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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

Bertini, Giuseppe  

Fernando Mazzocca

(b Milan, Dec 11, 1825; d Milan, Nov 24, 1898).

Italian painter, decorative artist and museum director. After studying under Luigi Sabatelli, Giuseppe Bisi (1787–1869) and Francesco Hayez at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan, Bertini worked in his father’s firm, which manufactured stained-glass windows. He then won a prize for a work of art connected with industry in the Accademia competition of 1844, for which he had submitted a Rest on the Flight into Egypt, painted on glass. The following year his Dante and Brother Ilario (Milan, Brera) took first prize and in 1846 the large-scale Tasso Dying in the Monastery of S Onofrio (ex-priv. col., Milan) was acclaimed. In the same year Bertini began his work as a fresco painter by decorating a room in the Palazzo Busca in Milan, where he depicted Dante and other famous Italians. After inspiring visits to Rome and Venice (1847 and 1848), where the work of Giambattista Tiepolo impressed him enormously, Bertini returned to Milan and devoted himself to great historical subjects. He was especially drawn to Lombard themes, but the painting that made his name was ...

Article

Day, Lewis Foreman  

Joellen Secondo

(b Peckham Rye, London, Jan 29, 1845; d London, April 18, 1910).

English designer and writer. He was educated in France and Germany, but his interest in design was provided by visits to the South Kensington Museum, London (now the Victoria & Albert Museum). In 1865 he entered the office of Lavers & Barraud, glass painters and designers. Some time later he became keeper of cartoons at Clayton & Bell and by 1870 had joined Heaton, Butler & Bayne, for whom he worked on the decoration of Eaton Hall, Ches. In late 1880 Day started his own business designing textiles, wallpapers, stained glass, embroidery, carpets, tiles, pottery, furniture, silver, jewellery and book covers. He designed tiles for Maw & Co. and Pilkington’s Tile and Pottery Co., stained glass and wallpaper for W. B. Simpson & Co., wallpapers for Jeffrey & Co. and textiles for Turnbull & Stockdale where he was made Art Director in 1881.

Day was a founder-member and Secretary of the ...

Article

Doesburg, Theo van  

Allan Doig

(b Utrecht, Aug 30, 1883; d Davos, Switzerland, March 7, 1931).

Dutch painter, architect, designer and writer. He was officially registered as the son of Wilhelm Küpper and Henrietta Catharina Margadant, but he was so convinced that his mother’s second husband, Theodorus Doesburg, was his father that he took his name. Little is known of his early life, but he began painting naturalistic subjects c. 1899. In 1903 he began his military service, and around the same time he met his first wife, Agnita Feis, a Theosophist and poet. Between about 1908 and 1910, much influenced by the work of Honoré Daumier, he produced caricatures, some of which were later published in his first book De maskers af! (1916). Also during this period he painted some Impressionist-inspired landscapes and portraits in the manner of George Hendrik Breitner. Between 1914 and 1915 the influence of Kandinsky became clear in such drawings as Streetmusic I and Streetmusic II (The Hague, Rijksdienst Beeld. Kst) and other abstract works....

Article

Freundlich, Otto  

Gottlieb Leinz

(b Stolp [now Stupsk, Poland], July 10, 1878; d Maidanek concentration camp, nr Lublin, March 9, 1943).

German painter, sculptor, stained-glass designer and writer. He studied art history (1903–4) in Berlin and Munich. After a visit to Florence (1905–6), he began to experiment with sculpture and studied with Lothar von Kunowski (b 1866) in Berlin (1907–8). He spent 1908–9 in Paris, where he met Picasso, Braque and Gris. Between 1910 and 1914 he divided his time between Paris, Berlin and Cologne: from 1910 he participated in the exhibitions of the Berlin Secession and from 1913 had contacts with the Sturm-Galerie in Berlin. His expressive early works included both sculptures and flat, geometric paintings (e.g. Composition with Figure, 1911; Pontoise, Mus. Pontoise). Having spent World War I in Cologne, from 1918 to 1924 he lived in Berlin, where he was one of the founder-members of the Novembergruppe in 1918, and contributed to the radical newspaper Die Aktion: Zeitschrift für Freiheitliche Politik und Literatur Aktion....

Article

Galimard, (Nicolas-)Auguste  

Jon Whiteley

(b Paris, March 25, 1813; d Montigny-lès-Corneilles, nr Paris, Jan 16, 1880).

French painter, writer and lithographer. He was given his first art lesson by his uncle, Nicolas-Auguste Hesse, in Paris, then moved to the studio of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. According to Auvray in the Dictionnaire général, he also studied with the sculptor Denys Foyatier. Like a number of Ingres’s pupils, Galimard was involved in decorating the newly built or newly restored churches of the July Monarchy and the Second Empire. At his first Salon in 1835 he exhibited Three Marys at the Tomb, a Châtelaine of the 15th Century and a portrait of his cousin, Mme Lefèvre (all untraced). The following year he exhibited one of his first attempts at glass painting, The Queen of the Angels (broken by a gust of wind during the exhibition), and a painting, Liberty Leaning on Christ Flanked by the Apostles James and John (untraced), a subject indicating sympathy with the social ideology of Charles Fourier or Saint-Simon. In ...

Article

Holst, Richard (Nicolaüs) Roland  

Jan Jaap Heij

(b Amsterdam, Dec 4, 1868; d Bloemendaal, Dec 31, 1938).

Dutch painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer and stained-glass artist. He trained at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (1886–90), under the directorship of August Allebé. Having initially painted and drawn Impressionistic landscapes, he started working in the ’t Gooi region in 1892, where, influenced by Vincent van Gogh and Jan Toorop, he made a number of Symbolist drawings and lithographs. In 1896 he married the Dutch writer Henriette van der Schalk. They both devoted themselves to the recently founded Sociaal Democratische Arbeiders Partij. In the years up to c. 1900 Holst produced among other things a series of lithographs of political cartoons with socialist content, as well as serene landscapes and paintings of girls from the village of Huizen. His allegorical murals (1902; in situ), on topics such as ‘Industry’ or ‘Commerce’, in the new Koopmansbeurs in Amsterdam by H. P. Berlage (1876–1903), marked an important point in his career as his first opportunity to construct a monumental piece of work. Partly inspired by the murals in the town hall at ’s Hertogenbosch by Antoon Derkinderen, he developed a tight, stylized type of design, which he believed to be ideal for visually representing idealistic and exalted thoughts. In his murals (...

Article

La Farge, John  

Henry Adams

(b New York, March 31, 1835; d Newport, RI, Nov 14, 1910).

American painter, decorative artist, and writer. He grew up in New York in a prosperous and cultivated French-speaking household. He received his first artistic training at the age of six from his maternal grandfather, an amateur architect and miniature painter. While at Columbia Grammar School, he learnt English watercolour techniques and afterwards studied briefly with George Inness’s teacher, the landscape painter Régis-François Gignoux. In 1856, while touring Europe, he spent a few weeks in Thomas Couture’s studio. Returning to New York via England, he was impressed by the Pre-Raphaelite paintings at the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition of 1857 and later said that they had influenced him when he began to paint. In 1859 he decided to devote himself to art and moved to Newport, RI, to study with William Morris Hunt.

Unlike Hunt, who never broke away from the manner of Couture and Jean-François Millet, La Farge rapidly evolved a highly original and personal style characterized by free brushwork, unusual colour harmonies, and great delicacy of feeling (...

Article

Morris, William  

Peter Stansky

(b Walthamstow [now in London], March 24, 1834; d London, Oct 3, 1896).

English designer, writer and activist. His importance as both a designer and propagandist for the arts cannot easily be overestimated, and his influence has continued to be felt throughout the 20th century. He was a committed Socialist whose aim was that, as in the Middle Ages, art should be for the people and by the people, a view expressed in several of his writings. After abandoning his training as an architect, he studied painting among members of the Pre-Raphaelites. In 1861 he founded his own firm, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (from 1875 Morris & Co.), which produced stained glass, furniture, wallpaper and fabrics (see §3 below). Morris’s interests constantly led him into new activities such as his last enterprise, the Kelmscott Press (see §5 below). In 1950 his home at Walthamstow became the William Morris Gallery. The William Morris Society was founded in 1956, and it publishes a biannual journal and quarterly newsletter....

Article

Murer [Maurer], Christoph  

M. Dressen

[Kristoffel; Stoffel]

(b Zurich, Feb 1558; d Winterthur, March 27, 1614).

Swiss glass painter, woodcut designer, etcher, book illustrator and writer. He was the son and pupil of the glass painter and councillor Jos Murer (1530–80), founder of a family of artists who lived in Zurich in the 16th and 17th centuries. In 1577 he collaborated with his father on a cycle of 13 pairs of panes representing Thirteen Historic Scenes of the Swiss Confederation for the Zisterzienkloster of Wettingen, Aargau. Christoph’s monograms (sm, stm) are on three panes. He probably followed this work with study travels. In 1579 he designed a cycle of panes in Basle for the well-known citizen Leonhard Thurneysser (1531–96), celebrating the adventurous life of this much-travelled goldsmith, alchemist, astrologer and personal physician to the Elector of Brandenburg. Of the original cycle, two paintings, including the Birth of Leonhard Thurneysser of Basle in 1531 (1579; Basle, Öff. Kstsamml.), and two design sketches (?...

Article

Valckert, Werner (Jacobsz.) van den  

Christiaan Schuckman

(b ?in or nr The Hague, c. 1580–85; d ?Amsterdam, after in or 1627).

Dutch painter, etcher, woodcutter, draughtsman and writer. On 6 November 1605 he married Jannetje Cornelis, the daughter of Cornelis Sybertsz. Monicx van Montvoort, a stained-glass painter from The Hague. He received his first artistic training from his father-in-law and probably not during the journey he is supposed to have made to Italy. Between 1600 and 1605 he was registered at the Guild of St Luke in The Hague, in 1612 as a master. During this period he probably made all but two of his etchings, a woodcut of the Inspiration of St Jerome (1613) and a painting of Venus as Temptress (Haarlem, priv. col., see van Thiel, 1983, no. 6). Despite his skilled etching technique, evident in his refined use of hatching, cross-hatching and dots, and his experiments with plate tone, van den Valckert applied himself almost exclusively to painting after 1613. His history paintings are similar in their academic formalism to those of Adriaen van Nieulandt and Pieter Isaacsz., two of the artist’s rivals in Amsterdam, while his idealized, historicizing portraits resemble those of Cornelis van der Voort (...

Article

Vedder, Elihu  

Regina Soria

(b New York, Feb 26, 1836; d Rome, Jan 29, 1923).

American painter, illustrator, sculptor, and writer (see fig.). He studied under Tompkins Harrison Matteson in Shelbourne, NY, and went to Paris in March 1856. After eight months in the studio of François-Edouard Picot, he settled in Florence until the end of 1860. There he learnt drawing from Raffaello Bonaiuti, became interested in the Florentine Renaissance and attended the free Accademia Galli. A more significant artistic inspiration came from the Italian artists at the Caffè Michelangiolo: Telemaco Signorini, Vincenzo Cabianca (1827–1902), and especially Nino Costa (1827–1902). This group sought new and untraditional pictorial solutions for their compositions and plein-air landscapes and were particularly interested in the experiences of Gustave Courbet and the Barbizon painters. They became known as Macchiaioli for their use of splashes (macchia) of light and shadows and for their revolutionary (maquis) attitude to prevailing styles. Among Vedder’s most notable Florentine landscapes are ...

Article

Verhaegen, Arthur Théodore, Baron  

Jean van Cleven

(b Brussels, Aug 31, 1847; d Brussels, Sept 11, 1917).

Belgian architect, designer, engineer, writer and politician. After graduating as an engineer at the University of Ghent in 1870, he established himself in Charleroi before settling in Ghent on his marriage in 1872. Under the influence of Jean-Baptiste-Charles-François Baron Bethune, he worked in the Belgian Gothic Revival style on architecture, furniture and wall paintings and in stained glass, gold, iron and embroidery. From 1875 to 1895 he directed the workshop for stained glass founded by Bethune. Verhaegen’s most important building is the new Beguinage (1873) of Sint Amandsberg near Ghent, which conforms to the severe Gothic Revival ideals of Bethune and anticipates some of the features of garden-city designs. His churches and conventual buildings at Ghent (Poortakker, 1874; St Macharius, 1880–82), Hekelgem (abbey, 1880; church destr.), Paris (Oeuvre des Flamands Church, c. 1875) and Rome (Everlasting Adoration, 1885–6) and châteaux at Watermaal-Bosvoorde (1880–81) and Merelbeke (...

Article

Wyspiański, Stanisław  

Lija Skalska-Miecik

(b Kraków, Jan 15, 1869; d Kraków, Nov 28, 1907).

Polish painter, pastellist, decorative artist, illustrator, writer and theatre director. He was the son of the Kraków sculptor Franciszek Wyspiański (1836–1902) and studied at the Kraków School of Fine Arts, mostly under Władysław Łuszczkiewicz (1828–1900) and Jan Matejko. In 1889 Wyspiański and Józef Mehoffer, the school’s most talented students, were appointed to complete Matejko’s painted decorations for St Mary, Kraków, a task that prompted Wyspiański’s interest in both decorative painting and stained glass. In 1890 he travelled in Italy, Switzerland, France and Germany, and also to Prague. In 1891 he continued his training in Paris, where he remained with intervals until 1894, studying at the Académie Colarossi under Joseph Blanc, Gustave Courtois (1852–1924) and Louis Auguste Girardot (b 1858). Wyspiański also worked independently in Paris, studying paintings in the museums and fascinated by contemporary art. Through Władysław Ślewiński, he met Paul Gauguin and members of the Nabis....