 |
| Rain Storm Beneath the Summit, from Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji, Katsushika Hokusai, c-1831 |
Many countries celebrate Halloween on October 31st, but the births and deaths of those artists make the date significant for additional reasons. Let's look at each artist a bit more closely to learn some more about them.
 |
| Woman Holding a Balance, Johannes Vermeer, c. 1664, National Gallery of Art |
Johannes Vermeer (October 31, 1632 – December 15, 1675) was a Dutch Baroque painter who spent his life in Delft. While not as well known in his own time, today Vermeer is an extremely famous artist whose life was a bit of an enigma. He married a Catholic woman and converted to the Catholic faith, they had a large family of 11 children.
In the Dutch Baroque era there was a huge art market for the newly growing middle and upper classes. There were many painters in the Netherlands during this time, but the works of Vermeer really stand out from his peers. Vermeer's use of color and paint handling was so detailed and precise.
During his life he did not create that many paintings. Today fewer than 40 have been attributed to him (compared to approximately 400 works by Rembrandt). However his style has influenced countless artists after him. Vermeer died fairly young at the age of 43.
 |
| Entrance to a Village, Meindert Hobbema, 1665, Metropolitan Museum of Art |
Meindert Hobbema (October 31, 1638 – December 7, 1709) was also a painter in the Dutch Baroque and one who was known for his landscape paintings. He lived in the capitol city of Amsterdam and he studied under the most famous of the Dutch landscape painters, Jacob van Ruisdael.
Hobbema's landscapes focused on the rural countryside of the Netherlands and had similar characteristics- big skies filled with clouds, dramatic leafy trees and often small buildings or figures who were secondary to the landscape.
Like Vermeer has wasn't as well known during his life, but he became popular in the 18th century and after that has been a well respected landscape artist.
 |
| The Great Wave off Kanagawa, from Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji, Katsushika Hokusai, c-1831, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
Katsushika Hokusai (October 31, 1760 – May 10, 1849) was a Japanese painter and printmaker from the Edo period (1615-1868). His woodblock print series "Thirty six Views of Mount Fuji" were his most famous works and contained the extremely well known and iconic work called The Great Wave off Kanagawa. As this is a print there are several copies in existence including one in the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Each of the thirty six prints that make up the series offer another view of Mount Fuji, at different times of the year and from different angles (see the very first image above). Compare and contrast just these two images, in one the mountain takes up nearly the entire scene and in the other appears quite tiny while the shape of the wave seems as big as a mountain.
Hokusai was a prolific artist who created several other print series as well as a few books. He influenced many artists in Japan as well as in Europe during the Japonisme period. This was the name given to the period after 1853, just a few years after the artist's death, when Japan began trading with Europe and artists (several also mentioned here such as Paul Gauguin, Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt) were influenced by Japanese art that they were seeing for the first time. Artists began experimenting with similar woodblock techniques, new arrangements in their composition and new colors and patterns. Hokusai's work continues to be an influence today.
 |
| Christ With Four Evangelists, Fra Bartolomeo, 1504, Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence, Italy |
Fra Bartolomeo (March 28, 1472 – October 31, 1517) was a Florentine Renaissance painter and Dominican friar. Fra Bartolomeo had lived for a time in the monastery of San Marco in Florence and it was he who painted the famous portrait of another well known Dominican, Fra Girolamo Savonarola.
 |
| Portrait of Friederike Maria Beer, Egon Schiele, 1914, Private collection |
Egon Schiele (June 12, 1890 – October 31, 1918) was an Austrian Expressionist painter who had studied under Gustav Klimt. His work primarily consisted of the figure, painted in a twisted and expressive manner. He was influenced by Klimt as well as Edvard Munch, Van Gogh and Jan Toorop and he himself would influence the next generation of painters. Schiele died young from the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918 when he was 28 years old.
0 comments:
Post a Comment