L'ATELIER ROBERT COANE
- ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES -


THIS PAGE AND DATA BASE ARE A WORK IN PROGRESS
It will never be finished as long as art is created and artists continue to be discovered.

Born in New York City in 1904, Paul Cadmus spent nine decades honing a singular, remarkably complex style of aesthetic idealization and social critique in justly celebrated paintings, drawings and etchings of nude figures, fantastical scenes and supercharged allegories.

After abandoning a career in advertising, Cadmus studied fine art, traveled throughout Europe in the early 1930s, and returned to the U.S. as an employee of the Public Works of Art Project. When The Fleet's In!, his notoriously erotic painting of sailors on leave, was simultaneously rejected by the PWAP and embraced by critics and patrons, Cadmus was inspired to devote himself as a full-time artist, uniquely able to render mythological beauty and daily grime, homoerotic fever dreams and emotionally naked self-portraits. Throughout the ensuing decades, Cadmus' work has been exhibited internationally at major museums and galleries, earning controversy and reverence in equal measure.

At the time of his death in 1999, Cadmus lived and workd in Weston, Connecticut with his partner, Jon Andersson. He was the subject of Paul Cadmus, a lavishly illustrated monograph by his brother-in-law, Lincoln Kirstein, and of Paul Cadmus: Enfant Terrible at 80, a 1984 film by David Sutherland.


Jean- Jacques Caffieri, French sculptor born in 1725, died in 1792.
For donating his busts of actors and playwrights to the French national theater, the Comédie Française, Jean-Jacques Caffieri, an avid theatergoer, gained free entry for life. His habit of making casts from his marble sculptures and giving them to institutions was fortuitous, for many of Caffieri's marbles were lost in a fire in 1761.

Belonging to the third generation of a family of sculptors and bronzeworkers who had come from Italy in the previous century, Caffieri was the younger brother of bronzeworker Philippe Caffieri. Jean-Jacques won the Prix de Rome in 1748 and spent four years in Rome studying ancient art. When he returned to Paris, he became sculptor to Louis XV and provided ornamental designs for metalwork, notably for the staircase at the Palais-Royal, a famous Parisian royal residence. He made his name, however, with a series of portrait busts of contemporaries like Madame du Barry and famous dramatists of the past.

Caffieri insisted on absolute fidelity to the model's features, and his talent lay in making these features come alive. He captured the kindness of astronomer Canon Pingre as well as the fierce countenance of Doctor Borie. French philosopher and art critic Denis Diderot declared Caffieri's Doctor Borie "a good enough likeness to make a patient die of fear."

Gustave Caillebotte was the definiton of the affluent Frenchman. He was an entreprenuer, dabbling in many cultural pursuits and sports. He was a naval architect (engineer), but also attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He participated enthusiastically in the Impressionist movement, painting over 500 works and collecting many by his comrads. After the death of his father, he inherited a large amount of money, which he used to buy Impressionist art and enjoy his life to the fullest in other ways. For example, he owned many yachts which he raced, including eight he designed himself.

Caillebotte is generally considered a part of High Impressionism (the late 1870s). He had a unique style of painting which differed from his fellow impressionists by being more realistic. For this reason his first painting was rejected from The Salon in 1875. However, he soon became good friends with Alfred Sisley, Pierre Auguste Renoir, and Claude Monet. He showed with the Impressionists all but twice. He also generously underwrited the cost of their exhibitions. Many of Caillebotte's counterparts focused their paintings on the outdoors and country life, but he was interested in the newly industrialized France and the new leisured classes it made possible. He painted both urban settings and leisure activities, including boulevards, newly constructed neighboroods, interior and exterior balcony views, sailing, canoeing and rowing. In his urban works he conveyed the psychological impacts of this more modern Paris. The main impact was an idle and disaffected, disconnected people.

Upon his death, Caillebotte willed 68 of his collected art works to the French government. They refused them, and it took three years before they finally gave in and accepted 38. These now make up much of the Impressionist collection at the Musee d'Orsay and are very important to the cultural history of France.

Born in 1898 in Philadelphia, Alexander Calder came from a family of artists. Both his father and grandfather were well-known sculptors, and his mother was a painter. Throughout his young life, Calder was more interested in mechanics and engineering than art. After graduating high school he attended the Stevens Institute of Technology, receiving his degree in 1919. Within a short while, however, his creative energies turned toward art and he enrolled in the Art Student's League in New York. Working as a freelance illustrator, Calder began to paint and sculpt. Soon after his first one man show in New York, Calder left for Paris.
Calder's famous circus.

It was then that he began work on one of his most famous projects, the "Calder Circus". The "Circus" was a miniature reproduction of an actual circus. Made from wire, cork, wood, cloth and other easily found materials, the "Circus" was a working display that Calder would show regularly. A mix between a diorama, a child's toy, and a fair game, Calder's "Circus" found many eager fans among the avant-garde. One of the methods used to create the "Circus" was the bending of wire to form realistic figures. Drawn to the ease and simplicity of it, Calder began to make wire portraits. A combination of a line drawing and of sculpture, these instant portraits represented a new possibility in three dimensional art.

By the early 1930s Calder had brought his "Circus" to the United States and back, and was living in Paris off the proceeds of his regular performances. While regularly fixing and adding to the "Circus", Calder began to show and work on wire and wood sculpture as well as painting. It was around this time that he became interested in the work of the Surrealist painter Joan Miró and the modernist painter Piet Mondrian. Both men had gone beyond abstraction and were making paintings of colors and shapes with no direct reference to the outside world. Enthusiastic about this embrace of form and color, Calder began to make moving sculptures in a similar vane.
Beginning with painted aluminum and wire, Calder created motored objects that could move to create different visual effects. In a short while, however, he realized that the mechanized movement didn't have the fluidity or the surprise he wanted in his work. He decided to let them hang and have the wind or a slight touch begin their movement. When the experimental French artist Marcel Duchamp saw them, he named them "mobiles" (a pun on the French for "to move" and "motive"). These new sculptures, arranged by the chance operations of the wind, went against everything that sculpture had been. They were not monumental, nor were they sober. They were simply about form and color and the joy in creating both. So, in his early thirties Alexander Calder had not only found a project he would continue for the rest of his life, he had created a unique form of art, the mobile.

In 1933, Calder and his wife, Louisa James, moved to Roxbury, Connecticut, where they would spend the rest of their lives. Working on hundreds of small mobiles, Calder became interested in making large, more substantial works as well. Using similar colorful abstract forms, he made giant metal structures whose shapes and colors stood out bravely in both rural and urban settings. Known as "stabiles," these works often had a similar whimsical quality to the smaller kinetic pieces. By the time of his first major show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, Calder's quiet revolution was known internationally. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s he was commissioned to create site specific "stabiles" and had major retrospectives in a number of cities including Amsterdam, Berne, and Rio de Janiero.

By 1970, Calder had reached the height of his fame. He had worked regularly creating thousands upon thousands of objects—everything from jewelry to children's toys to major monuments for the Lincoln Center in New York and UNESCO in Paris. That same year his gifts were honored again with a comprehensive show at the Guggenheim Museum and a smaller one at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1976, Alexander Calder died. Throughout his life, his commitment to creating work free from the pretensions of the art world and accessible to all, never stopped him from making exquisitely beautiful and important sculpture. In a century that saw the forms of art and literature reinvented regularly, Alexander Calder stands out as one of the great pioneers of his time.

Harry Callahan (1912-1999) was an American photographer who worked mainly in Chicago and Michigan, teaching at the Chicago Institute of Design and later moving to teach at the Rhode Island School of Design. For Callahan photography was a very intimate and personal endeavour, whether he was photographing the city streets where he lived, or landscapes, or his wife Eleanor and daughter Barbara.

Julia Margaret Cameron, wife of Pre-Raphaelite, Charles Cameron, was born in Calcutta in 1815. She was the first woman distinguished and recognized in the nascient art of photography.

In 1848, the year of the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Charles Cameron retired from his profession as jurist in India. He and Julia returned to England. For a time Mrs. Cameron found an outlet for her intense, sociable nature, in the London milieu of her sister Sarah Prinsep. At little Holland House Mrs. Prinsep gathered round her men of letters and the arts such as Tennyson, Browning, Millais, Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Watts. In 1860, the Camerons moved to the Isle of Wight to be near the Tennysons. A life of intellectual pleasures and oursuits followed, but Julia Cameron was frustrated and depressed. Then, in 1863, her daughter had a happy inspiration - and gave her a camera. "I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me", wrote Julia, "and at length the longing has been satisfied". Photography quickly became her passion and remained so until she returned to the Subcontinent with her husband twelve years later.

Mrs. Cameron's long years of intellectual apprenticeship in artistic circles meant that she brought to her hobby a remarkable sureness of vision. Julia Cameron rejected the sharp outlines of earlier wet plate photography. Soft focus, combined with rigorous close-up and exclusion of incidentals lent particular authority to her portraits of the great figures of the age. Her images of Tennyson, Carlyle, Herschel and others plainly achieve the spiritual penetration which was her aim. They are among the masterpieces of nineteenth-century visual art.

Julia Margaret Cameron died in Ceylon, present day Sri Lanka, in 1879.

Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal) (1697-1768). Venetian painter, the most famous view-painter of the 18th century. He began work painting theatrical scenery (his father's profession), but he turned to topography during a visit to Rome in 1719-20, when he was influenced by the work of Giovanni Paolo Panini. By 1723 he was painting dramatic and picturesque views of Venice, marked by strong contrasts of light and shade and free handling, this phase of his work culminating in the splendid Stone Mason's Yard (National Gallery, London, c. 1730). Meanwhile, partly under the influence of Luca Carlevaris, and largely in rivalry with him, Canaletto began to turn out views which were more topographically accurate, set in a higher key, and with smoother, more precise handling -- characteristics that mark most of his later work. At the same time he began painting the ceremonial and festival subjects which ultimately formed an important part of his work.

His patrons were chiefly English collectors, for whom he sometimes produced series of views in uniform size. Conspicuous among them was Joseph Smith, a merchant, appointed British Consul in Venice in 1744. It was perhaps at his instance that Canaletto enlarged his repertory in the 1740s to include subjects from the Venetian mainland and from Rome (probably based on drawings made during his visit as a young man), and by producing numerous capricci. He also gave increased attention to the graphic arts, making a remarkable series of etchings, and many drawings in pen, and pen and wash, as independent works of art and not as preparation for paintings. This led to changes in his style of painting, increasing an already well-established tendency to become stylized and mechanical in handling. He often used the camera obscura as an aid to composition.

In 1746 he went to England, apparently at the suggestion of Jacopo Amigoni (the War of the Austrian Succession drastically curtailed foreign travel, and Canaletto's tourist trade in Venice had dried up). For a time he was very successful, painting views of London and of various country houses. Subsequently, his work became increasingly lifeless and mannered, so much so that rumors were put about, probably by rivals, that he was not in fact the famous Canaletto but an impostor.

In 1755 he returned to Venice and continued active for the remainder of his life. Legends of his having amassed a fortune in Venice are disproved by the official inventory of his estate on his death. Before this, Joseph Smith had sold the major part of his paintings to George III, thus bringing into the royal collection an unrivalled group of Canaletto's paintings and drawings.
Canaletto was highly influential in Italy and elsewhere.

Michelangelo Merisi, Caravaggio, was the son of Fermo Merisi, steward and architect of the Marquis of Caravaggio. Orphaned at age 11, Caravaggio was apprenticed in the same year to the painter Simone Peterzano of Milan.

Caravaggio arrived in Rome sometime between 1588 and 1592. He was already in possession of the fundamental technical skills of painting and had acquired, with characteristic eagerness, a thorough understanding of the Lombard and Venetian painters, who, opposed to idealized Florentine painting, had developed a style that was nearer to representing nature and events. Caravaggio arrived in Rome and settled into the cosmopolitan society of the Campo Marzio. This decaying neighbourhood of inns, eating houses, temporary shelter, and little picture shops in which Caravaggio came to live suited his circumstances and his temperament. He was virtually without means, and his inclinations were always toward anarchy and against tradition.

These first five years were an anguishing period of instability and humiliation. According to his biographers, Caravaggio was "needy and stripped of everything" and moved from one unsatisfactory employment to another, working as an assistant to painters of much smaller talent. He earned his living for the most part with hackwork and never stayed more than a few months at any studio. Finally, probably in 1595, he decided to set out on his own and began to sell his pictures through a dealer, a certain Maestro Valentino, who brought Caravaggio's work to the attention of Cardinal Francesco del Monte, a prelate of great influence in the papal court. Caravaggio soon came under the protection of Del Monte and was invited to receive board, lodging, and a pension in the house of the cardinal.

Despite spiritual and material deprivations, Caravaggio had painted up to the beginning of Del Monte's patronage about 40 works. The subjects of this period are mostly adolescent boys, as in Boy with a Fruit Basket (1593; Borghese Gallery, Rome), The Young Bacchus (1593; Uffizi Gallery, Florence), and The Music Party (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). These early pictures reveal a fresh, direct, and empirical approach; they were apparently painted directly from life and show almost no trace of the academic Mannerism then prevailing in Rome. The felicitous tone and confident craftsmanship of these early works stand in sharp contrast to the daily quality of Caravaggio's disorderly and dissipated life. In Basket of Fruit (1596; Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan) the fruits, painted with brilliance and vivid realism, are handsomely disposed in a straw basket and form a striking composition in their visual apposition.

With these works realism won its battle with Mannerism, but it is in the cycle of the life of Saint Matthew in the Contarelli Chapel that Caravaggio's realistic naturalism first fully appears. Probably through the agency of Del Monte, Caravaggio obtained, in 1597, the commission for the decoration of the Contarelli Chapel in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. This commission established him, at the age of 24, as a "pictor celeberrimus", a "renowned painter," with important protectors and clients. The task was an imposing one. The scheme called for three large paintings of scenes from the saint's life: St Matthew and the Angel, The Calling of St Matthew, and The Martyrdom of St Matthew. The execution of all three, in which Caravaggio substituted a dramatic contemporary realism for the traditional pictorial formulas used in depicting saints, provoked public astonishment. His novelty in these works not only involves the surface appearance of structure and subject but also the sense of light and even of time. The first version of the canvas that was to go over the altar, St Matthew and the Angel, was so offensive to the canons of San Luigi dei Francesi, who had never seen such a representation of a saint, that it had to be redone. In this work the evangelist has the physical features of a plowman or a common labourer. His big feet seem to stick out of the picture, and his posture, legs crossed, is awkward almost to the point of vulgarity. The angel does not stand graciously by but forcefully pushes Matthew's hand over the page of a heavy book, as if he were guiding an illiterate. What the canons did not understand was that Caravaggio, in elevating this humble figure, was copying Christ, who had himself raised Matthew from the street.

The other two scenes of the St Matthew cycle are no less disconcerting. The Calling of St. Matthew shows the moment at which two men and two worlds confront each other: Christ, in a burst of light, entering the room of the toll collector, and Matthew, intent on counting coins in the midst of a group of gaily dressed idlers with swords at their sides. In The Martyrdom of St. Matthew the event is captured just at the moment when the executioner is forcing his victim to the ground. The scene is a public street, and, as Matthew's acolyte flees in terror, passersby glance at the act with idle unconcern.

Caravaggio's three paintings for the Contarelli Chapel not only caused a sensation in Rome but also marked a radical change in his artistic preoccupation. Henceforth he would devote himself almost entirely to the painting of traditional religious themes, to which, however, he gave a whole new iconography and interpretation. Caravaggio may have used a lantern hung to one side in his shuttered studio while painting from his models. The result in his paintings is a harsh, raking light that strikes across the composition, illuminating parts of it while plunging the rest into deep shadow. This dramatic illumination heightens the emotional tension, focuses the details, and isolates the figures, which are usually placed in the foreground of the picture in a deliberately casual grouping.

The decoration of the Contarelli Chapel was completed by 1602. There was a swarm of orders for his pictures, private and ecclesiastical. The Crucifixion of St Peter and The Conversion of St Paul, The Deposition of Christ, and the Death of the Virgin are among the monumental works he produced at this time. Some of these paintings, done at the high point of Caravaggio's artistic maturity, provoked violent reaction. The Madonna with Pilgrims, or Madonna di Loreto, for the Church of San Agostino, was a scandal because of the "dirty feet and torn, filthy cap" of the two old people kneeling in the foreground. The Death of the Virgin was refused by the Carmelites because of the indignity of the Virgin's plebeian features, bared legs, and swollen belly. At the advice of the painter Peter Paul Rubens, the picture was bought by the Duke of Mantua in April 1607 and displayed to the community of painters at Rome for one week before removal to Mantua.

The more brutal aspects of Caravaggio's paintings were condemned partly because Caravaggio's common people bear no relation to the graceful suppliants popular in much of Counter-Reformation art. They are plain working men, muscular, stubborn, and tenacious. But criticism did not cloud Caravaggio's success. His reputation and income increased. Although he moved in the society of cardinals and princes, his truculent spirit was the same.

After the time of the Contarelli project Caravaggio had many encounters with the law. In 1600 he was accused of blows by a fellow painter, and the following year he wounded a soldier. In 1603 he was imprisoned on the complaint of another painter and released only through the intercession of the French ambassador. In April 1604 he was accused of throwing a plate of artichokes in the face of a waiter and in October he was arrested for throwing stones at the Roman Guards. In May 1605 he was seized for misuse of arms, and on July 29 he had to flee Rome for a time because he had wounded a man in defense of his mistress. Within a year, on May 29, 1606, again in Rome, during a furious brawl over a disputed score in a game of tennis, Caravaggio killed Ranuccio Tomassoni.

Caravaggio fled Rome and sought refuge on the nearby estate of a relative of the Marquis of Caravaggio. He then moved on, hiding, and eventually reached Naples in early 1607. He remained in Naples for a time, painting a Madonna of the Rosary for the Flemish painter Louis Finson and one of his late masterpieces, The Seven Works of Mercy, for the Chapel of Monte della Misericordia. It is impossible to ignore the connection between the dark and urgent nature of this painting and what must have been his desperate state of mind. It is also the first indication of a shift in his painting style.

Around the end of 1607 Caravaggio traveled to Malta, where he was received as a celebrated artist. He completed several works, the most important of which was The Beheading of St. John the Baptist for the cathedral in Valletta in which he portrays himself as the beheaded Goliath. On July 14, 1608, Caravaggio was received into the Order of Malta as a "Knight of Justice". Soon afterward, however, he was expelled from the order and imprisoned. He escaped and took refuge in Sicily, landing at Syracuse in October 1608, restless and fearful . Yet his fame accompanied him. In Syracuse he painted his late, tragic masterpiece, The Burial of St. Lucy, for the Church of Santa Lucia. In early 1609 he fled again, to Messina, where he painted The Resurrection of Lazarus and The Adoration of the Shepherds, then moved on to Palermo, where he did the Adoration with St. Francis and St. Lawrence for the Oratorio di San Lorenzo.

He was aware his desperate flight could only be ended with a pardon from the Pope. He again moved north to Naples in October 1609. Bad luck pursued him. He was attacked and wounded so badly that rumors reached Rome that he was dead. After a long convalescence he sailed from Naples to Rome in July 1610 but was arrested enroute when his boat made a stop at Palo. On his release, he discovered that the boat he was to travel in had already sailed, taking his belongings. Setting out to overtake the vessel, he arrived at Port'Ercole, a Spanish possession within the Papal States, and died there a few days later, possibly of pneumonia. A document granting him clemency arrived from Rome three days after his death.

Carlo Carrà was born in Quargnento, in the province of Alessandria, Italy, in 1881 to a family of artisans. After working as a mural decorator for about ten years in the cities of Valenza Po, Milan, Paris, London and Bellinzona, in 1906 he enrolled at the Brera Art Academy, where he met the young painters Bonzagni, Romani, Valeri and Boccioni. In 1910 together with Marinetti, Boccioni and Russolo he wrote a manifesto addressing young artists, encouraging them to adopt a new expressive language. Balla and Severini did just that: this was the start of futurism.

In early 1913 the futurist movement also became a point of reference for the Florence based group of artists "la Voce", who were setting up the new magazine "Lacerba", directed by Papini and Soffici. Carrà regularly contributed to the magazine "Lacerba" with articles and drawings. At the same time he cultivated closer ties with the French cubists and in 1914 moved to Paris for several months. But he was already moving away from futurism: his collages were a first clear sign of the break from the Marinetti movement. This was the start of a period of reflection and study of the classics for Carrà, as he looked to Giotto and Paolo Uccello; his first metaphysical paintings date back to around this time.

Called up to fight in the war, Carrà spent time at Pieve di Cento but, for health reasons, was sent to the military hospital in Ferrara, where he met De Chirico, Savinio, Govoni and De Pisis. In 1919 he returned to Milan and married Ines Minoja. He later went through a period of interior and artistic breakdown, from which he emerged with a fresh vision of painting, as he strived to simplify imagery. This is the background to his third artistic stage, the so-called "lyric realism", which began in 1921. He definitively embraced a new synthesis between idea and nature and his preferred subjects were landscapes. In 1923 he went to Camogli, in Liguria. From 1926 on he spent several months in Forte dei Marmi, in Versilia, where he was left in awe of the bright, solitary landscapes, the deserted beaches, the mountains reaching down to the sea, the abandoned huts.

As well as his work as an artist, Carrà fought a battle to breathe life into modern art, writing criticism and aesthetic doctrines. He worked with the magazine "Lacerba" and "La Voce", with "Valori Plastici", "Esprit Nouveau", "La Fiera letteraria" and the daily newspaper "L'Ambrosiano".

The artist died on 13th April 1966, after a sudden illness.

Agostino Carracci, an Italian painter, engraver, and etcher, b. at Bologna, 16 August, 1557; d. at Parma, 22 March, 1602. The son of Antonio Carracci, a tailor, he was nephew of Lodovico and brother of Annibale. He began his art life as a goldsmith; but, urged by his uncle, the youth abandoned plastic for graphic art, and studied painting, first with Fontana, who had been Lodovico's master, and later with Passerotti.

The fame of Correggio's masterpieces drew Agostino to Parma, and afterwards, accompanied by Annibale, he made a long sojourn in Venice, where he became a distinguished engraver under the celebrated Cort. In 1589 he and his brother returned to Bologna and with Lodovico started the "School of the Carracci" (see below, LODOVICO), in which he taught while working devotedly at painting. In his native town is his masterpiece, "The Last Communion of St. Jerome", a beautiful work, showing Corregio's influence.

Agostino helped in the decoration of nearly every great palace in Bologna, and his poetic imagination was of great avail when with the matter-of- fact Annibale he assisted in the decoration of the Farnese Palace in Rome. He was a poet, and an interesting sonnet of his tells the students of the "Academy" what parts to choose from each school of painting and from the masters of the past in order to attain perfection. In 1600 Annibale and Agostino had a disagreement, and the latter left for Parma, where for the rest of his life he painted for the duke. Agostino was a master of engraving: he introduced what is called "the large style", and the lines of his plates were broadly and boldly laid.

His influence in the art of engraving was felt far beyond the bounds of Italy, and his technic with the graver was widely imitated. His plates were freely and beautifully executed, there is an admirable expression on all his faces, and the execution of the hands and feet is marvellous. In addition to his masterpiece, mention may be made of: "St Francis receiving the Stigmata" (Vienna); "Triumph of Galatea" (London). Among his numerous plates the best and most celebrated are: "Antonio Carracci" (his father); "Tiziano Vocelli"; "The Repose in Egypt".

Annibale Carracci,(1560-1609) was the youngest of the Carracci, prominent figures at the end of the 16th century in the movement against the prevailing Mannerist artificiality of Italian painting.

In 1595, Annibale, who was by far the greatest artist of the family, was called to Rome by Cardinal Odoardo Farnese to carry out his masterpiece, the decoration of the Farnese Gallery in the cardinal's family palace. He first decorated a small room called the Camerino with stories of Hercules, and in 1597 undertook the ceiling of the larger gallery, where the theme was The Loves of the Gods, or, as Bellori described it, "human love governed by Celestial love". Although the ceiling is rich in the interplay of various illusionistic elements, it retains fundamentally the self-contained and unambiguous character of High Renaissance decoration, drawing inspiration from Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling and Raphael's frescos in the Vatican Loggie and the Farnesina. The full untrammelled stream of Baroque illusionism was still to come in the work of Cortona and Lanfranco, but Annibale's decoration was one of the foundations of their style. Annibale made hundreds of drawings for the ceiling and, until the age of Romanticism, such elaborate preparatory work became accepted as a fundamental part of composing any ambitious history painting.

Annibale's other works in Rome also had great significance in the history of painting. Pictures such as "Domine, Quo Vadis?" reveal a striking economy in figure composition and a force and precision of gesture that had a profound influence on Poussin and through him on the whole language of gesture in painting. He developed landscape painting along similar lines, and is regarded as the father of ideal landscape, in which he was followed by Domenichino, his favorite pupil, Claude Loraine, and Poussin. "The Flight into Egypt" is Annibale's masterpiece in this genre.

Annibale's art also had a less formal side that comes out in his caricatures (he is generally credited with inventing the form) and in early genre paintings such as "The Butcher's Shop", which are remarkable for their lively observation and free handling.

In his last years Annibale was overcome by melancholia and gave up painting almost entirely after 1606. When he died he was buried accordingly to his wishes near Raphael in the Pantheon. It is a measure of his achievement that artists as great and diverse as Bernini, Poussin and Rubens found so much to admire and praise in his work.

The Carracci was a family of Italian artists that came from the region of Bologna. The family consisted of two brothers, Agostino and Annibale, and their cousin Ludovico.

Born in 1555, Ludovico was the oldest. He studied under Tintoretto in Venice before joining his cousins in the 1580's to open the Academia dei Desiderosi ('desiderosi' means desirous of fame and learning). This private teaching academy was founded because the members of the Carracci family were disturbed by the excess artificiality of the Mannerist painters of the time. They referred to Mannerist works as false Italian paintings. This aggravation led to an art reform that became the basis for the curriculum of the academy. Forcing the name of the academy to change to Academia degli Incamminati, meaning Academy of the Progressives. Guido Reni, Francesco Albani, and Domenichino were a few of the notable pupils that studied at the academy for progressive art. In each of these artists' works, a similar quality could be recognized; they each laid a special emphasis on drawing from life and clear draughtmanship. The talent that emerged from the academy made it one of the most active and influential Italian art centers for over two decades.

The family remained together working at the academy until 1595 when Annibale, the most gifted of the Carracci family, was summoned to Rome by Cardinal Odoardo Farnese. Ludovico remained in Bologna until his death in 1619 and directed the Carracci academy by himself after his cousins had gone to Rome. He left Bologna only for brief periods. His work is highly personal and, some say, uneven. Painterly and expressive considerations always outweigh those of stability and calm Classicism in his work, and at its best there is a passionate and poetic quality indicative of his preference for Tintoretto and Jacopo Bassano. His most fruitful period was 1585-95, but near the end of his career he still produced remarkable paintings of an almost Expressionist force, such as the Christ Crucified above Figures in Limbo (Sta Francesco Romana, Ferrara, 1614).

Born in Venice, Rosalba Carriera enjoyed great success as a professional artist. Many of her contemporaries considered her a genius and she was the first artist to explore and exploit the possibilities of pastel painting. She was a mentor to many young artists, taught her sisters to paint, and she influenced the great pastel portraitist Maurice Quentin de la Tour. Because she was born and raised in the great export/import city of Venice, her works were visible to a great many foreign visitors who were eager to commission her flattering portraits. Her work was collected throughout Europe and in 1720 she was invited to Paris by art dealer/collector, Pierre Crozat. She joined his circle along with Antoine Watteau and the two of them were instrumental in the development of the Rococo style. She was elected to the Academy Royal in Paris and also enjoyed a successful reputation in Italy where she was also a member of the Academy of St. Luke in Rome, Bolonga, and Florence...quite an extraordinary feat considering women were not welcome in the formal artistic institutions. Cosimo III de Medici included her self portrait in his collection and she was inundated with commissions from nobles throughout France and Italy. After having enjoyed a long career, she began to lose her eyesight in the 1740's and ceased painting for the last decade of her life.

Eugéne Carriére, 1849 - 1906, French lithographer best known for his spiritual interpretations of maternity and family life. Characteristic of this genre are his Crucifixion and Family Life. He produced a number of large canvases for the Sorbonne and the Hotel de Ville in Paris. Among his most notable works are a number of portraits including those of Paul Verlaine, Daudet and Edmond de Goncourt, all in the Louvre.

Born in 1908, Henri Cartier-Bresson is widely regarded as one of the greatest photographers of his time, Henri Cartier-Bresson was a shy Frenchman who elevated "snap shooting" to the level of a refined and disciplined art. His sharp-shooter’s ability to catch "the decisive moment," his precise eye for design, his self-effacing methods of work, and his literate comments about the theory and practice of photography made him a legendary figure among contemporary photojournalists.

His work and his approach have exercised a profound and far-reaching influence. His pictures and picture essays have been published in most of the world’s major magazines during three decades, and Cartier-Bresson prints have hung in the leading art museums of the United States and Europe (his monumental ‘The Decisive Moment’ show being the first photographic exhibit ever to be displayed in the halls of the Louvre). In the practical world of picture marketing, Cartier-Bresson left his imprint as well: he was one of the founders and a former president of Magnum, a cooperative picture agency of New York and Paris.
Henri Cartier-Bresson was born in 1908, in Chanteloupe, France, of prosperous middle-class parents. He owned a Box Brownie as a boy, using it for taking holiday snapshots, and later experimented with a 3 X 4 view camera. But he was also interested in painting and studied for two years in a Paris studio. This early training in art helped develop the subtle and sensitive eye for composition, which was one of his greatest assets as a photographer.
In 1931, at the age of 22, Cartier-Bresson spent a year as a hunter in the West African bush. Catching a case of backwater fever, he returned to France to convalesce. It was at this time, in Marseille, that he first truly discovered photography. He obtained a Leica and began snapping a few pictures with it. It was a pivotal experience. A new world, a new kind of seeing, spontaneous and unpredictable, opened up to him through the narrow rectangle of the 35 mm viewfinder. His imagination caught fire. He recalls how he excitedly "prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, determined to ‘trap’ life, to preserve life in the act of living."
 
Thus began one of the most fruitful collaborations between man and machine in the history of photography. He remained devoted to the 35 mm camera throughout his career. The speed, mobility, the large number of exposures per loading, and, above all, the unobtrusiveness of the little camera perfectly fitted his shy, quicksilver personality. Before long he was handling its controls as automatically as an expert racing driver shifts gears. The camera itself, in his own famous phrase, became an "extension of the eye".

When World War II erupted, Cartier-Bresson served briefly in the French Army and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of France. After two unsuccessful tries, he escaped from the camp where he was held as a prisoner of war, and worked with the underground until the war’s end.

Resuming his interrupted career as a photojournalist, he helped form the Magnum picture agency in 1947. Assignments for major magazines would take him on global travels, across Europe and the United States, to India, Russia and China. Many books of Cartier-Bresson photographs were published in the 50’s and 60’s, the most famous being ‘The Decisive Moment’ (1952). A major milestone in his career was a massive, 400-print retrospective exhibition, which toured the United States in 1960.

As a journalist, Henri Cattier Bresson felt an intense need to communicate what he thought and felt about what he saw, and while his pictures often were subtle they were rarely obscure. He had a high respect for the discipline of press photography, of having to tell a story crisply in one striking picture. His journalistic grappling with the realities of men and events, his sense of news and history, and his belief in the social role of photography all helped keep his work memorable.

He has said that a sense of human dignity is an essential quality for any photojournalist, and feels that no picture, regardless of how brilliant from a visual or technical standpoint, can be successful unless it grows from love and comprehension of people and an awareness of ‘man facing his fate." Many of his portraits of William Faulkner and other notables have become definitive, catching as they do, with relaxed and casual brilliance, the essence of personality.
His first book contained an often-quoted paragraph that sums up his approach to photography and has become something of a creed for candid, available light photojournalists everywhere. The decisive moment, as Cartier-Bresson tersely defined it, is ‘the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression."

Some critics accused him of being nothing more than a snap-shooter. It is true that the "decisive moment’ approach, in less disciplined hands, can degenerate into haphazard, unselective snap shooting. But the best of Cartier-Bresson’s works, with their uncanny sense of timing, rigorous organization, and deep insights into human emotion and character, could never have been caught by luck alone, unaided by a rare talent. They are snapshots only in the classic sense of "instantaneous exposures " snapshots elevated to the level of art.

"In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject," he wrote in ‘The Decisive Moment’. "The little human detail can become a leitmotif." Most of his photography is a collection of such little, human details; concerned images with universal meaning and suggestion. He lived in a haunted world where mundane facts, a reflection in a mud-puddle, an image chalked on a wall, the slant of a black-robed figure against mist, radiate significance at once familiar and only half-consciously grasped.

Michelangelo Cerquozzi (1602 - 1660). Italian painter pupil of the Flemish painter Jacob de Hase from whom he learned to produce battle scenes, became knopwn as "Michelangelo of the Battles". From 1626 he was associtd with Pieter van Laerand with him popularized the small burlesque scenes known as bambocciate.

T he French painter Paul Cézanne, who exhibited little in his lifetime and pursued his interests increasingly in artistic isolation, is regarded today as one of the great forerunners of modern painting, both for the way that he evolved of putting down on canvas exactly what his eye saw in nature and for the qualities of pictorial form that he achieved through a unique treatment of space, mass, and color.

Cézanne was born at Aix-en-Provence in the south of France on Jan. 19, 1839. He went to school in Aix, forming a close friendship with the novelist Emile Zola. He also studied law there from 1859 to 1861, but at the same time he continued attending drawing classes. Against the implacable resistance of his father, he made up his mind that he wanted to paint and in 1861 joined Zola in Paris. His father's reluctant consent at that time brought him financial support and, later, a large inheritance on which he could live without difficulty. In Paris he met Camille Pissarro and came to know others of the impressionist group, with whom he would exhibit in 1874 and 1877. Cézanne, however, remained an outsider to their circle; from 1864 to 1869 he submitted his work to the official SALON and saw it consistently rejected. His paintings of 1865-70 form what is usually called his early ``romantic'' period. Extremely personal in character, it deals with bizarre subjects of violence and fantasy in harsh, somber colors and extremely heavy paintwork.

Thereafter, as Cézanne rejected that kind of approach and worked his way out of the obsessions underlying it, his art is conveniently divided into three phases. In the early 1870s, through a mutually helpful association with Pissarro, with whom he painted outside Paris at Auvers, he assimilated the principles of color and lighting of Impressionism and loosened up his brushwork; yet he retained his own sense of mass and the interaction of planes, as in House of the Hanged Man (1873; Musee d'Orsay, Paris).

In the late 1870s Cézanne entered the phase known as "constructive,'' characterized by the grouping of parallel, hatched brushstrokes in formations that build up a sense of mass in themselves. He continued in this style until the early 1890s, when, in his series of paintings titled Card Players (1890-92), the upward curvature of the players' backs creates a sense of architectural solidity and thrust, and the intervals between figures and objects have the appearance of live cells of space and atmosphere.

Finally, living as a solitary in Aix rather than alternating between the south and Paris, Cézanne moved into his late phase. Now he concentrated on a few basic subjects: still lifes of studio objects built around such recurring elements as apples, statuary, and tablecloths; studies of bathers, based upon the male model and drawing upon a combination of memory, earlier studies, and sources in the art of the past; and successive views of the Mont Sainte-Victoire, a nearby landmark, painted from his studio looking across the intervening valley. The landscapes of the final years, much affected by Cézanne's contemporaneous practice in watercolor, have a more transparent and unfinished look, while the last figure paintings are at once more somber and spiritual in mood. By the time of his death on Oct. 22, 1906, Cézanne's art had begun to be shown and seen across Europe, and it became a fundamental influence on the Fauves, the cubists, and virtually all advanced art of the early 20th century.

Marc Chagall was a Russian-born French painter and designer, distinguished for his surrealistic inventiveness. He is recognized as one of the most significant painters and graphic artists of the 20th century. His work treats subjects in a vein of humor and fantasy that draws deeply on the resources of the unconscious. Chagall's personal and unique imagery is often suffused with exquisite poetic inspiration.

Chagall was born July 7, 1887, in Vitsyebsk, Russia (now in Belarus), and was educated in art in Saint Petersburg and, from 1910, in Paris, where he remained until 1914. Between 1915 and 1917 he lived in Saint Petersburg; after the Russian Revolution he was director of the Art Academy in Vitsyebsk from 1918 to 1919 and was art director of the Moscow Jewish State Theater from 1919 to 1922. Chagall painted several murals in the theater lobby and executed the settings for numerous productions. In 1923, he moved to France, where he spent the rest of his life, except for a period of residence in the United States from 1941 to 1948. He died in St. Paul de Vence, France, on March 28, 1985.

Chagall's distinctive use of color and form is derived partly from Russian expressionism and was influenced decisively by French cubism. Crystallizing his style early, as in Candles in the Dark (1908, artist's collection), he later developed subtle variations. His numerous works represent characteristically vivid recollections of Russian-Jewish village scenes, as in I and the Village (1911, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), and incidents in his private life, as in the print series Mein Leben (German for “My Life,” 1922), in addition to treatments of Jewish subjects, of which The Praying Jew (1914, Art Institute of Chicago) is one. His works combine recollection with folklore and fantasy. Biblical themes characterize a series of etchings executed between 1925 and 1939, illustrating the Old Testament, and the 12 stained-glass windows in the Hadassah Hospital of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem (1962). In 1973 Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall (National Museum of the Marc Chagall Biblical Message) was opened in Nice, France, to house hundreds of his biblical works. Chagall executed many prints illustrating literary classics. A canvas completed in 1964 covers the ceiling of the Opéra in Paris, and two large murals (1966) hang in the lobby of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.

Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel was born in Saumur, Southern France. She began by designing hats, first in Paris in 1908, and later in Deauville. Her fashion boutiques (one in Paris and one in Deauville) opened simultaneously in 1914. She opened an haute couture salon in Biarritz in 1916, and in 1920 moved to Paris in the present quarters on rue Cambon. Ready-to-wear fashions were not introduced until 1978, after Coco's death.

Chanel was famous for popularizing practical clothes, including pants for women, little black dresses, and box-like collarless jackets with bias edging and brass buttons. Her first fabrics included wool jersey, which was comfortable and easy fitting, but was not considered suitable for fashionable clothes. Traditional Chanel accessories include multiple strands of pearls and gold chains, quilted handbags, sling-back pumps in ivory with black toes, quilted handbags with shoulder straps made of gold chain, and gardenias. She liked to mix imitation jewels with real jewels and often combined massive amounts with sportswear.

Chanel's business was interrupted by World War I and again in 1939 at the beginning of World War II, after which it did not reopen until 1953.

After her death in her Paris apartment in 1971, first her assistant designers, Gaston Berthelot and Ramon Esparza, and then her assistants Yvonne Dudel and Jean Cazaubon designed the couture (1975-83). Philippe Guibourgé became the ready-to-wear designer. Karl Lagerfeld took over haute couture design in 1983 and ready-to-wear design in 1984. He rehashes her trademark styles annually in various fabrics.

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin was born in Paris on 2 November 1699, son of the master cabinetmaker Jean Chardin.

He was the pupil of the history painters Pierre-Jacques Cazes (1676-1754) and Noël-Nicolas Coypel (1690-1734). Chardin was accepted into the Académie de Saint-Luc as a painter of still lifes in 1724, and became a member of the Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture in 1728. He was elected a council member of the latter in 1743 and served as treasurer from 1755 to 1775. In 1733, Chardin began painting genre scenes in addition to still lifes. His charming small canvases, depicting modest scenes of one or two figures, and the humble, everyday objects of middle-class life, were in the tradition of the Dutch cabinet pictures of the preceding century that enjoyed such popularity among French collectors at this time.

Characterized by a simplicity and directness of vision, and a complete avoidance of sentimentality and affectation, Chardin's work represents a naturalistic tendency in French eighteenth-century painting that existed alongside the more fashionable and flamboyant Rococo. His technical mastery achieved great depth of tone through the use of a loaded brush and a subtle use of scumbled color.

Failing eyesight forced Chardin to turn to the medium of pastels towards the end of his life. He died in his apartment at the Louvre, in Paris, on 6 December 1779. Among Chardin's pupils was Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

William Merritt Chase was an eclectic American painter known for his portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. He was also a greatly influential teacher for 36 years. Trained at the National Academy of Design in New York and at Munich's Royal Academy, he first achieved recognition as a painter in the somber Munich style.

As the result of a trip to Venice, Chase became more concerned with the effects of light, and his landscapes became increasingly impressionistic. In his portraits and interiors, he was influenced by Dutch and Spanish Renaissance painters and by his contemporaries John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler; Chase's Portrait of Whistler, painted in Whistler's style, is one of his major works. Also greatly admired were his still-life paintings, such as Still Life--Fish, which recall 17th-century Dutch masterpieces.

T héodore Chassériau was born at his parent's home in Samana in the island of Santo Domingo where his father Bénoit was a successful and prosperous planter. His mother came from a minor noble family owning substantial plantations which had been established on the island since the reign of Louis XV. His mother brought him to Paris along with his brothers and sisters when he was only two years old because of political uncertainty on the island. When she later returned to join their father, the children were left in the care of their elder brother. Exhibiting a talent for drawing at a very young age, Chassériau was introduced at the age of ten to Ingres, who gave him occasional instruction until he joined him as a full time student in 1834 at the age of fifteen.

Best known for his Orientalist interiors and seductive odalisques, Chassériau's training in the studio of Ingres had a profound influence on his early career. The debt to his master is most immediately apparent in his fine portrait drawings but one may observe in the early painted portraits the technical skills he acquired under Ingres' tutelage. He made his Salon debut two years later and from these early days two important religious works are known, Cain Maudit and L'Enfant Prodigue, both painted when he was just seventeen. He exhibited again at the Salons of 1837 but his two offerings the following year were refused and it was not until 1839 that he enjoyed his earliest public success, with the Venus Marine, a seductive and erotic nude holding up her long tresses before a rocky seascape. This is painted in the new romantic style favored also by another Ingres pupil, Henri Lehmann, and was much praised by contemporary critics. In the same year Chassériau presented another powerfully erotic nude on a much larger scale, the Suzanne au Bain. Although a biblical subject, the artist took the opportunity to portray a much repeated subject as a an orientalist odalisque, her overt sexuality immediately arresting the viewer.

In the years leading to his departure for Constantine, Algiers, which so revolutionized his palette, Chassériau's output was dominated by portraiture. The earliest surviving such work is of his own father, painted when he was only thirteen years old, culminating in his greatest portrait, that of his two sisters, Adèle and Aline, Les Mesdemoiselles Chassériau, exhibited at the Salon of 1843.

T homas Chippendale, the best-known English cabinetmaker and author of The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker´s Director was born in Yorkshire, the son of a carpenter. By the time he married, in 1748, he was already established in London and living in Conduit Court, Long Acre. He moved to 60 St. Martin´s Lane in 1754, where he had workshops and a timber yard. He took James Rannie into partnership, and for much of his career, Chippendale was mainly occupied running his very extensive business, rather than in cabinetmaking itself. He continued the business alone after Rannie´s death in 1766. In 1771, Thomas Haig joined the firm, which then became Chippendale, Haig and Company.

Thomas Chippendale´s firm undertook the complete furnishing and decoration of large houses such as Nostell Priory and Harewood House. Several of Chippendale´s designs are so elaborate and fantastic as to be impractical to be carved in mahogany or other hardwood.

After his death in 1779, the firm of Chippendale and Haig was carried on by his son, Thomas. His partner, Thomas Haig, had retired in 1796, and in 1804, Thomas Chippendale, the younger, went bankrupt. However, he appears to have recovered quickly and resumed business maintaining the firm´s high level of craftsmanship. His furniture made for Stourhead, is among the best in the Regency style.

Clodion, originally Claude Michael, was a French sculptor whose works represent the quintessence of the Rococo style.

In 1755 Clodion went to Paris and entered the workshop of Lambert-Sigisbert Adam, his uncle. On his uncle's death, he became a pupil of J.B. Pigalle. In 1759 he won the grand prize for sculpture at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, and in 1762 he went to Rome. Catherine II was eager for him to come to St. Petersburg, but he returned to Paris in 1771. There he was successful and frequently exhibited at the Salon.

Clodion worked mostly in terra-cotta, his preferred subject matter being nymphs, satyrs, bacchantes, and other classical figures sensually portrayed. He was also, with his brothers, a decorator of such objects as candelabra, clocks, and vases. Perhaps because of his apparent unwillingness to be seriously monumental, he was never admitted to the Académie Royale. Nevertheless, after the Revolution had driven him in 1792 to Nancy, where he lived until 1798, he was flexible enough to adapt himself to Neoclassical monumentality - the relief on the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, representing the entry of the French into Munich, is an example.


Painter, draftsman and teacher, Robert Coane (b. 1945, Puerto Rico) is best known for provocative political works. He has exhibited and taught nationally and abroad, including the Minnesota Museum of American Art School, the New York Academy of Art and the Parsons School of Design and held residencies at El Museo del Barrio and at the Universidad Internacional Menéndez y Pelayo in Santander, Spain.

Late work is about form, color and surface detail. Technically Dutch panel painting, it is firmly rooted in European painting tradition with an eye to modern sensibilities in color and composition.
Fragmented figures or objects are rendered against flat, bold, striking backgrounds and often paired to create startling overall abstract forms.

The lighting is Caravaggio; the high-keyed tropical palette, Gauguin. Dramatic cropping makes for a unique tension between negative shape and image. Suggestive or narrative titles have been eliminated in favor of a simple nomenclature used for identification purposes only. The gesture remains spontaneous, the color brilliant. Luminous, compressed, stark, unencumbered, unadorned, the image speaks for itself.

In 1983 he founded L’Atelier in NYC, dedicated to the promotion of Figurative Art and Artists of quality and the singular importance of drawing and direct observation as the cornerstone of all visual art through Master Workshops in Figure Painting and Drawing and as webmaster to www.Atelier-RC.com.

An accomplished draftsman since early childhood, he was apprenticed to Puerto Rican painter Fran Cervoni at the age of twelve. In New York he studied drawing under Gary Faigin and painting under Francis Cunningham at the Art Students League, at the New York Academy of Figurative Art and at the Parsons School of Design.

Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1944, Brian Coape-Arnold moved to New York City in 1966. He graduated from Wagner College in Staten Island with a degree in History. An enthusiastic and compulsive draghtsman, he can often be found roaming the streets of New York for a good sketch with his wife and fellow artist Lee Becker. Coap-Arnold joined Robert Coane's L'Atelier in December of 1995 where he is considered "resident scholar" for his expert knowledge of the history of art.

Thomas Cole is often called the "Father of the Hudson River School of Art." In 1826 he helped to found the National Academy of Design in New York City.

In 1827 he made his first visit to the White Mountains. While best known for his allegorical paintings such as the Voyage of Life and the Course of Empire series, he did many White Mountain paintings including Flume in the White Mountains; View of Mount Washington; Mount Chocorua; Notch in the White Mountains; View Near Conway; and Mount Washington from the Upper Saco Intervale.

Cole was apprenticed to a calico designer and wood engraver in England before he came to the United States with his family in 1818. He helped to found the NAD in 1826.  The rest of his life he spent much of his time sketching from nature in the Catskills, White Mountains, Adirondacks, and the coast of Maine. In 1827, at the behest of Daniel Wadsworth, Cole visited the White Mountains for the first time.  He vistited the New Hampshire mountains again a year later with fellow artist Henry Cheever Pratt, only eight years after the first footpath was opened to Mount Washington. He returned to New Hampshire for the last time in 1839.  In the winters, Cole returned to his New York City studio to paint romantic, amalgamative, grand, and enormous allegorical works such as the Voyage of Life and Course of Empire from the accumulated sketches of his summer excursions.  Though he preferred allegorical subjects, he also painted many landscapes, often at the specific request of patrons. All his paintings are romantic in vein, for Cole felt it his duty to depict nature, especially American nature, as the "visible hand of God."

From 1829 to 1832 Cole traveled abroad, but his unique genius was not affected by Old World contacts.  His only pupil was his neighbor in Catskill, Frederic Church.

Born in 1801, Cole died in 1848 at only 47 years of age.


English painter JohnConstable, 1776-1837, is ranked with Turner as one of the greatest British landscape artists. Although he showed an early talent for art and began painting his native Suffolk scenery before he left school, his great originality matured slowly. He committed himself to a career as an artist only in 1799, when he joined the Royal Academy Schools and it was not until 1829 that he was grudgingly made a full Academician, elected by a majority of only one vote.

In 1816 he became financially secure on the death of his father and married Maria Bicknell after a seven-year courtship and in the fact of strong opposition from her family. During the 1820s he began to win recognition: The Hay Wain won a gold medal at the Paris Salon of 1824 and Constable was admired by Delacroix and Bonington among others. His wife died in 1828, however, and the remaining years of his life were clouded by despondency.

After spending some years working in the picturesque tradition of landscape and the manner of Gainsborough, Constable developed his own original treatment from the attempt to render scenery more directly and realistically, carrying on but modifying in an individual way the tradition inherited from Ruisdael and the Dutch 17th-century landscape painters. He turned away from the pictorial conventions of 18th-century landscape painters and represented in paint the atmospheric effects of changing light in the open air, the movement of clouds across the sky. "The sound of water escaping from mill dams, willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts and brickwork, I love such things. These scenes made me a painter," he is quoted as saying.

He never went abroad, and his finest works are of the places he knew and loved best, particularly Suffolk and Hampstead, where he lived from 1821. He abandoned fine traditional finish, catching the sunlight in blobs of pure white or yellow, and the drama of storms with a rapid brush. Henry Fuseli was among the contemporaries who applauded the freshness of Constable's approach.

Constable worked extensively in the open air, drawing and sketching in oils, but his finished pictures were produced in the studio. For his most ambitious works he followed the unusual technical procedure of making a full-size oil sketch, and there is presently a tendency to praise these even more highly than the finished works because of their freedom and freshness of brushwork.

American-born history and portrait painter, John Singleton Copley began painting portraits in his teens in his native Boston. Although self-taught, he was familiar with European art through the study of prints in the collection of his stepfather, the engraver Peter Pelham. His early pieces had a freshness and spontaneity of handling rarely seen in works by his contemporaries (‘Portrait of Colonel Epes Sargent’, circa 1760, National Gallery of Art, Washington). In 1766 he exhibited the portrait of his stepbrother, Henry Pelham (‘Boy with a Squirrel’, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) in London. Despite critical acclaim both at home and abroad he lacked confidence. In 1776 he visited Italy where he worked on devotional pictures. Later in the same year he settled in London with his family. ‘The Copley Family’ (1776–77, National Gallery of Art, Washington) marked the occasion. In London he continued as a portrait painter, but his fine style lost its originality: he followed fashion rather then conviction.

With demand for history subjects much greater in England than America, he pursued this genre seeking new modes of expression and using modern costume for historical characters. In ‘Brook Watson and the Shark’ (1778, National Gallery of Art, Washington) he gave a novel interpretation of the Hellenistic sculpture of the ‘Borghese Gladiator’ (Louvre, Paris) by modelling the figure of Watson on the ancient hero. His heroic ‘Death of Chatham’ (1779–80, Tate, London) was a response to Benjamin West’s ‘Death of Wolfe’. Copley became a member of the Royal Academy in 1779. He soon engaged in bitter, artistic and financial rivalries with fellow Academicians, some related to his innovative showmanship in displaying his major works independently for profit, such as the huge ‘Siege of Gibraltar’ completed in 1794 (Guildhall Art Gallery, London).

He fell out of fashion and died forgotten and bankrupt, although his eminent lawyer son, later Lord Lyndhurst, was three times Lord Chancellor of England.



Joseph Cornell was born December 24, 1903, in Nyack, New York. From 1917 to 1921, he attended Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts. He was an avid collector of memorabilia and, while working as a woolen-goods salesman in New York until 1931, developed his interests in ballet, literature, and opera. He lived with his mother and brother, Robert, at their home in the Flushing section of Queens.

In the early 1930s, Cornell met Surrealist writers and artists at the Julien Levy Gallery, New York, and saw Max Ernst’s collage-novel La Femme 100 têtes. Cornell’s early constructions of found objects were first shown in the group exhibition Surréalisme at Levy’s gallery in 1932. From 1934 to 1940, Cornell supported himself by working as a textile designer at the Traphagen studio in New York. During these years, he became familiar with Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and Kurt Schwitters’s box constructions. Cornell was included in the 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada [more], Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Always interested in film and cinematic techniques, he made a number of movies, including the collage film Rose Hobart (ca. 1936) and wrote two film scenarios. One of these, Monsieur Phot (1933), was published in 1936 in Levy’s book Surrealism.

Cornell’s first two solo exhibitions took place at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1932 and 1939, and they included an array of objects, a number of them in shadow boxes. During the 1940s and 1950s, he made Aviary, Hotel, Observatory, and Medici boxes, among other series, as well as boxes devoted to stage and screen personalities. In the early 1960s, Cornell stopped making new boxes and began to reconstruct old ones and to work intensively in collage. Cornell retrospectives were held in 1967 at the Pasadena Art Museum and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. In 1970, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York mounted an exhibition of his collages. Cornell died December 29, 1972, at his home in Flushing.

French painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875) abandoned a commercial career for art at the age of 26 and from the first showed a strong vocation for landscape painting. He lived in Paris, but travelled about France making sketches from nature and from these he composed in his studio. In addition to his journeys in France, he visited England, the Low Countries, Switzerland, and Italy three times (1825-28, 1834, and 1843).

Throughout his life Corot found congenial the advice given to him by his teacher Achille-Etna Michallon "to reproduce as scrupulously as possible what I saw in front of me". On the other hand he never felt entirely at home with the ideals of the Barbizon School, the members of which saw Romantic idealization of the countrysite as a form of escapism from urban banality, and he remained more faithful to the French Classical tradition than to the English or Dutch schools. Yet although he continued to make studied compositions after his sketches done direct from nature, he brought a new and personal poetry in the Classical tradition of composed landscape and an unaffected naturalness which had hitherto been foreign to it. Though he represented nature realistically, he did not idealize the peasant or the labors of agriculture in the manner of Millet and Courbet, and was uninvolved in ideological controversy.

From 1827 Corot exhibited regularly at the Salon, but his greatest success there came with a rather different type of picture -- more traditionally Romantic in its evocation of an Arcadian past, and painted in a misty soft-edged style that contrasts sharply with the luminous clarity of his more topographical work.

Late in his career Corot also turned to figure painting and it is only fairly recently that this aspect of his work has emerged from neglect -- his female nudes are often of high quality. It was, however, his directness of vision that was generally admired by the major landscape painters of the latter half of the century and influenced nearly all of them at some stage in their careers. His popularity was such that he is said to be the most forged of all painters.

In his lifetime he was held in great esteem as a man as well as an artist. He had a noble and generous nature. He supported Millet's widow, for example, and gave a cottage to the blind and impoverished Daumier.


Pierre-Auguste Cot was born at Bédarieux on 17 February 1837. After successful studies at l'Ecole des Beaux Arts in Toulouse, Cot moved to Paris where he continued his studies. Under the tutelage of three widely recognized masters of their day, Léon Cogniet, Alexander Cahanelle and William Adolphe Bouguereau. He painted mythological subjects, and also enjoyed a considerable reputatation for his portraits.

Cot first exhibited in 1863 and in 1865 he was awarded first prize by L'Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. By 1870, his popularity quickly emerged and commissioned portraits of prominent aristorcrats outnumbered his earlier figurative subjects at the Paris Salong, where his work was shown. As Cot painted portraits throughout the majority of his lifetime, his figurative paintings, such as "Storm," are quite rare.

He died in July 1883.

The painter Gustave Courbet (1819-77) started and dominated the French movement toward realism. Art critics and the public were accustomed to pretty pictures that made life look better than it was. Courbet, against much opposition, truthfully portrayed ordinary places and people.

Gustave Courbet was born on June 10, 1819, to a prosperous farming family in Ornans, France. He went to Paris in 1841, supposedly to study law, but he soon decided to study painting and learned by copying the pictures of master artists. In 1844 his self-portrait, Courbet with a Black Dog, was accepted by the Salon, an annual public exhibition of art sponsored by the influential Royal Academy.

In 1848 a political revolution in France foreshadowed a revolution in art, as people in the arts became more open to new ideas. Courbet's early work was exhibited successfully in 1849. That same year he visited his family in the countryside and produced one of his greatest paintings, The Stone-Breakers, followed by Burial at Ornans in 1850. Both were quite unlike the romantic pictures of the day because they showed peasants in realistic settings instead of the rich in glamorized situations. In 1855 he completed a huge canvas, The Artist's Studio, and, when it was refused for an important exhibition, Courbet boldly displayed his work himself near the exhibition hall.

Courbet visited Germany in 1856, where he was welcomed by the artistic community. By 1859 he was the undisputed leader of the new generation of the French realist movement. He painted all varieties of subjects, including admirable portraits and sensuous female nudes but, most of all, scenes of nature. His series of seascapes with changing storm clouds wafting overhead begun in 1865 had a great influence on impressionist painters.

Politically a socialist, Courbet took part in revolutionary activities for which he was imprisoned for six months in 1871. He was also fined more than he could pay so he fled to Switzerland where he died in the town of La Tour-de-Peilz on Dec. 31, 1877.


Guillaume Coustou, 1677–1746, studied with Coysevox and in Rome. Returning to Paris, he worked at Versailles and at Marly. He is famous for his colossal group, The Ocean and the Mediterranean, at Marly, and above all for his exuberant Horses of Marly at the entrance of the Champs Élysées, Paris. His son Guillaume Coustou,. the younger, 1716–77, was also a noted sculptor.

Nicolas Coustou (b. 1658, Lyon, d. 1733, Paris), French sculptor, brother of Guillaume Coustou. studied with his uncle, Antoine Coysevox, with whom he later collaborated on the decorations at Marly and at Versailles. He became rector and chancellor of the Académie royale. Among his best-known works are La Seine et la Marne (Tuileries Gardens) and the bas-relief, Passage du Rhin (Louvre). He was employed in court circles, and his work can be seen at Versailles and in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris.


Thomas Couture (December 21, 1815 - March 30, 1879) was an influential French history painter and teacher. He was born at Senlis Oise, France and at age 11, Thomas Couture's family moved to Paris where he would study at the industrial arts school (École des Arts et Métiers) and later at the École des Beaux-Arts. He was a pupil of Gros and Delaroche. He failed the prestigious Prix de Rome competition at the École six times, but he felt the problem was with the École, not himself. Couture finally did win the prize in 1837.

In 1840, he began exhibiting historical and genre pictures at the Paris Salon, earning several medals for his works, in particular for his 1847 masterpiece, "Romans in the Decadence of the Empire." Shortly after his this success, Couture opened an independent atelier meant to challenge the École des Beaux-Arts by turning out the best new history painters.

Couture's innovative technique gained much attention and he received Government and Church commissions for murals during the late 1840s through the 1850s. However, he never completed the first two commissions, while the third met with mixed criticism. Upset by the unfavorable reception of his murals, in 1860 he left Paris for a time returning to his hometown of Senlis where he continued to teach young artists who came to him. In 1867 he thumbed his nose at the academic establishment by publishing a book on his own ideas and working methods.
During his lifetime, Couture taught such later luminaries of the art world as Edouard Manet, Henri Fantin-Latour, and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

Asked by a publisher to do an autobiography, Thomas Couture responded with words that are even more appropriate today: "Biography is the exaltation of personality --- and personality is the scourge of our time."

Thomas Couture died at Villiers-le-Bel, Île-de-France and was interred in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, France.

The landscape painter John Crome (1769-1821), a.k.a. Old Crome, was the founder of the Norwich School of painters. He was born in Norwich, the son of a weaver, and remained in that town for his whole life, making one trip to Wales, one to Paris, and otherwise contenting himself with a yearly visit to London to see the Academy Exhibition. He was first apprenticed to a coach-painter, but spent his leisure time painting in oils, being largely self-taught. He was influenced somewhat by various Dutch painters whose work he had the opportunity to study, and also was inspired by Richard Wilson in his early work. From 1807-1818 he sent a dozen pictures to the Royal Academy, but otherwise showed his works in Norwich.
Crome's major works were realist landscapes in oil, but he also helped to revive etching in England, producing a series of plates from about 1809-13. His oil paintings numbered about 300, quite impressive given that he spent so much time teaching. Crome had a strong influence on his many pupils, and among his followers may be mentioned James Stark, George Vincent, and his own son, John Berney Crome, who produced scenes of shipping and landscapes in moonlight.

George Cruikshank (1792-1878) was a humorist of the school of Hogarth, and is considered by some to be one of the best that Britain has produced.

He was the son of a Scottish painter, Isaac Cruikshank, and apparently his talent was such that he could draw as soon as he could write. From the beginning he was concerned with satire, achieving public notice with painting theatre backdrops (the first was for Drury Lane Theatre, London). In the early 1820s he made etchings for the pamphleteer William Hone, but his political caricature work was soon overtaken by his work as a book illustrator. Life in London (1821) was followed by Tales of Irish Life (1824), and then a series of further books at an ever increasing rate. His best known work was for Charles Dickens, starting with Sketches by Boz and reaching its zenith, perhaps, with Oliver Twist.

Among his large number of other illustrated books were a Grimm’s Fairy Tales (1827), a Pilgrim’s Progress and Paradise Lost, and seven novels by Harrison Ainsworth. He also had a late interest in oil painting, enrolling in the Academy Schools as a student at the age of 64. He did not achieve much success in that technique, but the Tate Gallery has his The Worship of Bacchus.
Despite his large oeuvre, more than 15,000 drawings in his lifetime, Cruikshank was never well off. He required financial assistance from friends in 1866 (led by Ruskin), and late in life relied on a modest pension from the civil list and a Turner annuity from the Academy.

Today, it can be a little hard to appreciate the rather blatant unsubtle humour of illustrators such as Cruikshank. The fugitive nature of many of the events alluded to in his drawings means that much is lost to the viewer. Most of it seems not humorous and rather feeble.

John Steuart Curry (1897-1946) began his professional career as an illustrator. A native of Kansas, Curry concentrated on midwestern themes, believing that art should grow out of daily experiences. Along with Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) and Grant Wood (1892-1942), Curry participated in regionalism or American scene painting. This grassroots art movement of the 1930s advocated painting local scenes in a realistic manner, reflecting the isolationism of America in the interwar period.

In 1932 Curry enjoyed considerable professional success both in selling his work and winning the praise of prominent New York critics. Concurrently, however, he was experiencing frustrations with his life and the direction of his art. Wanting to avoid being stereotyped as a painter of farm life and landscape, the artist literally ran away with the Ringling Brothers' Circus in 1932 on its spring tour through New England. During the ensuing three months, Curry was extremely productive. Baby Ruth is one of many works he made of circus life, which included volumes of preliminary sketches, watercolors, and oil paintings. For Curry, the theatrical excitement of the circus represented the spectacle of popular entertainment that was as much a part of rural American life as the threshing machine and his approach to the circus was one of great intensity. Curry acts as an objective observer, demonstrating neither sympathy nor sensationalism toward his subject.


Aelbert Cuyp (1620-91) is the most famous member of the family and now one of the most celebrated of all landscape painters, although he also painted many other subjects. He was the son and probably the pupil of Jacob Gerritsz. Cuyp. His early works also show the influence of Jan van Goyen.

Aelbert was born and died at Dordrecht but seems to have travelled along Holland's great rivers to the eastern part of the Netherlands and painted views of Westphalia. A prodigious number of pictures are ascribed to him but his oeuvre poses many problems. He often signed his paintings but rarely dated them and a satisfactory chronology has never been established. Although he had little influence outside Dordrecht, Cuyp had several imitators there and some of the paintings formerly attributed to him are now given to Abraham Calraet (1642-1722), who signed himself `AC' (the same initials as Cuyp).

In 1658 Cuyp married a rich widow and in the 1660s he seems to have virtually abandoned painting. He was almost forgotten for two generations after his death. Late 18th-century English collectors are credited with rediscovering his merits, and he is still much better represented in English collections, public and private, than in Dutch museums. His finest works, typically river scenes and landscapes with placid dignified-looking cows, show great serenity and masterly handling of glowing light. He approaches Claude more closely in spirit than any of his countrymen who travelled to Italy.