Jacob Lawrence
Jacob Lawrence was an African-American painter known for his portrayal of African-American life. As well as a painter and interpreter, he was an educator. Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism", though by his own account the primary influence was not so much French art as the shapes and colors of Harlem, he brought the African-American experience to life using blacks and browns juxtaposed with vivid colors. He taught and spent 16 years as a professor at the University of Washington. Lawrence is among the best-known 20th-century African-American painters, he was 25 years old when he gained national recognition with his 60-panel Migration Series, painted on cardboard. The series depicted the Great Migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North. A part of this series was featured in a 1941 issue of Fortune; the collection is now held by two museums: the odd-numbered paintings are on exhibit in the Phillips Collection in Washington, D. C. and the even-numbered are on display at MOMA in New York.
Lawrence's works are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Phillips Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Reynolda House Museum of American Art. He is known for his modernist illustrations of everyday life as well as epic narratives of African American history and historical figures. Jacob Lawrence was born September 1917 in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Jacobs's parents moved him and his siblings from the rural south to the north for a chance at a better life, they divorced in 1924, after which his mother put him and his two younger siblings into foster care in Philadelphia. When he was 13, he and his siblings moved to New York City, where he reconnected with his mother in Harlem. Lawrence was introduced to art shortly after that when their mother enrolled him in after school classes at an arts and crafts settlement house in Harlem, called Utopia Children's Center, in an effort to keep him busy.
The young Lawrence drew patterns with crayons. In the beginning, he copied patterns of his mother's carpets. One of his art teachers noted great potential in Lawrence. After dropping out of school at 16, Lawrence worked in a printing plant, he continued with art, attending classes at the Harlem Art Workshop, taught by the noted African-American artist Charles Alston. Alston urged him to attend the Harlem Community Art Center, led by the sculptor Augusta Savage. Savage secured Lawrence a scholarship to the American Artists School and a paid position with the Works Progress Administration, established during the Great Depression by the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Lawrence continued his studies as well, working with Alston and Henry Bannarn, another Harlem Renaissance artist, in the Alston-Bannarn workshop. On July 24, 1941, Lawrence married the painter Gwendolyn Knight a student of Savage, she supported his work and helped him with captions for many of his series of paintings.
They were married until his death in 2000. In October 1943, Lawrence was drafted in the United States Coast Guard and served with the first racially integrated crew on the USCGC Sea Cloud, under Carlton Skinner, he continued to paint and sketch while in the Coast Guard, documenting the experience of war around the world. He produced 48 paintings during this time, but after the war, he created his famous War Series. Back in New York, Lawrence continued to paint, he grew depressed, in 1949, he checked himself into Hillside Hospital in Queens, where he stayed for 11 months. He painted as an inpatient; these works differed from his usual artworks. Shortly after leaving Hillside, Lawrence turned to theater. After many years in New York, in 1970 Lawrence and Knight moved to the Pacific Northwest, where he had been invited to be an art professor at the University of Washington, they settled in Seattle. Some of his works are displayed in the university's Meany Hall for the Performing Arts and in the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.
Lawrence's painting, installed in the main lobby of Meany Hall, was commissioned by the University in 1985 for that space. For Jacob Lawrence's education, he took Works Progress Administration art classes in New York and he studied at Harlem Art Workshop in New York in 1937. Harlem provided crucial training for the majority of black artists in the United States. Lawrence was one of the first artists trained by the African-American community in Harlem. Throughout his lengthy artistic career, Lawrence concentrated on exploring the history and struggles of African Americans, he portrayed important periods in African-American history. The artist was 21 years old when his series of paintings of the Haitian general Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the revolution of the slaves that gained independence, was shown in an exhibit of African-American artists at the Baltimore Museum of Art; this impressive work was followed by a series of paintings of the lives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, as well as a series of pieces about the abolitionist John Brown.
Harlem artist Charles Allston recognized Lawrence’s talent. ‘’The place of Jacob Lawrence among younger painters is unique,’’ Allston said. ‘’Having thus far miraculously escaped the imprint of academic ideas and current vogues in art, to which young artists are most susceptible, he has followed a course of development dictated by his own inner motivations.’’ Lawrence was 23 when he completed the 60-panel set of narrative paintings entitled Migration of the Negro, now called the Migratio
Georges Braque
Georges Braque was a major 20th-century French painter, draughtsman and sculptor. His most important contributions to the history of art were in his alliance with Fauvism from 1906, the role he played in the development of Cubism. Braque’s work between 1908 and 1912 is associated with that of his colleague Pablo Picasso, their respective Cubist works were indistinguishable for many years, yet the quiet nature of Braque was eclipsed by the fame and notoriety of Picasso. Georges Braque was born on 13 May 1882 in Val-d'Oise, he grew up in Le Havre and trained to be a house painter and decorator like his father and grandfather. However, he studied artistic painting during evenings at the École des Beaux-Arts, in Le Havre, from about 1897 to 1899. In Paris, he apprenticed with a decorator and was awarded his certificate in 1902; the next year, he attended the Académie Humbert in Paris, painted there until 1904. It was here that he met Francis Picabia. Braque's earliest works were impressionistic, but after seeing the work exhibited by the artistic group known as the "Fauves" in 1905, he adopted a Fauvist style.
The Fauves, a group that included Henri Matisse and André Derain among others, used brilliant colors to represent emotional response. Braque worked most with the artists Raoul Dufy and Othon Friesz, who shared Braque's hometown of Le Havre, to develop a somewhat more subdued Fauvist style. In 1906, Braque traveled with Friesz to L'Estaque, to Antwerp, home to Le Havre to paint. In May 1907, he exhibited works of the Fauve style in the Salon des Indépendants; the same year, Braque's style began a slow evolution as he became influenced by Paul Cézanne who had died in 1906 and whose works were exhibited in Paris for the first time in a large-scale, museum-like retrospective in September 1907. The 1907 Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne affected the avant-garde artists of Paris, resulting in the advent of Cubism. Braque's paintings of 1908–1912 reflected his new interest in geometry and simultaneous perspective, he conducted an intense study of the effects of light and perspective and the technical means that painters use to represent these effects, seeming to question the most standard of artistic conventions.
In his village scenes, for example, Braque reduced an architectural structure to a geometric form approximating a cube, yet rendered its shading so that it looked both flat and three-dimensional by fragmenting the image. He showed this in the painting Houses at l'Estaque. Beginning in 1909, Braque began to work with Pablo Picasso, developing a similar proto-Cubist style of painting. At the time, Pablo Picasso was influenced by Gauguin, Cézanne, African masks and Iberian sculpture while Braque was interested in developing Cézanne's ideas of multiple perspectives. “A comparison of the works of Picasso and Braque during 1908 reveals that the effect of his encounter with Picasso was more to accelerate and intensify Braque’s exploration of Cézanne’s ideas, rather than to divert his thinking in any essential way.” Braque’s essential subject is the ordinary objects he has known forever. Picasso celebrates animation. Thus, the invention of Cubism was a joint effort between Picasso and Braque residents of Montmartre, Paris.
These artists were the style's main innovators. After meeting in October or November 1907, Braque and Picasso, in particular, began working on the development of Cubism in 1908. Both artists produced paintings of monochromatic color and complex patterns of faceted form, now termed Analytic Cubism. A decisive time of its development occurred during the summer of 1911, when Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso painted side by side in Céret in the French Pyrenees, each artist producing paintings that are difficult—sometimes impossible—to distinguish from those of the other. In 1912, they began to experiment with collage and Braque invented the papier collé technique. On 14 November 1908, the French art critic Louis Vauxcelles, in his review of Georges Braque's exhibition at Kahnweiler's gallery called Braque a daring man who despises form, "reducing everything, places and a figures and houses, to geometric schemas, to cubes". Vauxcelles, on 25 March 1909, used the terms "bizarreries cubiques" after seeing a painting by Braque at the Salon des Indépendants.
The term'Cubism', first pronounced in 1911 with reference to artists exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants gained wide use but Picasso and Braque did not adopt it initially. Art historian Ernst Gombrich described Cubism as "the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one reading of the picture—that of a man-made construction, a colored canvas." The Cubist style spread throughout Paris and Europe. The two artists' productive collaboration continued and they worked together until the beginning of World War I in 1914, when Braque enlisted with the French Army. In May 1915, Braque received a severe head injury in battle at Carency and suffered temporary blindness, he was trepanned, required a long period of recuperation. The things that Picasso and I said to one another during those years will never be said again, if they were, no one would understand them anymore, it was like being roped together on a mountain. Braque resumed painting in late 1916. Working alone, he began to moderate the harsh abstraction of cubism.
He developed a more personal style characterized by brilliant color, textured surfaces, and—after his relocation to the Normandy seacoast—the reappearance of the human figure. He painted many still life subjects during this time, maintaining his e
Modern art
Modern art includes artistic work produced during the period extending from the 1860s to the 1970s, denotes the styles and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation. Modern artists experimented with new ways of seeing and with fresh ideas about the nature of materials and functions of art. A tendency away from the narrative, characteristic for the traditional arts, toward abstraction is characteristic of much modern art. More recent artistic production is called contemporary art or postmodern art. Modern art begins with the heritage of painters like Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec all of whom were essential for the development of modern art. At the beginning of the 20th century Henri Matisse and several other young artists including the pre-cubists Georges Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, Jean Metzinger and Maurice de Vlaminck revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism.
Matisse's two versions of The Dance signified a key point in his career and in the development of modern painting. It reflected Matisse's incipient fascination with primitive art: the intense warm color of the figures against the cool blue-green background and the rhythmical succession of the dancing nudes convey the feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism. Influenced by Toulouse-Lautrec and other late-19th-century innovators, Pablo Picasso made his first cubist paintings based on Cézanne's idea that all depiction of nature can be reduced to three solids: cube and cone. With the painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Picasso created a new and radical picture depicting a raw and primitive brothel scene with five prostitutes, violently painted women, reminiscent of African tribal masks and his own new Cubist inventions. Analytic cubism was jointly developed by Picasso and Georges Braque, exemplified by Violin and Candlestick, from about 1908 through 1912. Analytic cubism, the first clear manifestation of cubism, was followed by Synthetic cubism, practiced by Braque, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Albert Gleizes, Marcel Duchamp and several other artists into the 1920s.
Synthetic cubism is characterized by the introduction of different textures, collage elements, papier collé and a large variety of merged subject matter. The notion of modern art is related to modernism. Although modern sculpture and architecture are reckoned to have emerged at the end of the 19th century, the beginnings of modern painting can be located earlier; the date most identified as marking the birth of modern art is 1863, the year that Édouard Manet showed his painting Le déjeuner sur l'herbe in the Salon des Refusés in Paris. Earlier dates have been proposed, among them 1855 and 1784. In the words of art historian H. Harvard Arnason: "Each of these dates has significance for the development of modern art, but none categorically marks a new beginning.... A gradual metamorphosis took place in the course of a hundred years."The strands of thought that led to modern art can be traced back to the Enlightenment, to the 17th century. The important modern art critic Clement Greenberg, for instance, called Immanuel Kant "the first real Modernist" but drew a distinction: "The Enlightenment criticized from the outside....
Modernism criticizes from the inside." The French Revolution of 1789 uprooted assumptions and institutions that had for centuries been accepted with little question and accustomed the public to vigorous political and social debate. This gave rise to what art historian Ernst Gombrich called a "self-consciousness that made people select the style of their building as one selects the pattern of a wallpaper."The pioneers of modern art were Romantics and Impressionists. By the late 19th century, additional movements which were to be influential in modern art had begun to emerge: post-Impressionism as well as Symbolism. Influences upon these movements were varied: from exposure to Eastern decorative arts Japanese printmaking, to the coloristic innovations of Turner and Delacroix, to a search for more realism in the depiction of common life, as found in the work of painters such as Jean-François Millet; the advocates of realism stood against the idealism of the tradition-bound academic art that enjoyed public and official favor.
The most successful painters of the day worked either through commissions or through large public exhibitions of their own work. There were official, government-sponsored painters' unions, while governments held public exhibitions of new fine and decorative arts; the Impressionists argued that people do not see objects but only the light which they reflect, therefore painters should paint in natural light rather than in studios and should capture the effects of light in their work. Impressionist artists formed a group, Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes Peintres, Graveurs which, despite internal tensions, mounted a series of independent exhibitions; the style was adopted by artists in preference to a "national" style. These factors established the view that it was a "movement"; these traits—establishment of a working method integral to the art, establishment of a movement or visible active core of support, international adoption—would be repeated by artistic movements in the Modern period in art
Pierre Bonnard
Pierre Bonnard was a French painter and printmaker, known for the stylized decorative qualities of his paintings and his bold use of color. He was a founding member of the Post-Impressionist group of avant-garde painters Les Nabis, his early work was influenced by the work of Paul Gauguin, the prints of Hokusai and other Japanese artists, he was a leading figure in the transition from impressionism to modernism. He painted landscapes, urban scenes and intimate domestic scenes, where the backgrounds and painting style took precedence over the subject. Pierre Bonnard was born in Fontenay-aux-Roses, Hauts-de-Seine on 3 October 1867, his mother, Élisabeth Mertzdorff, was from Alsace. His father, Eugène Bonnard, was from the Dauphiné, was a senior official in the French Ministry of War, he had a brother, a sister, Andrée, who in 1890 married the composer Claude Terrasse. He received his education in the Lycée Lycée Charlemagne in Vanves, he showed a talent for drawing and water colors, as well as caricatures.
He painted in the gardens of his parent's country home at Grand-Lemps near the Cote Saint-André in the Dauphiné. He showed a strong interest in literature, he received his baccalaureate in the classics, and, to satisfy his father, between 1886-87 earned his license in law, began practicing as a lawyer beginning in 1888. While he was studying law, he attended art classes at the Académie Julian in Paris. At the Académie Julien he met his future friends and fellow artists, Paul Sérusier, Maurice Denis, Gabriel Ibels and Paul Ranson. In 1888, Bonnard was accepted by the École des Beaux-Arts, where he met Edouard Vuillard and Ker Xavier Roussel, he sold his first commercial work of art, a design for poster for France-Champagne, which helped him convince his family that he could make a living as an artist. He began his career as an artist. From 1893 until her death, Bonnard lived with Marthe de Méligny, she was the model for many of his paintings, including many nudes, her birth name was Maria Boursin.
They married in 1925. In the years before their marriage, Bonnard had love affairs with two other women, who served as models for some of his paintings, Renée Monchaty and Lucienne Dupuy de Frenelle, the wife of a doctor. Renée Monchaty committed suicide shortly after de Méligny married. Bonnard received pressure from a different direction to continue painting. While he had received his license to practice law in 1888, he failed in the examination for entering the official registry of lawyers. Art was his only option. After the summer holidays, he joined with his friends from the Academy Julien to form Les Nabis, an informal group of artists with different styles and philosophies but common artistic ambitions. At the time, Bonnard, as he wrote, was unaware of the impressionist painters, or of Gauguin and other new painters, his friend Paul Sérusier showed him a painting on a wooden cigar box he made after visiting Paul Gauguin at Pont-Aven, like Gauguin, patches of pure color. In 1890 Denis, at age twenty, formalized the doctrine: "a painting was "a surface plane covered with colors assembled in a certain order."
Some of the Nabis had religious, philosophical or mystical approaches to their paintings, but Bonnard remained more cheerful and un-ideological. The painter-writer Aurelien Lugné-Poe, who shared a studio at 28 rue Pigalle with Bonnard and Vuillard, wrote "Pierre Bonnard was the humorist among us. In 1891, he met Toulouse-Lautrec and in December 1891 showed his work at the annual exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants. In the same year Bonnard began an association with La Revue Blanche, for which he and Édouard Vuillard designed frontispiece In March 1891, his work was displayed with the work of the other Nabis at the Le Barc de Boutteville; the style of Japanese graphic arts became an important influence on Bonnard. In 1893 A major exposition of works of Utamaro and Hiroshige was held at the Durand-Rouel Gallery, the Japanese influence the use of multiple points of view, the use of bold geometric patterns in clothing, such as checkered blouses, began to appear in his work; because of his passion for Japanese art, his nickname among the Nabis became Le Nabi le trés japonard.
He devoted an increasing amount of attention to decorative art, designing furniture, fabrics and other objects. He continued to design posters for France-Champagne, which gained him an audience outside the art world. In 1892 he began to produce lithographs, painted two of his early notable works, Le Corsage a carreaux and La Partie de croquet, he made a series of illustrations for the music books of his brother-in-law, Claude Terrasse. In 1894 he turned in a new direction, made a series of paintings of scenes of the life of Paris. In his urban scenes, the buildings and animals were the focus of attention, he made his first portrait of his future wife, whom he married in 1925. In 1895 he became an early participant of the movement of Art Nouveau, designing a stained glass window, called Maternity, for Tiffany. In 1895, he had his first individual exposition of paintings and lithographs at the Durand-Ruel Gallery, he als
Art museum
An art museum or art gallery is a building or space for the display of art from the museum's own collection. It might be in public or private ownership and may be accessible to all or have restrictions in place. Although concerned with visual art, art galleries are used as a venue for other cultural exchanges and artistic activities, such as performance arts, music concerts, or poetry readings. Art museums frequently host themed temporary exhibitions which include items on loan from other collections. In distinction to a commercial art gallery, run by an art dealer, the primary purpose of an art museum is not the sale of the items on show. Throughout history and expensive works of art have been commissioned by religious institutions and monarchs and been displayed in temples and palaces. Although these collections of art were private, they were made available for viewing for a portion of the public. In classical times, religious institutions began to function as an early form of art gallery. Wealthy Roman collectors of engraved gems and other precious objects donated their collections to temples.
It is unclear. In Europe, from the Late Medieval period onwards, areas in royal palaces and large country houses of the social elite were made accessible to sections of the public, where art collections could be viewed. At the Palace of Versailles, entrance was restricted to people wearing the proper apparel – the appropriate accessories could be hired from shops outside; the treasuries of cathedrals and large churches, or parts of them, were set out for public display. Many of the grander English country houses could be toured by the respectable for a tip to the housekeeper, during the long periods when the family were not in residence. Special arrangements were made to allow the public to see many royal or private collections placed in galleries, as with most of the paintings of the Orleans Collection, which were housed in a wing of the Palais-Royal in Paris and could be visited for most of the 18th century. In Italy, the art tourism of the Grand Tour became a major industry from the 18th century onwards, cities made efforts to make their key works accessible.
The Capitoline Museums began in 1471 with a donation of classical sculpture to the city of Rome by the Papacy, while the Vatican Museums, whose collections are still owned by the Pope, trace their foundation to 1506, when the discovered Laocoön and His Sons was put on public display. A series of museums on different subjects were opened over subsequent centuries, many of the buildings of the Vatican were purpose-built as galleries. An early royal treasury opened to the public was the Grünes Gewölbe of the Kingdom of Saxony in the 1720s. Established museums open to the public began to be established from the 17th century onwards based around a collection of the cabinet of curiosities type; the first such museum was the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, opened in 1683 to house and display the artefacts of Elias Ashmole that were given to Oxford University in a bequest. In the second half of the eighteenth century, many private collections of art were opened to the public, during and after the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars many royal collections were nationalized where the monarchy remained in place, as in Spain and Bavaria.
In 1753, the British Museum was established and the Old Royal Library collection of manuscripts was donated to it for public viewing. In 1777, a proposal to the British government was put forward by MP John Wilkes to buy the art collection of the late Sir Robert Walpole who had amassed one of the greatest such collections in Europe, house it in a specially built wing of the British Museum for public viewing. After much debate, the idea was abandoned due to the great expense, twenty years the collection was bought by Tsaritsa Catherine the Great of Russia and housed in the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg; the Bavarian royal collection was opened to the public in 1779 and the Medici collection in Florence around 1789. The opening of the Musée du Louvre during the French Revolution in 1793 as a public museum for much of the former French royal collection marked an important stage in the development of public access to art by transferring the ownership to a republican state; the building now occupied by the Prado in Madrid was built before the French Revolution for the public display of parts of the royal art collection, similar royal galleries were opened to the public in Vienna and other capitals.
In Great Britain, the corresponding Royal Collection remained in the private hands of the monarch and the first purpose-built national art galleries were the Dulwich Picture Gallery, founded in 1814 and the National Gallery opened to the public a decade in 1824. University art museums and galleries constitute collections of art developed and maintained by all kinds of schools, community colleges and universities; this phenomenon exists in the East, making it a global practice. Although overlooked, there are over 700 university art museums in the US alone; this number, compared to other kinds of art museums, makes university art museums the largest category of art museums in the country. While the first of these collections can be traced to learning collections developed in art academies in Western Europe, they are now associated with and housed in centers of higher education of all types; the word gallery being an archite
Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh is a city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in the United States, is the county seat of Allegheny County. As of 2018, a population of 308,144 lives within the city limits, making it the 63rd-largest city in the U. S; the metropolitan population of 2,362,453, is the largest in both the Ohio Valley and Appalachia, the second-largest in Pennsylvania, the 26th-largest in the U. S. Pittsburgh is located in the south west of the state, at the confluence of the Allegheny and Ohio rivers. Pittsburgh is known both as "the Steel City" for its more than 300 steel-related businesses and as the "City of Bridges" for its 446 bridges; the city features 30 skyscrapers, two inclined railways, a pre-revolutionary fortification and the Point State Park at the confluence of the rivers. The city developed as a vital link of the Atlantic coast and Midwest, as the mineral-rich Allegheny Mountains made the area coveted by the French and British empires, Whiskey Rebels, Civil War raiders. Aside from steel, Pittsburgh has led in manufacturing of aluminum, shipbuilding, foods, transportation, computing and electronics.
For part of the 20th century, Pittsburgh was behind only New York and Chicago in corporate headquarters employment. S. stockholders per capita. America's 1980s deindustrialization laid off area blue-collar workers and thousands of downtown white-collar workers when the longtime Pittsburgh-based world headquarters moved out; this heritage left the area with renowned museums, medical centers, research centers, a diverse cultural district. Today, Apple Inc. Bosch, Uber, Autodesk, Microsoft and IBM are among 1,600 technology firms generating $20.7 billion in annual Pittsburgh payrolls. The area has served as the long-time federal agency headquarters for cyber defense, software engineering, energy research and the nuclear navy; the area is home to 68 colleges and universities, including research and development leaders Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. The nation's eighth-largest bank, eight Fortune 500 companies, six of the top 300 U. S. law firms make their global headquarters in the area, while RAND, BNY Mellon, FedEx, Bayer and NIOSH have regional bases that helped Pittsburgh become the sixth-best area for U.
S. job growth. In 2015, Pittsburgh was listed among the "eleven most livable cities in the world"; the region is a hub for Environmental Design and energy extraction. In 2019, Pittsburgh was deemed “Food City of the Year” by the San Francisco-based restaurant and hospitality consulting firm af&co. Many restaurants were mentioned favorable, among them were Superior Motors in Braddock, Driftwood Oven in Lawrenceville, Spork in Bloomfield, Fish nor Fowl in Garfield and Bitter Ends Garden & Luncheonette in Bloomfield. Pittsburgh was named in 1758 by General John Forbes, in honor of British statesman William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham; as Forbes was a Scot, he pronounced the name PITS-bər-ə. Pittsburgh was incorporated as a borough on April 22, 1794, with the following Act: "Be it enacted by the Pennsylvania State Senate and Pennsylvania House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania... by the authority of the same, that the said town of Pittsburgh shall be... erected into a borough, which shall be called the borough of Pittsburgh for ever."
From 1891 to 1911, the city's name was federally recognized as "Pittsburg", though use of the final h was retained during this period by the city government and other local organizations. After a public campaign, the federal decision to drop the h was reversed; the area of the Ohio headwaters was long inhabited by the Shawnee and several other settled groups of Native Americans. The first known European to enter the region was the French explorer/trader Robert de La Salle from Quebec during his 1669 expedition down the Ohio River. European pioneers Dutch, followed in the early 18th century. Michael Bezallion was the first to describe the forks of the Ohio in a 1717 manuscript, that year European fur traders established area posts and settlements. In 1749, French soldiers from Quebec launched an expedition to the forks to unite Canada with French Louisiana via the rivers. During 1753–54, the British hastily built Fort Prince George before a larger French force drove them off; the French built Fort Duquesne based on LaSalle's 1669 claims.
The French and Indian War, the North American front of the Seven Years' War, began with the future Pittsburgh as its center. British General Edward Braddock was dispatched with Major George Washington as his aide to take Fort Duquesne; the British and colonial force were defeated at Braddock's Field. General John Forbes took the forks in 1758. Forbes began construction on Fort Pitt, named after William Pitt the Elder while the settlement was named "Pittsborough". During Pontiac's Rebellion, native tribes conducted a siege of Fort Pitt for two months until Colonel Henry Bouquet relieved it after the Battle of Bushy Run. Fort Pitt is notable as the site of an early use of smallpox for biological warfare. Lord Jeffery Amherst ordered blankets contaminated from smallpox victims to be distributed in 1763 to the tribes surrounding the fort; the disease spread into other areas, infected other tribes, killed hundreds of thousands. During this period, the powerful nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, based in New York, had maintained control of much of the Ohio Valley as hunting grounds by right of conquest after defeating other tribes.
By the terms of the 1768 Treaty of
El Greco
Doménikos Theotokópoulos, most known as El Greco, was a painter and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. "El Greco" was a nickname, a reference to his Greek origin, the artist signed his paintings with his full birth name in Greek letters, Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος, Doménikos Theotokópoulos adding the word Κρής Krēs, Cretan. El Greco was born in the Kingdom of Candia, at that time part of the Republic of Venice, the center of Post-Byzantine art, he trained and became a master within that tradition before traveling at age 26 to Venice, as other Greek artists had done. In 1570 he moved to Rome, where he executed a series of works. During his stay in Italy, El Greco enriched his style with elements of Mannerism and of the Venetian Renaissance taken from a number of great artists of the time, notably Tintoretto. In 1577, he moved to Toledo, where he lived and worked until his death. In Toledo, El Greco produced his best-known paintings. El Greco's dramatic and expressionistic style was met with puzzlement by his contemporaries but found appreciation in the 20th century.
El Greco is regarded as a precursor of both Expressionism and Cubism, while his personality and works were a source of inspiration for poets and writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke and Nikos Kazantzakis. El Greco has been characterized by modern scholars as an artist so individual that he belongs to no conventional school, he is best known for tortuously elongated figures and fantastic or phantasmagorical pigmentation, marrying Byzantine traditions with those of Western painting. Born in 1541, in either the village of Fodele or Candia on Crete, El Greco was descended from a prosperous urban family, driven out of Chania to Candia after an uprising against the Catholic Venetians between 1526 and 1528. El Greco's father, Geórgios Theotokópoulos, was a tax collector. Nothing is known about his mother or his first wife Greek. El Greco's older brother, Manoússos Theotokópoulos, was a wealthy merchant and spent the last years of his life in El Greco's Toledo home. El Greco received his initial training as an icon painter of the Cretan school, a leading center of post-Byzantine art.
In addition to painting, he studied the classics of ancient Greece, the Latin classics also. Candia was a center for artistic activity where Eastern and Western cultures co-existed harmoniously, where around two hundred painters were active during the 16th century, had organized a painters' guild, based on the Italian model. In 1563, at the age of twenty-two, El Greco was described in a document as a "master", meaning he was a master of the guild and operating his own workshop. Three years in June 1566, as a witness to a contract, he signed his name in Greek as μαΐστρος Μένεγος Θεοτοκόπουλος σγουράφος. Most scholars believe that the Theotokópoulos "family was certainly Greek Orthodox", although some Catholic sources still claim him from birth. Like many Orthodox emigrants to Catholic areas of Europe, some assert that he may have transferred to Catholicism after his arrival, practiced as a Catholic in Spain, where he described himself as a "devout Catholic" in his will; the extensive archival research conducted since the early 1960s by scholars, such as Nikolaos Panayotakis, Pandelis Prevelakis and Maria Constantoudaki, indicates that El Greco's family and ancestors were Greek Orthodox.
One of his uncles was an Orthodox priest, his name is not mentioned in the Catholic archival baptismal records on Crete. Prevelakis goes further, expressing his doubt that El Greco was a practicing Roman Catholic. Important for his early biography, El Greco, still in Crete, painted his Dormition of the Virgin near the end of his Cretan period before 1567. Three other signed works of "Doménicos" are attributed to El Greco. In 1563, at the age of twenty-two, El Greco was an enrolled master of the local guild in charge of his own workshop, he left for Venice a few years and never returned to Crete. His Dormition of the Virgin, of before 1567 in tempera and gold on panel was created near the end of El Greco's Cretan period; the painting combines post-Byzantine and Italian Mannerist stylistic and iconographic elements, incorporates stylistic elements of the Cretan School. It was natural for the young El Greco to pursue his career in Venice, Crete having been a possession of the Republic of Venice since 1211.
Though the exact year is not clear, most scholars agree that El Greco went to Venice around 1567. Knowledge of El Greco's years in Italy is limited, he lived in Venice until 1570 and, according to a letter written by his much older friend, the greatest miniaturist of the age, Giulio Clovio, was a "disciple" of Titian, by in his eighties but still vigorous. This may mean he worked in Titian's large studio, or not. Clovio characterized El Greco as "a rare talent in painting". In 1570, El Greco moved to Rome, where he executed a series of works marked by his Venetian apprenticeship, it is unknown how long he remained in Rome, though he may have returned to Venice before he left for Spain. In Rome, on the recommendation of Giulio Clovio, El Greco was received as a guest at the P
Dupont Circle
