Russian Painter.1914-1955 was a painter known for his use of a thick impasto and his highly abstract landscape painting. He also worked with collage, illustration and textiles Nocolas de Stael was born in the family of a Russian Lieutenant General, Baron Vladimir Stael von Holstein, (a member of the Stael von Holstein family, and the last Commandant of the Peter and Paul Fortress) and his wife, Olga Sakhanskaya. De Stael's family was forced to emigrate to Poland in 1919 because of the Russian Revolution; Both, his father and stepmother, would die in Poland and the orphaned Nicolas de Stael would be sent with his older sister Marina to Brussels to live with a Russian family (1922). He eventually studied art at the Brussels Acad??mie royale des beaux-arts (1932). In the 1930s, he travelled throughout Europe, lived in Paris (1934) and in Morocco (1936) (where he first met his companion Jeannine Guillou, also a painter and who would appear in some of his paintings from 1941-1942) and Algeria. In 1936 he had his first exhibition of Byzantine style icons and watercolors at the Galerie Dietrich et Cie, Brussels. He joined the French Foreign Legion in 1939 and was demobilized in 1941.   Related Paintings of Nicolas de Stael :. | Figure | abstract composition | Rainstorm | The Port of Boat | The Cloud of Landscape |
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George Dawe
1781-1829 British George Dawe Locations English painter and writer. He was the son of the mezzotint engraver Philip Dawe who taught him engraving. He continued to concentrate on engraving when he entered the Royal Academy Schools, London, in 1796, producing portraits until 1802, when he turned to history painting. In 1803 he won a gold medal and the following year made his d?but at the Royal Academy, where he exhibited until 1818, often showing such anecdotal and literary works as Imogen Found in the Cave of Belarius (exh. RA 1809; London, Tate). He was elected an ARA in 1809 and an RA in 1814 and soon afterwards returned to portrait painting. In 1816 he painted a number of portraits of George IV daughter Princess Charlotte (e.g. London, N.P.G.), several of which were engraved. In 1817 he went to Brussels and was present at the review of the allied troops by Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington in Cambrai. Soon afterwards he was invited by Tsar Alexander I of Russia to paint the portraits of all the senior officers who had taken part in the Napoleonic Wars. He travelled to St Petersburg in 1819 where, over the next nine years, he painted nearly 400 portraits. These were placed in a specially built gallery (destr.) in the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. He returned briefly to England in 1828 before travelling to Berlin, where he painted the portraits of Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland (1828; London, N.P.G.) and Frederick William III, King of Prussia (1828; untraced). From Berlin he moved to St Petersburg and then to Warsaw before being forced by illness to return to England, where he died shortly afterwards. His book The Life of George Morland with Remarks on his Works (1807) is both a lively account of his godfather dissipated lifestyle and a fairly critical appreciation of his work.
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Nicolas Lancret
French 1690-1743 Nicolas Lancret (22 January 1690 ?C 14 September 1743), French painter, was born in Paris, and became a brilliant depicter of light comedy which reflected the tastes and manners of French society under the regent Orleans. His first master was Pierre d'Ulin, but his acquaintance with and admiration for Watteau induced him to leave d'Ulin for Gillot, whose pupil Watteau had been. Two pictures painted by Lancret and exhibited on the Place Dauphine had a great success, which laid the foundation of his fortune, and, it is said, estranged Watteau, who had been complimented as their author. Lancret's work cannot now, however, be taken for that of Watteau, for both in drawing and in painting his touch, although intelligent, is dry, hard and wanting in that quality which distinguished his great model; these characteristics are due possibly in part to the fact that he had been for some time in training under an engraver. The number of his paintings (of which over eighty have been engraved) is immense; he executed a few portraits and attempted historical composition, but his favorite subjects were balls, fairs, village weddings, etc. The British Museum possesses an admirable series of studies by Lancret in red chalk, and the National Gallery, London, shows four paintings--the "Four Ages of Man" (engraved by Desplaces and l'Armessin), cited by d'Argenville amongst the principal works of Lancret. In 1719 he was received as Academician, and became councillor in 1735; in 1741 he married a grandchild of Boursault, author of Aesop at Court.