Spanish, 1595-1657,Spanish painter. Although he is sometimes thought to have been a Sevillian painter, his career is documented in Madrid. Barrera enjoyed considerable prestige and authority within the artistic community of the Spanish capital and in 1634 and 1639 represented his profession in significant legal battles concerning the status and rights of painters. However, Barrera's known paintings, all of which are still-lifes, are those of a derivative artist of modest abilities. In Still-life with Basket of Grapes, signed and dated 1642 (Florence, Uffizi), his arrangement of objects in a window-frame and on a stone ledge derives from works by Juan van der Hamen y Le?n but without that artist's refined compositional sense or mastery of pictorial space. The rather weak modelling of objects in this painting is consistent with Barrera's other still-lifes, which are further characterized by their light tonality, bland colouring and monotonous brushwork. Comparable stylistic features are found in the more accomplished still-lifes of Antonio Ponce, with whom Barrera is documented in the 1630s. Barrera's best works are those depicting the Four Seasons, signed and dated 1638 (Seville, priv. col., see 1982 exh. cat., pp. 78-85). These are still-lifes of abundant seasonal foodstuffs and, in landscape settings, large symbolic and genre figures drawn from traditional iconography.  Related Paintings of Francisco Barrera :. | Portrat des Erbprinzen Heinrich XIII | Sexy body, female nudes, classical nudes 114 | The Lamentation over the Dead Christ | slatten vid auvers-sur-oise | The Return of Odysseus |
Related Artists:
John Thomas Serres
1759-1825 English painter, born in London in December 1759. He was the eldest son of Dominic (1722-93), a successful marine painter who was to be one of the founder members of the Royal Academy.Son of Dominic Serres. John Thomas Serres's colourful career began with landscape painting. He later travelled extensively, spending periods in Paris (1789), Rome and Naples (1790-91), before succeeding his father to the office of Marine Painter to George III in 1793. He worked promisingly as a painter (in both oils and watercolour) of sea-pieces in the European tradition, advanced in England by Phillipe Jacques de Loutherbourg. After becoming Marine Draughtsman to the Admiralty in 1800 he took on the less challenging employment of making drawings and elevations of the west coasts of France and Spain. This connection with the Navy was probably related to his appointment as drawing instructor at Chelsea Naval School, London.
Peale, Harriet Cany
American, 1800-69
Juan Bautista Martinez del Mazo
1612-1667 Spanish Juan Bautista Martinez del Mazo Gallery Mazo??s works owe credit above all to Vel??zquez, whose style he was long compelled to emulate in court portraits. However, Mazo shows in his paintings a personality of his own. His portraits exhibit startling naturalism and marvelously executed. Mazo was specially skillful in painting small figures, a cardinal element in both his hunting scenes and the landscapes he painted as in his most celebrate work View of Saragossa. Mazo??s palette was rather like that of Vel??zquez, except for a penchant often shown for stressing blue or bluish tints. .The departure from his master style was in his way of shaping people and things by highlights which flash the pictorial image towards the surface of the painting, even from the background.. As a counterbalance, an explicit, even emphatic, perspective design marks out the spatial confines of the composition, making it appear squarish.. A further departure from Velazquez is his luxurious depiction of detail or incident, which he achieved with brilliant, depthless strokes, whether on the figure of a sitter, a curtain on a wall, a floor, the surface of a river, or plain grounds. .These stylistic traits reveal Mazo??s own personality as an artist. .For centuries, Mazo??s paintings were attributed to Vel??zquez, but modern art criticism, techniques and knowledge have been able to separate their works.