Italian Byzantine Style Painter, ca.1290-1348 Ambrogio Lorenzetti (or Ambruogio Laurati; c. 1290 ?C June 9, 1348) was an Italian painter of the Sienese school. He was active between approximately from 1317 to 1348. His elder brother was the painter Pietro Lorenzetti. His work shows the influence of Simone Martini, although more naturalistic. The earliest dated work of the Sienese painter is a Madonna and Child (1319, Museo Diocesano, San Casciano). His presence was documented in Florentine up until 1321. He would return there after spending a number of years in Siena. The frescoes on the walls of the Hall of the Nine (Sala dei Nove) or Hall of the Peace (Sala della Pace) in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena are one of the masterworks of early renaissance secular painting. The "nine" was the oligarchal assembly of guild and monetary interests that governed the republic. Three walls are painted with frescoes consisting of a large assembly of allegorical figures of virtues in the Allegory of Good Government . In the other two facing panels, Ambrogio weaves panoramic visions of Effects of Good Government on Town and Country, and Allegory of Bad Government and its Effects on Town and Country (also called "Ill-governed Town and Country"). The better preserved "well-governed town and country" is an unrivaled pictorial encyclopedia of incidents in a peaceful medieval "borgo" and countryside. The first evidence of the existence of the hourglass can be found in one of his paintings. Like his brother, he is believed to have died of bubonic plague 1348. Giorgio Vasari includes a biography of Lorenzetti in his Lives.  Related Paintings of Ambrogio Lorenzetti :. | Madonna Enthroned with Angels | Annunciation | Scenes of the Life of St Nicholas | Madonna with Angels between St Nicholas and Prophet Elisha | Effects of Good Government in the City |
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Carleton E.Watkins
American photographers , b. 1829, d. 1916 was a noted 19th century California photographer. Carleton Emmons Watkins was born in Oneonta, upstate New York. He went to San Francisco during the gold rush, arriving in 1851. He traveled to California with Oneontan Collis Huntington, who later became one of the owners of the Central Pacific Railroad, which helped Watkins later in his career. His interest in photography started as an aide in a San Francisco portrait studio, and started taking photographs of his own in 1861. He became interested in landscape photography and soon started making photographs of California mining scenes and of Yosemite Valley. He experimented with several new photographic techniques, and eventually favored his "Mammoth Camera," which used large glass plate negatives, and a stereographic camera. He became famous for his series of photographs and historic stereoviews of Yosemite Valley in the 1860s, and also created a variety images of California and Oregon in the 1870s and later. Watkins purchased the 1860s Central Pacific Railroad construction stereoview negatives from CPRR official photographer Alfred A. Hart and continued their publication through the 1870s. However Watkins was not a good businessman. He spent lavishly on his San Francisco studio and went deeply in debt. His photographs were auctioned, following a business setback, resulting in his photographs being published without credit by I. W. Taber, the new owner. Watkins also had problems of his photographs being reprinted without permission by Eastern companies and with other photographers rephotographing the exact scenes Watkins photographed. In 1879, Watkins married his 22-year-old assistant, Frances Sneade, with whom he had two children. Watkins began anew with his "New Series," which included a variety of subjects and formats, mostly related to California.
Renard Emile
French artist ,1859-1930
gerard terborch
Gerard ter Borch (or Terburg) (December 1617 ?C 8 December 1681) was a Dutch genre painter, who lived in the Dutch Golden Age. Gerard ter Borch was born in December 1617 in Zwolle in the province of Overijssel in the Dutch Republic. He received an excellent education from his father, also an artist, and developed his talent very early. The inscription on a study of a head proves that Ter Borch was at Amsterdam in 1632, where he studied possibly under Willem Cornelisz Duyster or Pieter Codde. Duyster's influence can be traced in a picture bearing the date 1638, in the lonides Bequest (Victoria and Albert Museum). In 1634 he studied under Pieter de Molijn in Haarlem. A record of this Haarlem period is the Consultation (1635) at the Berlin Gallery. In 1635 he was in London, and subsequently he travelled in Germany, France, Spain and Italy. It is certain that he was in Rome in 1641, when he painted the small portraits on copper of Jan Six and A Young Lady (Six Collection, Amsterdam). In 1648 he was at M??nster during the meeting of the congress which ratified the treaty of peace between the Spaniards and the Dutch, and executed his celebrated little picture, painted upon copper, of the assembled plenipotentiaries--a work which, along with the a portrait of a Man Standing, now represents the master in the national collection in London. The picture was bought by the marquess of Hertford at the Demidoff sale for 1280, and presented to the National Gallery by Sir Richard Wallace, at the suggestion of his secretary, Sir John Murray Scott. At this time Ter Borch was invited to visit Madrid, where he received employment and the honour of knighthood from Philip IV, but, in consequence of an intrigue, it is said, he was obliged to return to the Netherlands. He seems to have resided for a time in Haarlem; but he finally settled in Deventer, where he became a member of the town council, as which he appears in the portrait now in the gallery of the Hague. He died at Deventer in 1681. Ter Borch is excellent as a portrait painter, but still greater as a painter of genre subjects. He depicts with admirable truth the life of the wealthy and cultured classes of his time, and his work is free from any touch of the grossness which finds so large a place in Dutch art.[not specific enough to verify] His figures are well drawn and expressive in attitude; his colouring is clear and rich, but his best skill lies in his unequalled rendering of texture in draperies, which is seen to advantage in such pictures as The Letter and in The Gallant Conversation engraved by Wille ?C which exists in various repetitions at Berlin and Amsterdam, and in the Bridgewater Gallery. Ter Borch's works are comparatively rare; only about eighty have been catalogued. Six of these are at the Hermitage, six at the Berlin Museum, five at the Louvre; four at the Dresden Museum, and two at the Wallace Collection. The artist's painting The Suitor's Visit, c. 1658, oil on canvas, 80 x 75 cm (31½ ?? 29 9/16 in.) in the Andrew W. Mellon Collection, was used on the cover of Marilyn Stokstad's second edition of Art History