landscape and watercolour painter and one of the first to use the new technique of lithography. From the age of six Rudolf accompanied him on study trips, and, together with Alt’s other children, he coloured his father’s drawings. During his student days at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna (1825–32), Rudolf joined his father on further journeys and collaborated in his studio. In 1832 he won a prize, which simultaneously freed him from military service and marked the beginning of his independent artistic activity. In the same year he produced his first oil painting, after his own watercolour, of the ...

Article

Amador, Manuel E(ncarnación)  

Monica E. Kupfer

(b Santiago de Veraguas, Mar 25, 1869; d Panama City, Nov 12, 1952).

Panamanian painter, draftsman, and printmaker. He is known chiefly as the designer of the national flag (1903) of Panama. He studied business administration and had a long career in public office. When Panama became independent in 1903, he became Secretario de Hacienda and in 1904 Consul-General ad honorem to Hamburg. In 1908 he moved to New York, where he studied with Robert Henri, who strongly influenced his style of vigorous drawing, loose brushwork, distorted expressionist images, and somber colors, as in Head Study (1910; Panama City, R. Miró priv. col.; see Miró 1966). He produced most of his work between 1910 and 1914 and again after the late 1930s; his main subject was the human figure, but he also painted portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. On his return to Panama in the 1930s he worked as an auditor in the Contraloría General. After his retirement he resumed painting and produced some of his most passionate works, such as ...

Article

Américo de (Figueiredo e) Melo, Pedro  

Roberto Pontual

revised by Elaine Wilson

(b Areia, 1843; d Florence, 1905).

Brazilian painter. His precocious talent as a draftsman was recognized as early as 1853, when he accompanied the expedition led by the French naturalist Louis Jacques Brunet to the northeast of Brazil. He then went to Rio de Janeiro, where he entered the Academia Imperial das Belas Artes in 1855. Under the patronage of Emperor Peter II he lived in France from 1859 to 1864, studying with Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Horace Vernet at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His interests also included physics, philosophy, and literature. His essay “Refutation of the Life of Jesus by Renan” won him the decoration of the papal order of the Holy Sepulcher. He also painted one of his first important pictures at this time, Carioca (“Woman from Rio de Janeiro”; 1862; Rio de Janeiro, Mus. N. B.A.). On his return to Brazil he taught drawing (and, later, art history, aesthetics, and archaeology) at the Academia Imperial. When the Republic was proclaimed in ...

Article

Andrade [D’Andrade], Alfredo (Cesare Reis Freire) de  

Lucília Verdelho da Costa and Sandro Callerio

(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 ...

Article

Angelini, Costanzo  

Rosanna Cioffi

(b Santa Giusta degli Abruzzi, Sept 22, 1760; d Naples, June 22, 1853).

Italian draughtsman and painter. He trained in Rome under Marco Caprinozzi and was a pupil of Domenico Corvi at the Accademia di San Luca. The greatest influence on his work, however, was the style of Jacques-Louis David. Angelini soon distinguished himself as a skilled draughtsman and collaborated with the engravers Giovanni Volpato and Raphael Morghen on Principi del disegno tratti delle più eccellenti statue antiche (Rome, 1786), a work that was of fundamental importance in disseminating the Neo-classical style, particularly through the teaching of the academies. About 1790 Angelini travelled to Naples at the request of William Hamilton (i), the British Consul, in order to draw the antique vases in his collection (published Naples, 1791–5). His work was admired by several other collectors in Naples and in 1799 he was commissioned to draw the antique vases of the Marchese Vivenzio (published c. 1900).

With the introduction of French Neo-classicism in Naples, Angelini became the artist best able to respond to the demands of the new taste. In ...

Article

Angrand, Léonce (-Marie-François)  

Eleanor Laughlin

(b Paris, Aug 8, 1808; d Paris, Jan 11, 1886).

French painter, draftsman, and diplomat. While serving as French Vice-Consul in Lima (1834–1838), Angrand drew and painted scenes in Peru. His watercolors and sketches captured street views of architecture and social interaction in Arica, Arequipa, Lima, Cuzco, Ollantaytambo, Urubamba, and Tacna. He served as consul to other areas of Latin America (1839–1842 and 1845–1856), traveling to study and visually record ancient sites such as Tiwanaku and Copán among others. Angrand’s archaeological renderings are scientifically precise and accompanied by descriptions. As albums, his contemporary street scenes convey a sense of everyday life in 19th-century Peru, while also providing insight to race and class relations in urban settings.

Antiquités americaines: extrait de la Revue Générale de l’Architecture et des travaux publics. Paris, 1866. Available at: https://www.doaks.org/resources/rare-books/antiquita-c-s-ama-c-ricaines-extrait-de-la-revue-ga-c-na-c-rale-de-larchitecture-et-des-travaux-publics (accessed Nov 5, 2018).Desjardins, E. “Lettres sur les antiquités Tiaguanaco et l’origine presumable de la plus ancienne dans le Haut-Pérou, par Léonce Angrand.” ...

Article

Arens, Johann August  

Andreas Kreul

(b Hamburg, Oct 2, 1757; d Pisa, Aug 18, 1806).

German architect, draughtsman, landscape designer and painter. He studied from 1778 to 1783 at the University of Göttingen and the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen, where he was awarded four prizes. His early designs included drawings for the hothouse of the botanic gardens in Copenhagen and a lecture room at Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin. While visiting Paris in 1784–5 he devoted himself to the study of Revolutionary architecture, and in England and Italy (1786) he studied landscape design and ancient sites. In Rome in 1787 he met Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who later summoned him to Weimar to rebuild the prince’s Schloss. In addition to a number of designs for the palace at Weimar he produced drawings for various summer-houses. In 1790 he moved to Hamburg, his plans for the Schloss at Weimar still largely unexecuted. By the end of his life he had designed numerous public buildings and private houses in Hamburg, including the house for Bürgermeister ...

Article

Arkhipov [Pyrikov], Abram  

John E. Bowlt

(Yefimovich)

(b Yegorovo, Ryazan province, Aug 15, 1862; d Moscow, Sept 25, 1930).

Russian painter. He trained at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture under Vasily Perov, Aleksey Savrasov, Vladimir Makovsky and Vasily Polenov and joined the Wanderers (Peredvizhniki) in 1889 and the Union of Russian Artists in 1903. While indebted to the realist painting of Perov, Arkhipov also gave particular attention to effects of light, rhythm and texture, even in his most didactic canvases, such as Washerwomen (late 1890s; two versions Moscow, Tret’yakov Gal. and St Petersburg, Rus. Mus.). Arkhipov found a rich and diverse source of inspiration in the Russian countryside and the peasantry; he painted peasants at work, the melting of the snow, the local church and priest, the villages of the far north and the White Sea. Works such as The Lay Brother (1891) and Northern Village (1903; both Moscow, Tret’yakov Gal.) are evidence of Arkhipov’s important position in the history of late 19th-century Russian landscape painting. His concentration on ...

Article

Arnim, Ferdinand (Heinrich Ludwig) von  

Eva Börsch-Supan

(b Treptow an der Rega, Sept 15, 1814; d Potsdam, March 25, 1866).

German architect and watercolourist. He studied at the Bauakademie in Berlin (1833–8) and from c. 1841 was head of works in the Hofbaukommission. He was therefore given the task after 1845 of completing the projects in Sanssouci left unfinished at the death of Ludwig Persius (including the Paradeisgärtl, Wachturm am Ruinenberg, and the Friedenskirche). His own Potsdam projects included the Friedhofs cemetery buildings (1851), the Villa von Hacke (Jägerallee 1; 1847), villas at Zeppelinstrasse 172 (1850) and Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse 63 (1860–61), and his own villa at Weinbergstrasse 20 (1858: illustrated in nine lithographs published in 1865), as well as several villas and country houses in the area. They were still designed in the Italianate villa style favoured by Persius, but the structures are more solid and the forms more classical. In this way Arnim, who had also been teaching at the Bauakademie since ...

Article

Assyrian Revival  

Frederick N. Bohrer

Style of the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th, inspired by Assyrian artefacts of the 9th to 7th centuries bc. These were first brought to public attention through the excavations by Paul-Emile Botta (1802–70) at Khorsabad and Austen Henry Layard at Nimrud in the 1840s. By 1847 both the Louvre in Paris and the British Museum in London had begun to display these objects, the size and popularity of which were such that the Louvre created a separate Musée des Antiquités Orientales, while the British Museum opened its separate Nineveh Gallery in 1853. The same popularity, fuelled by Layard’s best-selling Nineveh and its Remains (London, 1849) and Botta’s elaborate Monument de Ninive (Paris, 1849–50), led to further explorations elsewhere in Mesopotamia.

Assyrian revivalism first appeared in England rather than France, which was then in political turmoil. The earliest forms of emulation can be found in the decorative arts, such as the ‘Assyrian style’ jewellery that was produced in England from as early as ...

Article

Atkinson, Lawrence  

Richard Cork

[Laurence]

(b Manchester, Jan 17, 1873; d Paris, Sept 21, 1931).

English painter, sculptor and draughtsman. He studied singing and music in Berlin and Paris. At first he earned his living by establishing himself as a singing teacher in Liverpool and London. By July 1913, when he exhibited in the Allied Artists’ Association in London, he was devoting an increasing amount of his energies to painting. His early work was Fauvist in affiliation, reflecting perhaps the teaching he had received at La Palette in Paris. Contact with Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists led him to pursue a more abstract path. In the spring of 1914 he joined the Rebel Art Centre with Wyndham Lewis and other artists who appeared in Blast magazine later that year.

Little is known about the development of Atkinson’s work at this crucial stage in his career. His signature was on the manifesto in the first issue of Blast, but his work was not reproduced in the magazine; his continuing involvement with other forms of art was demonstrated when his book of poems, ...

Article

Auberjonois, René  

Anne Pastori Zumbach

(b Lausanne, Aug 18, 1872; d Lausanne, Oct 11, 1957).

Swiss draughtsman, painter and illustrator. He began his career as an apprentice banker but abandoned this to study music and languages in Dresden, and then painting at the South Kensington School of Art, London (1895). In 1896 he went to Paris where he took courses in anatomy and became the pupil of Luc Olivier Merson and possibly of Whistler. In 1897 he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts but continued to frequent Merson’s studio. At the end of 1899, after a short stay in Bavaria, Auberjonois went to Florence, where he passed several months studying and copying the paintings of the Old Masters and painting the Tuscan landscape. Returning to Paris in 1901, he began to work independently, exhibiting for the first time at the Salon in Paris and at the Exposition Nationale Suisse des Beaux-Arts in Vevey. From 1901 to World War I he lived alternately in Paris and in Switzerland....

Article

Audubon, John James  

Amy Meyers

(Laforest)[Fougère, Jean-Jacques]

(b Les Cayes, Santo Domingo [now Haiti], April 26, 1785; d New York state, Jan 27, 1851).

American Naturalist, painter and draughtsman of French–Creole descent. Brought up in a French village near Nantes, he developed an interest in art and natural science, encouraged by his father and the naturalist Alcide Dessaline d’Orbigny. He is thought to have moved to Paris by 1802 to pursue formal art training; although the evidence is inconclusive, Audubon claimed to have studied in the studio of Jacques-Louis David.

In 1803 Audubon travelled to the USA to oversee Mill Grove, an estate owned by his father on the outskirts of Philadelphia, PA. Uninterested in practical affairs, he spent his time hunting and drawing birds. His drawings (many in Cambridge, MA, Harvard U., Houghton Lib.) from this period are executed primarily in pencil and pastel. They are conventional specimen drawings that define individual birds in stiff profile with little or no background. A number of these works, however, bear notations from Mark Catesby’s ...

Article

Baca Flor, Carlos  

W. Iain Mackay

(b Islay, Arequipa, 1867; d Neuilly-sur-Seine, Feb 20, 1941).

Peruvian painter and draftsman. His family moved to Chile when he was four, and in 1882 he entered the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Santiago. In recognition of his rejection of an offer of Chilean nationality, the Peruvian government invited him to Lima in 1887 to assist him with his studies. In 1890 he went to Paris, continuing on to Rome where he studied under Francisco Pradilla at the Academia Española de Bellas Artes and again in Paris under Jean-Paul Laurens and Benjamin Constant at the Académie Julien in 1893. In Paris he was commissioned to paint important society and government figures; in 1908 the American banker and collector J. Pierpont Morgan summoned him to New York, where he lived for twenty years, painting 120 portraits. In 1926 he became a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and three years later he settled in Paris again. His painting was academically accomplished and realist in style, influenced by Leonardo, Rembrandt, and Hans Holbein. He was a careful observer of detail, and he achieved astonishing physical resemblance to his subjects. The prominent figures he portrayed include ...

Article

Baes, (Pierre-)Jean(-Baptiste)  

Alfred Willis

(b Brussels, Aug 20, 1848; d Ixelles, Brussels, Dec 13, 1914).

Belgian architect, designer, painter and writer . He came from a family of artists: one brother, Charles Baes, was a glass painter and two others, Henri Baes and Pierre Baes, were decorative painters. Jean Baes studied decorative design at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, and, from 1867 to 1871, in the firm of Charle-Albert. He subsequently trained in architecture in the studios of Emile Janlet, Wynand Janssens and Alphonse Balat. Baes devoted most of his professional career—which was cut short in 1895 by a debilitating illness—to architecture but he also worked as an interior designer, a graphic designer, an architectural draughtsman and, especially, as a watercolourist of architectural subjects. In 1872 he was a founder-member of Belgium’s Société Centrale d’Architecture and after 1874 he collaborated on its journal, L’Emulation. In 1886 he became Assistant Director of the newly established Ecole des Arts Décoratifs, Brussels, where his pupils included Paul Hankar and ...

Article

Bagatti Valsecchi family  

Laura Mattioli Rossi

Italian family of artists, architects and collectors . Pietro Bagatti Valsecchi (b Milan, 15 April 1802; d Milan, 27 Nov 1864) was adopted by Baron Lattanzio Valsecchi and assumed the latter’s surname and inherited his estate. He gained a degree in mathematics and physics but later devoted himself to painting miniatures on ivory, enamel, glass, metal and porcelain, specializing in these techniques in Paris and Geneva. Returning to Milan, he soon gained considerable recognition for such work and took part in major exhibitions. In 1837 he presented a group of works at the Salon in Paris, including a miniature copy on ivory of Francesco Hayez’s Mary Queen of Scots Mounting the Scaffold (1827; Milan, Bagatti Valsecchi Col.) and a copy on porcelain of Francesco Podesti’s Raphael’s Studio (Milan, Bib. Ambrosiana). In 1842 he was made a noble of the Austrian Empire for his artistic achievements, and the Emperor Ferdinand acquired one of his paintings on porcelain, ...

Article

Bakker Korff, Alexander Hugo  

Maarten Wurfbain

(b The Hague, Aug 31, 1824; d Leiden, Jan 31, 1882).

Dutch painter and draughtsman. He first trained under Cornelis Kruseman at the Academie in The Hague (1841–5), then specialized in history painting at the Antwerp Academie under Gustaf Wappers from 1845 to 1848. He set up as a painter in The Hague in 1848 and exhibited large history paintings in 1848 and 1849. An example of a history painting from this period is Death bed of Frederick Henry (Apeldoorn, Pal. Het Loo; study, Leiden, Stedel. Mus. Lakenhal). By 1852 he was living in Leiden but the following year, because of failing eyesight, he temporarily gave up painting until 1858 or 1859, when he started painting small-scale, realistic genre scenes based on photographs (e.g. The Pastry Cook; Amsterdam, Rijksmus.). From 1861 until his death he regularly exhibited genre paintings. Most of these are small and generally depict one or more women (never men) engaged in conversation or domestic occupations. He was awarded the knighthood of Leopold when ...