1805-1900
American painter. He studied with Samuel F. B. Morse in New York during the winter of 1824-5. On his return to the rural isolation of Leverett, MA, he painted his earliest known work, the portrait of his grandmother Elizabeth Billings Ashley (Springfield, MA, Mus. F.A.). His career as an itinerant portrait painter began in 1826, most of his commissions coming through a network of family associations in western Massachusetts and Connecticut. The portraits of 1836-40 are considered his best. From 1841 he lived mainly in New York, where he expanded his subject-matter to include landscapes and American history pictures. There he presumably studied photography, for on his return to Massachusetts he advertised himself as a daguerreotypist. His few portraits painted after 1841 are copied from his own photographs and lack the expressive characterization and decorative power of his earlier work. From 1865 to 1885 his paintings were based primarily on biblical and patriotic themes. The Historical Monument of the American Republic (1867-88; Springfield, MA, Mus. F.A.) stands alone in American folk art in size (2.82*3.89 m), scope and imaginative vision. Inspired by plans for a national celebration of the centennial of the USA in 1876, Field painted an architectural fantasy of eight towers linked by railway bridges and trains at the tops, with the history of the USA in low-relief sculpture on the exterior surfaces of the towers. Field added two more towers to the painting in 1888 and thereafter retired. Related Paintings of Erastus Salisbury Field :. | The Taj Mahal | The Garden of Eden | Man at Desk | Woman with a Green Book | Joseph Moore and His Family | Related Artists:
Jan Brueghel1568-1625
Flemish Jan Brueghel Locations
Jan Brueghel the Elder (b. 1568, Brussels - January 13th 1625, Antwerp) was a Flemish painter, son of Pieter Brueghel the Elder and father of Jan Brueghel the Younger. Nicknamed Velvet Brueghel, Flower Brueghel, and Paradise Brueghel, of which the latter two were derived from favored subjects, while the former may refer to the velveteen sheen of his colors or to his habit of wearing velvet.
Bouquet, painted 1603. The Entry of the Animals Into Noah Ark, painted 1613.His father died in 1569, and then, following the death of his mother in 1578, Jan, along with his brother Pieter Brueghel the Younger (Hell Brueghel) and sister Marie, went to live with their grandmother Mayken Verhulst (widow of Pieter Coecke van Aelst). She was an artist in her own right, and according to Carel van Mander, possibly the first teacher of the two sons. The family moved to Antwerp sometime after 1578.
He first applied himself to painting flowers and fruits, and afterwards acquired considerable reputation by his landscapes and sea-pieces. He formed a style more independent of his father than did his brother Pieter the Younger. His early works are often landscapes containing scenes from scripture, particularly forest landscapes betraying the influence of the master forest landscape-painter Gillis van Coninxloo. Later in his career, he moved toward the painting of pure landscapes and townscapes, and, toward the end, of still lifes.
After residing long at Cologne he travelled into Italy, where his landscapes, adorned with small figures, were greatly admired. He left a large number of pictures, chiefly landscapes, which are executed with great skill.
Adriaen Coorte (ca. 1665 - after 1707) was a Dutch Golden Age painter of still lifes, who signed works between 1683 and 1707. He painted small and unpretentious still lifes in a style more typical of the first half of the century, and was "one of the last practitioners of this intimate category".
Very little is known of his life, but he is assumed to have been born and died in Middelburg. He became a pupil of Melchior d'Hondecoeter around 1680 in Amsterdam. From 1683 he seems to have returned to Middelburg, where he set up a workshop and signed his small, carefully balanced minimalist still lifes. He often painted on paper that was glued to a wooden panel. About 80 signed works by him have been catalogued, and nearly all of them follow the same pattern; small arrangements of fruits, vegetables, or shells on a stone slab, lit from above, with the dark background typical of still lifes earlier in the century. Instead of the Chinese or silver vessels favoured by his contemporaries, his tableware is very basic pottery. "Objects and light are studied intensely, and are painted with a wondrous tenderness".[1] Neither his birth nor death date is certain, and archival evidence only exists in Middelburg for his membership in the Guild of St. Luke there from 1695 onwards, when he was fined for selling a painting without being a member of the guild. His works appear frequently in contemporary Middelburg taxation inventories
Jacob More1740-93
Scottish painter, active in Italy. The son of an Edinburgh merchant, he was first apprenticed to a goldsmith and then, from 1766, to the Norie family of house-painters. In the 1760s he produced numerous sketches of the Scottish Lowlands (examples Edinburgh, N.G.), and in 1769 he designed and executed stage sets at the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh, for the first productions after the legalizing of the theatre in Scotland. More's Edinburgh period culminated in a series of oil paintings of the Falls of the River Clyde, three of which are in public collections: Corra Linn (Edinburgh, N.G.), Stonebyres Linn (London, Tate) and Bonnington Linn (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam). These paintings are regarded as the first serious artistic interpretations of the Scottish landscape, depictions by previous artists having been essentially topographical in character. More took a set of three of them to the Society of Artists Exhibition in London in 1771, at which he gained widespread recognition and the personal encouragement of Sir Joshua Reynolds.