1.
La Rochelle
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La Rochelle is a city in southwestern France and a seaport on the Bay of Biscay, a part of the Atlantic Ocean. It is the capital of the Charente-Maritime department, the city is connected to the Île de Ré by a 2. 9-kilometre bridge completed on 19 May 1988. Its harbour opens into a protected strait, the Pertuis dAntioche, the area of La Rochelle was occupied in antiquity by the Gallic tribe of the Santones, who gave their name to the nearby region of Saintonge and the city of Saintes. The Romans subsequently occupied the area, where they developed salt production along the coast as well as wine production, roman villas have been found at Saint-Éloi and at Les Minimes, as well as salt evaporation ponds dating from the same period. La Rochelle was founded during the 10th century and became an important harbour in the 12th century, in 1137, Guillaume X to all intents and purposes made La Rochelle a free port and gave it the right to establish itself as a commune. Fifty years later Eleanor of Aquitaine upheld the communal charter promulgated by her father, and for the first time in France, Guillaume was assisted in his responsibilities by 24 municipal magistrates, and 75 notables who had jurisdiction over the inhabitants. During the Plantagenet control of the city in 1185, Henry II had the Vauclair castle built, the main activities of the city were in the areas of maritime commerce and trade, especially with England, the Netherlands and Spain. In 1196, a wealthy bourgeois named Alexandre Auffredi sent a fleet of seven ships to Africa to tap the riches of the continent. He went bankrupt and went into poverty as he waited for the return of his ships, the Knights Templar had a strong presence in La Rochelle since before the time of Eleanor of Aquitaine, who exempted them from duties and gave them mills in her 1139 Charter. La Rochelle was for the Templars their largest base on the Atlantic Ocean, from La Rochelle, they were able to act as intermediaries in trade between England and the Mediterranean. The fleet allegedly left laden with knights and treasures just before the issue of the warrant for the arrest of the Order in October 1307, during the Hundred Years War in 1360, following the Treaty of Bretigny La Rochelle again came under the rule of the English monarch. La Rochelle however expelled the English in June 1372, following the naval Battle of La Rochelle, the French and Spanish decisively defeated the English, securing French control of the Channel for the first time since the Battle of Sluys in 1340. The naval battle of La Rochelle was one of the first cases of the use of handguns on warships, having recovered freedom, La Rochelle refused entry to Du Guesclin, until Charles V recognized the privileges of the city in November 1372. In 1402, the French adventurer Jean de Béthencourt left La Rochelle, until the 15th century, La Rochelle was to be the largest French harbour on the Atlantic coast, dealing mainly in wine, salt and cheese. During the Renaissance, La Rochelle adopted Protestant ideas, calvinism started to be propagated in the region of La Rochelle, resulting in its suppression through the establishment of Cours présidiaux tribunals by Henry II. An early result of this was the burning at the stake of two heretics in La Rochelle in 1552. On the initiative of Gaspard de Coligny, the Calvinists attempted to colonize the New World to find a new home for their religion, with the likes of Pierre Richier and Jean de Léry. After the short-lived attempt of France Antarctique, they failed to establish a colony in Brazil and he has been described, by Lancelot Voisin de La Popelinière, as le père de léglise de La Rochelle
2.
The Birth of Venus (Bouguereau)
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The Birth of Venus is one of the most famous paintings by 19th-century painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau. It depicts not the birth of Venus from the sea. She is considered the epitome of the Classical Greek and Roman ideal of the form and beauty. For Bouguereau, it is considered a tour de force, the canvas stands at just over 9 ft 10 in high, and 7 ft 2 in wide. The subject matter, as well as the composition, resembles a previous rendition of this subject, Sandro Botticellis The Birth of Venus, the Birth of Venus was created for the Paris Salon of 1879. It was awarded the Grand Prix de Rome, and was purchased by the state for the Musée du Luxembourg, the painting is now in the permanent collection of the Musée dOrsay in Paris. At the center of the painting, Venus stands nude on a scallop shell being pulled by a dolphin, fifteen putti, including Cupid and Psyche, and several nymphs and centaurs have gathered to witness Venus arrival. Most of the figures are gazing at her, and two of the centaurs are blowing into conch and Triton shells, signaling her arrival, Venus is considered to be the embodiment of feminine beauty and form, and these traits are shown in the painting. Her head is tilted to one side, and her expression is calm. She raises her arms, arranging her thigh-length, brown hair, swaying elegantly in an S curve contrapposto, the model for Venus was Marie Georgine, princess of Ligne. In 1861, she was on a holiday in Paris with her lover. Together, they modeled for Bouguereaus Abduction of Psyche and Flora and he worked out Venus and other sketches and paintings later from photographs he took of the couple. Some of Bouguereaus other works, like La Nuit, are based on her. Marie was also painted by Léon Bonnat and photographed by Antoine Samuel Adam-Salomon, Venus figure was enlarged from a nymph from Bouguereaus The Nymphaeum, completed in 1878, a year earlier. The nymph is slightly thinner, and her breasts are fuller, Venus contrapposto is more intense, and her hair is also longer and lighter than the nymphs, but she arranges it almost identically. To the upper-left of the painting, there is a shadow in the clouds and it appears to be the silhouette of the artist, with a head, shoulder, arm, and a raised fist that would seem to hold a paintbrush. Media related to The Birth of Venus at Wikimedia Commons YouTube video highlighting the painting
3.
The Bohemian (Bouguereau painting)
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The Bohemian is a painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau completed in 1890. It depicts a young woman sitting on a concrete bench on the south bank of the Seine across from Notre Dame de Paris resting a violin in her lap. Her right arm is resting on her thigh while the palm of her hand is pressed down on her left knee so that she does not lean on the violin. Her hands are clasped with the fingers pointing forward while her shoulders are wrapped in a shawl dyed maroon and light green, the bow of the violin has been stuck through diagonally under the fingerboard. To her right is a maple tree, the subject is a model employed by Bouguereau for this and other paintings, including The Shepherdess. It was owned by the Minneapolis Institute of Art until 2004 when it was auctioned by Christies to benefit the acquisition fund
4.
Realist visual arts
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Realism in the arts is the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding artistic conventions, implausible, exotic and supernatural elements. Realism has been prevalent in the arts at many periods, and is in part a matter of technique and training. In the visual arts, illusionistic realism is the depiction of lifeforms, perspective. Realist works of art may emphasize the mundane, ugly or sordid, such as works of realism, regionalism. There have been various movements in the arts, such as the opera style of verismo, literary realism, theatrical realism. The realism art movement in painting began in France in the 1850s, the realist painters rejected Romanticism, which had come to dominate French literature and art, with roots in the late 18th century. Realism is the precise, detailed and accurate representation in art of the appearance of scenes. Realism in this sense is also called naturalism, mimesis or illusionism, realistic art was created in many periods, and it is in large part a matter of technique and training, and the avoidance of stylization. It becomes especially marked in European painting in the Early Netherlandish painting of Jan van Eyck, however such realism is often used to depict, for example, angels with wings, which were not things the artists had ever seen in real life. It is the choice and treatment of matter that defines Realism as a movement in painting. The development of increasingly accurate representation of the appearances of things has a long history in art. It includes elements such as the depiction of the anatomy of humans and animals, of perspective and effects of distance. Ancient Greek art is recognised as having made great progress in the representation of anatomy. Pliny the Elders famous story of birds pecking at grapes painted by Zeuxis in the 5th century BC may well be a legend, roman portraiture, when not under too much Greek influence, shows a greater commitment to a truthful depiction of its subjects. The art of Late Antiquity famously rejected illusionism for expressive force, scientific methods of representing perspective were developed in Italy and gradually spread across Europe, and accuracy in anatomy rediscovered under the influence of classical art. As in classical times, idealism remained the norm, intriguingly, having led the development of illusionic painting, still life was to be equally significant in its abandonment in Cubism. The depiction of ordinary, everyday subjects in art also has a history, though it was often squeezed into the edges of compositions. However these objects are at least largely there because they carry layers of complex significance, pieter Bruegel the Elder pioneered large panoramic scenes of peasant life
5.
Academic Art
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Academic art, or Academicism, is a style of painting and sculpture produced under the influence of European academies of art. In this context it is often called academism, academicism, Lart pompier, and eclecticism, in this medicean institution students learned the arti del disegno and heard lectures on anatomy and geometry. Another academy, the Accademia di San Luca, was founded about a later in Rome. The Accademia di San Luca served a function and was more concerned with art theory than the Florentine one. Accademia di San Luca later served as the model for the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture founded in France in 1648, and which later became the Académie des beaux-arts. The Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture was founded in an effort to distinguish artists who were practicing a liberal art from craftsmen. This emphasis on the component of artmaking had a considerable impact on the subjects. This battle of styles was a conflict over whether Peter Paul Rubens or Nicolas Poussin was a model to follow. Debates also occurred over whether it was better to learn art by looking at nature, academies using the French model formed throughout Europe, and imitated the teachings and styles of the French Académie. In England, this was the Royal Academy, one effect of the move to academies was to make training more difficult for women artists, who were excluded from most academies until the last half of the 19th century. This was partly because of concerns over the propriety of life classes with nude models, special arrangements were often made for female students until the 20th century. Since the onset of the debate, many artists worked between the two styles. In the 19th century, in the form of the debate, the attention. One artist after another was claimed by critics to have achieved the synthesis, among them Théodore Chassériau, Ary Scheffer, Francesco Hayez, Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, and Thomas Couture. William-Adolphe Bouguereau, an academic artist, commented that the trick to being a good painter is seeing color. Another development during this period included adopting historical styles in order to show the era in history that the painting depicted, called historicism and this is best seen in the work of Baron Jan August Hendrik Leys, a later influence on James Tissot. Its also seen in the development of the Neo-Grec style, historicism is also meant to refer to the belief and practice associated with academic art that one should incorporate and conciliate the innovations of different traditions of art from the past. The art world also grew to give increasing focus on allegory in art, as artists attempted to synthesize these theories in practice, the attention on the artwork as an allegorical or figurative vehicle was emphasized
6.
Elizabeth Jane Gardner
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Elizabeth Jane Gardner was an American academic and salon painter, who was born in Exeter, New Hampshire. She was an American expatriate who died in Paris where she had lived most of her life and she studied in Paris under the figurative painter Hugues Merle, the well-known salon painter Jules Joseph Lefebvre, and finally under William-Adolphe Bouguereau. After Bouguereaus wife died, Gardner became his paramour and after the death of his mother and she adopted his subjects, compositions and even his smooth facture, channeling his style so successfully that some of her work might be mistaken for his. In fact, she was quoted as saying, I know I am censured for not more boldly asserting my individuality, Gardners best known work may be The Shepherd David Triumphant, which shows the young shepherd with the lamb he has rescued. Among her other works were Cinderella, Cornelia and Her Jewels, Corinne, Fortune Teller, Maud Muller, Daphne and Chloe, Ruth and Naomi, The Farmers Daughter, The Breton Wedding, and some portraits. Elizabeth first attended the Young Ladies Female Academy in Exeter then she moved on to go to the Lasell Female Seminary in Auburndale Massachusetts, she she studied languages, Gardner learned English, French, Italian and German. She graduated in 1856, she spent the few years teaching French at a newly opened school in Worcester waiting to become a famous artist. In 1864, after being an art teacher in Lasell Seminary. To pay rent she spend her time copying paintings in prestigious galleries by contemporary artists, later that year in Autumn Elizabeth decided to apply to the School of Fine Arts or. This school was known as the most prestigious art academy in Paris, sadly, her application was denied and rejected. Like most if not all art establishments at the time the school was male only, the ban for woman application was not lifted until 1897, thirty0five years after Gardner applied. Elizabeth did not give up, she continued to enroll in private classes, in a letter to her brother, Gardner noted, Americans are buying many pictures. I have always had the satisfaction of pleasing those for whom I have painted, one gentleman was so satisfied with a copy I did for him that he paid me more than I asked. She briefly studied wth Jean-Baptiste-Ange Tissier before leaving in 1865 to join an independent cooperative womens studio, in 1866, Gardner was the first American woman to exhibit at the Paris Salon. Awarded a gold medal at the 1872 Salon, she became the first woman ever to receive such an honor, Elizabeth Gardner Bouguereau was accepted to the Salon more than any other woman painter in history and all but a few of the men. The biggest challenge to her training was the restriction on women studying anatomy from nude models and she circumvented this restriction by donning male attire to gain admittance to the all-male drawing school at Manufacture Nationale des Gobelins et de la Savonnerie. In 1873, Gardner was finally admitted to the previously all-male Académie Julian, Elizabeth Gardners relationship with Bouguereau was widely known and discussed within the Parisian artistic community. They made no secret of their relationship over the course of an engagement that was to last seventeen years, the couple courted for seventeen years for they had a great fear of crossing Bougereaus mother
7.
Academic art
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Academic art, or Academicism, is a style of painting and sculpture produced under the influence of European academies of art. In this context it is often called academism, academicism, Lart pompier, and eclecticism, in this medicean institution students learned the arti del disegno and heard lectures on anatomy and geometry. Another academy, the Accademia di San Luca, was founded about a later in Rome. The Accademia di San Luca served a function and was more concerned with art theory than the Florentine one. Accademia di San Luca later served as the model for the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture founded in France in 1648, and which later became the Académie des beaux-arts. The Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture was founded in an effort to distinguish artists who were practicing a liberal art from craftsmen. This emphasis on the component of artmaking had a considerable impact on the subjects. This battle of styles was a conflict over whether Peter Paul Rubens or Nicolas Poussin was a model to follow. Debates also occurred over whether it was better to learn art by looking at nature, academies using the French model formed throughout Europe, and imitated the teachings and styles of the French Académie. In England, this was the Royal Academy, one effect of the move to academies was to make training more difficult for women artists, who were excluded from most academies until the last half of the 19th century. This was partly because of concerns over the propriety of life classes with nude models, special arrangements were often made for female students until the 20th century. Since the onset of the debate, many artists worked between the two styles. In the 19th century, in the form of the debate, the attention. One artist after another was claimed by critics to have achieved the synthesis, among them Théodore Chassériau, Ary Scheffer, Francesco Hayez, Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, and Thomas Couture. William-Adolphe Bouguereau, an academic artist, commented that the trick to being a good painter is seeing color. Another development during this period included adopting historical styles in order to show the era in history that the painting depicted, called historicism and this is best seen in the work of Baron Jan August Hendrik Leys, a later influence on James Tissot. Its also seen in the development of the Neo-Grec style, historicism is also meant to refer to the belief and practice associated with academic art that one should incorporate and conciliate the innovations of different traditions of art from the past. The art world also grew to give increasing focus on allegory in art, as artists attempted to synthesize these theories in practice, the attention on the artwork as an allegorical or figurative vehicle was emphasized
8.
Classicism
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Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for a classical period, classical antiquity in the Western tradition, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. Classicism is a genre of philosophy, expressing itself in literature, architecture, art, and music, which has Ancient Greek and Roman sources. It was particularly expressed in the Neoclassicism of the Age of Enlightenment, Classicism is a recurrent tendency in the Late Antique period, and had a major revival in Carolingian and Ottonian art. Until that time the identification with antiquity had been seen as a history of Christendom from the conversion of Roman Emperor Constantine I. Renaissance classicism introduced a host of elements into European culture, including the application of mathematics and empiricism into art, humanism, literary and depictive realism, importantly it also introduced Polytheism, or paganism, and the juxtaposition of ancient and modern. The classicism of the Renaissance led to, and gave way to and this period sought the revival of classical art forms, including Greek drama and music. Opera, in its modern European form, had its roots in attempts to recreate the combination of singing and dancing with theatre thought to be the Greek norm, examples of this appeal to classicism included Dante, Petrarch, and Shakespeare in poetry and theatre. Tudor drama, in particular, modeled itself after classical ideals, studying Ancient Greek became regarded as essential for a well-rounded education in the liberal arts. They also began reviving plastic arts such as bronze casting for sculpture, for example, the painting of Jacques-Louis David which was seen as an attempt to return to formal balance, clarity, manliness, and vigor in art. Various movements of the period saw themselves as classical revolts against a prevailing trend of emotionalism and irregularity. The 20th century saw a number of changes in the arts, thus, both pre-20th century disciplines were labelled classical and modern movements in art which saw themselves as aligned with light, space, sparseness of texture, and formal coherence. Examples of classicist playwrights are Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine and Moliere, the influence of these French rules on playwrights in other nations is debatable. In the English theatre, Restoration playwrights such as William Wycherly and those of Shakespeares plays that seem to display the unities, such as The Tempest, probably indicate a familiarity with actual models from classical antiquity. Classicism in architecture developed during the Italian Renaissance, notably in the writings and designs of Leon Battista Alberti and this style quickly spread to other Italian cities and then to France, Germany, England, Russia and elsewhere. In the 16th century, Sebastiano Serlio helped codify the classical orders, building off of these influences, the 17th-century architects Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren firmly established classicism in England. For the development of classicism from the mid-18th-century onwards, see Neoclassical architecture, for Greek art of the 5th century B. C. E. See Classical art in ancient Greece and the Severe style Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture are marked by their renewal of classical forms, motifs and subjects. In the 15th century Leon Battista Alberti was important in theorizing many of the ideas for painting that came to a fully realised product with Raphaels School of Athens during the High Renaissance
9.
Impressionism
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Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s. The Impressionists faced harsh opposition from the art community in France. The development of Impressionism in the arts was soon followed by analogous styles in other media that became known as impressionist music. Radicals in their time, early Impressionists violated the rules of academic painting and they constructed their pictures from freely brushed colours that took precedence over lines and contours, following the example of painters such as Eugène Delacroix and J. M. W. Turner. They also painted scenes of modern life, and often painted outdoors. Previously, still lifes and portraits as well as landscapes were painted in a studio. The Impressionists found that they could capture the momentary and transient effects of sunlight by painting en plein air, the Impressionists, however, developed new techniques specific to the style. The public, at first hostile, gradually came to believe that the Impressionists had captured a fresh and original vision, even if the art critics and art establishment disapproved of the new style. In the middle of the 19th century—a time of change, as Emperor Napoleon III rebuilt Paris, the Académie was the preserver of traditional French painting standards of content and style. Historical subjects, religious themes, and portraits were valued, landscape, the Académie preferred carefully finished images that looked realistic when examined closely. Paintings in this style were made up of brush strokes carefully blended to hide the artists hand in the work. Colour was restrained and often toned down further by the application of a golden varnish, the Académie had an annual, juried art show, the Salon de Paris, and artists whose work was displayed in the show won prizes, garnered commissions, and enhanced their prestige. The standards of the juries represented the values of the Académie, represented by the works of artists as Jean-Léon Gérôme. In the early 1860s, four young painters—Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and they discovered that they shared an interest in painting landscape and contemporary life rather than historical or mythological scenes. A favourite meeting place for the artists was the Café Guerbois on Avenue de Clichy in Paris, where the discussions were led by Édouard Manet. They were soon joined by Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, during the 1860s, the Salon jury routinely rejected about half of the works submitted by Monet and his friends in favour of works by artists faithful to the approved style. In 1863, the Salon jury rejected Manets The Luncheon on the Grass primarily because it depicted a woman with two clothed men at a picnic. While the Salon jury routinely accepted nudes in historical and allegorical paintings, the jurys severely worded rejection of Manets painting appalled his admirers, and the unusually large number of rejected works that year perturbed many French artists
10.
Figure painting
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A figure painting is a work of fine art in any of the painting media with the primary subject being the human figure, whether clothed or nude. Figure painting may refer to the activity of creating such a work. The human figure has been one of the constant subjects of art since the first stone age cave paintings, unlike figure drawings which are usually nudes, figure paintings are often historical, mythological, allegorical or imaginary depictions that may have figures in appropriate costumes. A portrait painting is a painting that focuses on the creation of a likeness of a particular individual or group. The nude has been a theme in Western art since antiquity and again in the Renaissance. Oil paint historically has been the ideal media for depicting the figure, by blending and layering paint, the surface can become more like skin. Its slow drying time and various degrees of viscosity enable the artist to achieve rich and subtle blends of color and texture, figure painting is not synonymous with figurative art, which may depict real objects of any kind. The Nude, A Study in Ideal Form, venus in Exile, The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-century Art. Nudity and Classical Themes in Byzantine Art, In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, new York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Jenny Saville at Gagosian Gallery Jenny Saville at Saatchi Gallery Francis Bacon Lucien Freud Leopold Museum, Austria -Nude Men Museum of Fine Arts, Boston - Degas and the Nude
11.
Ingres
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Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a French Neoclassical painter. A man profoundly respectful of the past, he assumed the role of a guardian of orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style represented by his nemesis. His exemplars, he explained, were the great masters which flourished in that century of glorious memory when Raphael set the eternal. I am thus a conservator of good doctrine, and not an innovator, Ingres was born in Montauban, Tarn-et-Garonne, France, the first of seven children of Jean-Marie-Joseph Ingres and his wife Anne Moulet. From his father the young Ingres received early encouragement and instruction in drawing and music, and his first known drawing, the deficiency in his schooling would always remain for him a source of insecurity. In 1791, Joseph Ingres took his son to Toulouse, where the young Jean-Auguste-Dominique was enrolled in the Académie Royale de Peinture, Sculpture et Architecture, there he studied under the sculptor Jean-Pierre Vigan, the landscape painter Jean Briant, and the neoclassical painter Guillaume-Joseph Roques. Roques veneration of Raphael was an influence on the young artist. Ingres won prizes in several disciplines, such as composition, figure and antique and his musical talent was developed under the tutelage of the violinist Lejeune, and from the ages of thirteen to sixteen he played second violin in the Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse. Ingres followed his masters neoclassical example but revealed, according to David and his trip to Rome, however, was postponed until 1806, when the financially strained government finally appropriated the travel funds. Working in Paris alongside several other students of David in a provided by the state. He found inspiration in the works of Raphael, in Etruscan vase paintings, in 1802 he made his debut at the Salon with Portrait of a Woman. The following year brought a commission, when Ingres was one of five artists selected to paint full-length portraits of Napoleon Bonaparte as First Consul. These were to be distributed to the towns of Liège, Antwerp, Dunkerque, Brussels. In the summer of 1806 Ingres became engaged to Marie-Anne-Julie Forestier, although he had hoped to stay in Paris long enough to witness the opening of that years Salon, in which he was to display several works, he reluctantly left for Italy just days before the opening. Chaussard condemned Ingress style as gothic and asked, How, with so much talent, a line so flawless, the answer is that he wanted to do something singular, something extraordinary. M. Ingress intention is nothing less than to make art regress by four centuries, to carry us back to its infancy, Ingres stylistic eclecticism represented a new tendency in art. As art historian Marjorie Cohn has written, At the time, Artists and critics outdid each other in their attempts to identify, interpret, and exploit what they were just beginning to perceive as historical stylistic developments. From the beginning of his career, Ingres freely borrowed from earlier art, adopting the style appropriate to his subject
12.
Bordeaux
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Bordeaux is a port city on the Garonne River in the Gironde department in southwestern France. The municipality of Bordeaux proper has a population of 243,626, together with its suburbs and satellite towns, Bordeaux is the centre of the Bordeaux Métropole. With 749,595 inhabitants and 1,178,335 in the area, it is the fifth largest in France, after Paris, Lyon, Marseille and Lille. It is the capital of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, as well as the prefecture of the Gironde department and its inhabitants are called Bordelais or Bordelaises. The term Bordelais may also refer to the city and its surrounding region, Bordeaux is the worlds major wine industry capital. It is home to the main wine fair, Vinexpo. Bordeaux wine has been produced in the region since the 8th century, the historic part of the city is on the UNESCO World Heritage List as an outstanding urban and architectural ensemble of the 18th century. After Paris, Bordeaux has the highest number of preserved buildings of any city in France. In historical times, around 300 BC it was the settlement of a Celtic tribe, the Bituriges Vivisci, the name Bourde is still the name of a river south of the city. In 107 BC, the Battle of Burdigala was fought by the Romans who were defending the Allobroges, a Gallic tribe allied to Rome, the Romans were defeated and their commander, the consul Lucius Cassius Longinus, was killed in the action. The city fell under Roman rule around 60 BC, its importance lying in the commerce of tin, later it became capital of Roman Aquitaine, flourishing especially during the Severan dynasty. In 276 it was sacked by the Vandals, further ravage was brought by the same Vandals in 409, the Visigoths in 414 and the Franks in 498, beginning a period of obscurity for the city. In the late 6th century, the city re-emerged as the seat of a county and an archdiocese within the Merovingian kingdom of the Franks, the city started to play a regional role as a major urban center on the fringes of the newly founded Frankish Duchy of Vasconia. Around 585, a certain Gallactorius is cited as count of Bordeaux, the city was plundered by the troops of Abd er Rahman in 732 after storming the fortified city and overwhelming the Aquitanian garrison. After Duke Eudess defeat, the Aquitanian duke could still save part of its troops, the following year, the Frankish commander descended again over Aquitaine, but clashed in battle with the Aquitanians and left to take on hostile Burgundian authorities and magnates. In 745, Aquitaine faced yet another expedition by Charles sons Pepin and Carloman against Hunald, Hunald was defeated, and his son Waifer replaced him, who in turn confirmed Bordeaux as the capital city. During the last stage of the war against Aquitaine, it was one of Waifers last important strongholds to fall to King Pepin the Shorts troops. Next to Bordeaux, Charlemagne built the fortress of Fronsac on a hill across the border with the Basques, in 778, Seguin was appointed count of Bordeaux, probably undermining the power of the Duke Lupo, and possibly leading to the Battle of Roncevaux Pass that very year
13.
Chromolithography
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Chromolithography is a unique method for making multi-colour prints. This type of colour printing stemmed from the process of lithography, when chromolithography is used to reproduce photographs, the term photochrome is frequently used. Lithographers sought to find a way to print on flat surfaces with the use of chemicals instead of relief or intaglio printing, hand-colouring also remained important, elements of the official British Ordnance Survey maps were coloured by hand by boys until 1875. The initial technique involved the use of multiple lithographic stones, one for each colour, depending on the number of colours present, a chromolithograph could take months to produce, by very skilled workers. However much cheaper prints could be produced by simplifying both the number of used, and the refinement of the detail in the image. Cheaper images, like advertisements, relied heavily on a black print. The process is based on the rejection of grease by water, the image is applied to stone, grained zinc or aluminium surfaces, with a grease-based crayon or ink. Limestone and zinc are two commonly used materials in the production of chromolithographs, as aluminium unfortunately corrodes easily, after the image is drawn onto one of these surfaces, the image is gummed-up with a gum arabic solution and weak nitric acid to desensitize the surface. Before printing, the image is proved before finally inking up the image with oil based transfer or printing ink, the inked image under pressure is transposed onto a sheet of paper using a flat-bed press. This describes the form of printing. The offset indirect method uses a cylinder that transfers the image from printing surface to the paper. Colours may be overprinted by using stones or plates to achieve a closer reproduction of the original. Accurate registration for multi-coloured work is achieved by the use of a key outline image, ben-Day medium, uses a raised gelatin stipple image to give tone gradation. An air-brush sprays ink to give soft edges and these are just two methods used to achieve gradations of tone. The use of twelve overprinted colours would not be considered unusual, each sheet of paper will therefore pass through the printing press as many times as there are colours in the final print. In order that each colour is placed in the position, each stone or plate must be precisely ‘registered, ’ or lined up. Chromolithographs are considered to be reproductions that are smaller than double demi, autolithographs are prints where the artist draws and perhaps prints his or her own limited number of reproductions. This is the true art form
14.
Prix de Rome
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The Prix de Rome was a French scholarship for arts students, initially for painters and sculptors, that was established in 1663 during the reign of Louis XIV of France. Winners were awarded a bursary that allowed them to stay in Rome for three to five years at the expense of the state, the prize was extended to architecture in 1720, music in 1803, and engraving in 1804. The prestigious award was abolished in 1968 by André Malraux, the Minister of Culture, the Prix de Rome was initially created for painters and sculptors in 1663 in France during the reign of Louis XIV. It was an annual bursary for promising artists having proved their talents by completing a very difficult elimination contest, the prize, organised by the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, was open to their students. From 1666, the winner could win a stay of three to five years at the Palazzo Mancini in Rome at the expense of the King of France. In 1720, the Académie Royale d’Architecture began a prize in architecture, six painters, four sculptors, and two architects would be sent to the French Academy in Rome founded by Jean-Baptiste Colbert from 1666. Expanded after 140 years into five categories, the contest started in 1663 as two categories, painting and sculpture, in 1803, music was added, and after 1804 there was a prix for engraving as well. The primary winner took the First Grand Prize and the Second Prizes were awarded to the runners-up, in 1803, Napoleon Bonaparte moved the French Academy in Rome to the Villa Medici with the intention of preserving an institution once threatened by the French Revolution. At first, the villa and its gardens were in a sad state, in this way, he hoped to retain for young French artists the opportunity to see and copy the masterpieces of antiquity and the Renaissance. Jacques-Louis David, having failed to win the three years in a row, considered suicide. Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Ernest Chausson and Maurice Ravel attempted the Prix de Rome, but did not gain recognition. Ravel tried a total of five times to win the prize, during World War II the prize winners were accommodated in the Villa Paradiso in Nice. The Prix de Rome was abolished in 1968 by André Malraux, since then, a number of contests have been created, and the academies, together with the Institut de France, were merged by the State and the Minister of Culture. Selected residents now have an opportunity for study during an 18-month stay at The Academy of France in Rome, the heyday of the Prix de Rome was during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Prix de Rome for Architecture was created in 1720, the engraving prize was created in 1804. A Prix de Rome was also established in the Kingdom of Holland by Lodewijk Napoleon to award young artists and architects, during the years 1807–1810 prize winners were sent to Paris and onwards to Rome for study. Suspended in 1851 it was reinstated in 1870 by William III of the Netherlands, since then the winners have been selected by the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam under the main headings of architecture and the visual arts. The Belgian Prix de Rome is an award for artists, created in 1832
15.
Villa Medici
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The Villa Medici is a mannerist villa and an architectural complex with a garden contiguous with the larger Borghese gardens, on the Pincian Hill next to Trinità dei Monti in Rome, Italy. The Villa Medici, founded by Ferdinando I de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, a musical evocation of its garden fountains features in Ottorino Respighis Fontane di Roma. In ancient times, the site of the Villa Medici was part of the gardens of Lucullus, which passed into the hands of the Imperial family with Messalina, who was murdered in the villa. In 1564, when the nephews of Cardinal Giovanni Ricci of Montepulciano acquired the property, the new proprietors commissioned Annibale Lippi, the late architects son, to continue work. Interventions by Michelangelo are a tradition, in 1576, the property was acquired by Cardinal Ferdinando de Medici, who finished the structure to designs by Bartolomeo Ammanati. A series of grand gardens recalled the botanical gardens created at Pisa and at Florence by the Cardinals father Cosimo I de Medici, sheltered in plantations of pines, cypresses and oaks. Ferdinando de Medici had a studiolo, a retreat for study and contemplation, now these rooms look onto Borghese gardens but would then have had views over the Roman countryside. An engraving detailing the arrangement of statues prior to 1562 was documented by Galassi Alghisi, then the antiquities from the Villa Medici formed the nucleus of the collection of antiquities in the Uffizi, and Florence began to figure on the European Grand Tour. The fountain in the front of the Villa Medici is formed from a red granite vase from ancient Rome and it was designed by Annibale Lippi in 1589. The view from the Villa looking over the fountain towards St Peters in the distance has been much painted, like the Villa Borghese that adjoins them, the villas gardens were far more accessible than the formal palaces such as Palazzo Farnese in the heart of the city. For a century and a half the Villa Medici was one of the most elegant and worldly settings in Rome, the seat of the Grand Dukes embassy to the Holy See. When the male line of the Medici died out in 1737, in this manner Napoleon Bonaparte came into possession of the Villa Medici, which he transferred to the French Academy at Rome. Subsequently it housed the winners of the prestigious Prix de Rome, under distinguished directors including Ingres and Balthus, in 1656, Christina, Queen of Sweden was said to have fired one of the cannon on top of the Castel SantAngelo without aiming it first. The wayward ball hit the villa, destroying one of the Florentine lilies that decorated the facade, in 1803, Napoleon Bonaparte moved the French Academy in Rome to the Villa Medici with the intention of preserving an institution once threatened by the French Revolution. At first, the villa and its gardens were in a sad state, in this way, he hoped to retain for young French artists the opportunity to see and copy the masterpieces of antiquity and the Renaissance. The young architect Auguste-Henri-Victor Grandjean de Montigny undertook the renovation, the competition was interrupted during the first World War, and Benito Mussolini confiscated the villa in 1941, forcing the Academy of France in Rome to withdraw until 1945. The competition and the Prix de Rome were eliminated in 1968 by André Malraux, the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Institut de France then lost their guardianship of the Villa Medici to the Ministry of Culture and the French State. Between 1961 and 1967, the artist Balthus, then at the head of the Academy, carried out a vast restoration campaign of the palace and its gardens, Balthus participated “hands on” in all the phases of the construction
16.
Greek sculpture
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Ancient Greek sculpture is the sculpture of ancient Greece. Modern scholarship identifies three major stages, frequent subjects were the battles, mythology, and rulers of the area historically known as Ancient Greece. Smaller works were in a variety of materials, many of them precious. The ores for bronze were also easy to obtain. Marble was mostly found around the Parthenon and other major Greek buildings, many copies of the Roman period are marble versions of works originally in bronze. Ordinary limestone was used in the Archaic period, but thereafter, except in areas of modern Italy with no local marble, only for architectural sculpture, plaster or stucco was sometimes used for the hair only. Many statues were given jewellery, as can be seen from the holes for attaching it, by the early 19th century, the systematic excavation of ancient Greek sites had brought forth a plethora of sculptures with traces of notably multicolored surfaces, some of which were still visible. It was not until published findings by German archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann in the late 20th and he analyzed the pigments of the original paint to discover their composition. Brinkmann made several painted replicas of Greek statues that went on tour around the world, museums that hosted the exhibit included the Glyptotek Museum in Munich, the Vatican Museum, and the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, et al. The collection made its American debut at Harvard University in the Fall of 2007 and it is commonly thought that the earliest incarnation of Greek sculpture was in the form of wooden cult statues, first described by Pausanias as xoana. No such statues survive, and the descriptions of them are vague, the first piece of Greek statuary to be reassembled since is probably the Lefkandi Centaur, a terra cotta sculpture found on the island of Euboea, dated c.920 BCE. The statue was constructed in parts, before being dismembered and buried in two separate graves, the centaur has an intentional mark on its knee, which has led researchers to postulate that the statue might portray Cheiron, presumably kneeling wounded from Herakles arrow. If so, it would be the earliest known depiction of myth in the history of Greek sculpture, the forms from the geometrical period were chiefly terra cotta figurines, bronzes, and ivories. The bronzes are chiefly tripod cauldrons, and freestanding figures or groups, typical works of the era include the Karditsa warrior and the many examples of the equestrian statuette. The repertory of this work is not confined to standing men and horses, however, as vase paintings of the time also depict imagery of stags, birds, beetles, hares. There are no inscriptions on early-to-middle geometric sculpture, until the appearance of the Mantiklos Apollo of the early 7th century BCE found in Thebes, the inscription is a declaration of the statuette to Apollo, followed by a request for favors in return. Apart from the novelty of recording its own purpose, this sculpture adapts the formulae of oriental bronzes, as seen in the shorter more triangular face and slightly advancing left leg. This is sometimes seen as anticipating the greater freedom of the 7th century BCE and, as such
17.
Leonardo da Vinci
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He has been variously called the father of palaeontology, ichnology, and architecture, and is widely considered one of the greatest painters of all time. Sometimes credited with the inventions of the parachute, helicopter and tank, many historians and scholars regard Leonardo as the prime exemplar of the Universal Genius or Renaissance Man, an individual of unquenchable curiosity and feverishly inventive imagination. Much of his working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice, and he spent his last years in France at the home awarded to him by Francis I of France, Leonardo was, and is, renowned primarily as a painter. Among his works, the Mona Lisa is the most famous and most parodied portrait, Leonardos drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, being reproduced on items as varied as the euro coin, textbooks, and T-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings have survived, Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised flying machines, a type of armoured fighting vehicle, concentrated power, an adding machine. Some of his inventions, however, such as an automated bobbin winder. A number of Leonardos most practical inventions are nowadays displayed as working models at the Museum of Vinci. He made substantial discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, geology, optics, and hydrodynamics, today, Leonardo is widely considered one of the most diversely talented individuals ever to have lived. Leonardo was born on 15 April 1452 at the hour of the night in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci. He was the son of the wealthy Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a Florentine legal notary, and Caterina. Leonardo had no surname in the modern sense – da Vinci simply meaning of Vinci, his birth name was Lionardo di ser Piero da Vinci, meaning Leonardo. The inclusion of the title ser indicated that Leonardos father was a gentleman, little is known about Leonardos early life. He spent his first five years in the hamlet of Anchiano in the home of his mother and his father had married a sixteen-year-old girl named Albiera Amadori, who loved Leonardo but died young in 1465 without children. When Leonardo was sixteen, his father married again to twenty-year-old Francesca Lanfredini, pieros legitimate heirs were born from his third wife Margherita di Guglielmo and his fourth and final wife, Lucrezia Cortigiani. Leonardo received an education in Latin, geometry and mathematics. In later life, Leonardo recorded only two childhood incidents, one, which he regarded as an omen, was when a kite dropped from the sky and hovered over his cradle, its tail feathers brushing his face
18.
Raphael
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Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, known as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form, ease of composition, together with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, he forms the traditional trinity of great masters of that period. Raphael was enormously productive, running a large workshop and, despite his death at 37. Many of his works are found in the Vatican Palace, where the frescoed Raphael Rooms were the central, the best known work is The School of Athens in the Vatican Stanza della Segnatura. After his early years in Rome much of his work was executed by his workshop from his drawings and he was extremely influential in his lifetime, though outside Rome his work was mostly known from his collaborative printmaking. Raphael was born in the small but artistically significant central Italian city of Urbino in the Marche region and his poem to Federico shows him as keen to show awareness of the most advanced North Italian painters, and Early Netherlandish artists as well. In the very court of Urbino he was probably more integrated into the central circle of the ruling family than most court painters. Under them, the court continued as a centre for literary culture, growing up in the circle of this small court gave Raphael the excellent manners and social skills stressed by Vasari. Castiglione moved to Urbino in 1504, when Raphael was no longer based there but frequently visited, Raphael mixed easily in the highest circles throughout his life, one of the factors that tended to give a misleading impression of effortlessness to his career. He did not receive a humanistic education however, it is unclear how easily he read Latin. His mother Màgia died in 1491 when Raphael was eight, followed on August 1,1494 by his father, Raphael was thus orphaned at eleven, his formal guardian became his only paternal uncle Bartolomeo, a priest, who subsequently engaged in litigation with his stepmother. He probably continued to live with his stepmother when not staying as an apprentice with a master and he had already shown talent, according to Vasari, who says that Raphael had been a great help to his father. A self-portrait drawing from his teenage years shows his precocity and his fathers workshop continued and, probably together with his stepmother, Raphael evidently played a part in managing it from a very early age. In Urbino, he came into contact with the works of Paolo Uccello, previously the court painter, and Luca Signorelli, according to Vasari, his father placed him in the workshop of the Umbrian master Pietro Perugino as an apprentice despite the tears of his mother. The evidence of an apprenticeship comes only from Vasari and another source, an alternative theory is that he received at least some training from Timoteo Viti, who acted as court painter in Urbino from 1495. An excess of resin in the varnish often causes cracking of areas of paint in the works of both masters, the Perugino workshop was active in both Perugia and Florence, perhaps maintaining two permanent branches. Raphael is described as a master, that is to say fully trained and his first documented work was the Baronci altarpiece for the church of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino in Città di Castello, a town halfway between Perugia and Urbino. Evangelista da Pian di Meleto, who had worked for his father, was named in the commission
19.
Michelangelo
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Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art. Considered to be the greatest living artist during his lifetime, he has since described as one of the greatest artists of all time. A number of Michelangelos works of painting, sculpture, and architecture rank among the most famous in existence and he sculpted two of his best-known works, the Pietà and David, before the age of thirty. As an architect, Michelangelo pioneered the Mannerist style at the Laurentian Library, at the age of 74, he succeeded Antonio da Sangallo the Younger as the architect of St. Peters Basilica. Michelangelo transformed the plan so that the end was finished to his design, as was the dome, with some modification. Michelangelo was unique as the first Western artist whose biography was published while he was alive, in his lifetime he was often called Il Divino. One of the qualities most admired by his contemporaries was his terribilità, the attempts by subsequent artists to imitate Michelangelos impassioned and highly personal style resulted in Mannerism, the next major movement in Western art after the High Renaissance. Michelangelo was born on 6 March 1475 in Caprese near Arezzo, at the time of Michelangelos birth, his father was the Judicial administrator of the small town of Caprese and local administrator of Chiusi. Michelangelos mother was Francesca di Neri del Miniato di Siena, the Buonarrotis claimed to descend from the Countess Mathilde of Canossa, this claim remains unproven, but Michelangelo himself believed it. Several months after Michelangelos birth, the returned to Florence. There Michelangelo gained his love for marble, as Giorgio Vasari quotes him, If there is good in me. Along with the milk of my nurse I received the knack of handling chisel and hammer, as a young boy, Michelangelo was sent to Florence to study grammar under the Humanist Francesco da Urbino. The young artist, however, showed no interest in his schooling, preferring to copy paintings from churches, the city of Florence was at that time the greatest centre of the arts and learning in Italy. Art was sponsored by the Signoria, by the merchant guilds and by patrons such as the Medici. The Renaissance, a renewal of Classical scholarship and the arts, had its first flowering in Florence, the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti had laboured for fifty years to create the bronze doors of the Baptistry, which Michelangelo was to describe as The Gates of Paradise. The exterior niches of the Church of Orsanmichele contained a gallery of works by the most acclaimed sculptors of Florence – Donatello, Ghiberti, Andrea del Verrocchio, and Nanni di Banco. The interiors of the churches were covered with frescos, begun by Giotto. During Michelangelos childhood, a team of painters had been called from Florence to the Vatican, among them was Domenico Ghirlandaio, a master in fresco painting, perspective, figure drawing, and portraiture who had the largest workshop in Florence at that period
20.
Titian
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Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio, known in English as Titian /ˈtɪʃən/, was an Italian painter, the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian school. He was born in Pieve di Cadore, near Belluno, during his lifetime he was often called da Cadore, taken from the place of his birth. His painting methods, particularly in the application and use of color, would exercise a profound influence not only on painters of the Italian Renaissance, during the course of his long life, Titians artistic manner changed drastically, but he retained a lifelong interest in color. Although his mature works may not contain the vivid, luminous tints of his pieces, their loose brushwork. The exact date of Titians birth is uncertain, when he was an old man he claimed in a letter to Philip II, King of Spain, to have been born in 1474, but this seems most unlikely. Other writers contemporary to his old age give figures that would equate to birthdates between 1473 and after 1482 and he was the son of Gregorio Vecelli and his wife Lucia. His father was superintendent of the castle of Pieve di Cadore, Gregorio was also a distinguished councilor and soldier. Many relatives, including Titians grandfather, were notaries, and the family of four were well-established in the area, at the age of about ten to twelve he and his brother Francesco were sent to an uncle in Venice to find an apprenticeship with a painter. At that time the Bellinis, especially Giovanni, were the artists in the city. There Titian found a group of men about his own age, among them Giovanni Palma da Serinalta, Lorenzo Lotto, Sebastiano Luciani. Francesco Vecellio, his brother, later became a painter of some note in Venice. A fresco of Hercules on the Morosini Palace is said to have one of Titians earliest works. Others were the Bellini-esque so-called Gypsy Madonna in Vienna, and the Visitation of Mary and Elizabeth, now in the Accademia, a Man with a Quilted Sleeve is an early portrait, painted around 1509 and described by Giorgio Vasari in 1568. Scholars long believed it depicted Ludovico Ariosto, but now think it is of Gerolamo Barbarigo, Rembrandt borrowed the composition for his self-portraits. Titian joined Giorgione as an assistant, but many contemporary critics found his work more impressive—for example in exterior frescoes that they did for the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. Their relationship evidently contained a significant element of rivalry, distinguishing between their work at this period remains a subject of scholarly controversy. A substantial number of attributions have moved from Giorgione to Titian in the 20th century, one of the earliest known Titian works, Christ Carrying the Cross in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, depicting the Ecce Homo scene, was long regarded as by Giorgione. In 1507–1508 Giorgione was commissioned by the state to create frescoes on the re-erected Fondaco dei Tedeschi, Titian and Morto da Feltre worked along with him, and some fragments of paintings remain, probably by Giorgione
21.
Rubens
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Sir Peter Paul Rubens was a Flemish/Netherlandish draughtsman and painter. He is widely considered as the most notable artist of Flemish Baroque art school, the catalogue of his works by Michael Jaffé lists 1,403 pieces, excluding numerous copies made in his workshop. His commissioned works were mostly history paintings, which included religious and mythological subjects and he painted portraits, especially of friends, and self-portraits, and in later life painted several landscapes. Rubens designed tapestries and prints, as well as his own house and he also oversaw the ephemeral decorations of the royal entry into Antwerp by the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand in 1635. His drawings are mostly extremely forceful but not overly detailed and he also made great use of oil sketches as preparatory studies. For altarpieces he painted on slate to reduce reflection problems. Rubens was born in the city of Siegen to Jan Rubens and he was named in honour of Saint-Peter and Paul, because he was born on their solemnety. His father, a Calvinist, and mother fled Antwerp for Cologne in 1568, after increased religious turmoil and persecution of Protestants during the rule of the Spanish Netherlands by the Duke of Alba. Jan Rubens became the adviser of Anna of Saxony, the second wife of William I of Orange. Following Jan Rubens imprisonment for the affair, Peter Paul Rubens was born in 1577, the family returned to Cologne the next year. In 1589, two years after his fathers death, Rubens moved with his mother Maria Pypelincks to Antwerp, religion figured prominently in much of his work and Rubens later became one of the leading voices of the Catholic Counter-Reformation style of painting. In Antwerp, Rubens received a Renaissance humanist education, studying Latin, by fourteen he began his artistic apprenticeship with Tobias Verhaeght. Subsequently, he studied under two of the leading painters of the time, the late Mannerist artists Adam van Noort. Much of his earliest training involved copying earlier works, such as woodcuts by Hans Holbein the Younger. Rubens completed his education in 1598, at time he entered the Guild of St. Luke as an independent master. In 1600 Rubens travelled to Italy and he stopped first in Venice, where he saw paintings by Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto, before settling in Mantua at the court of Duke Vincenzo I Gonzaga. The colouring and compositions of Veronese and Tintoretto had an effect on Rubenss painting. With financial support from the Duke, Rubens travelled to Rome by way of Florence in 1601, there, he studied classical Greek and Roman art and copied works of the Italian masters
22.
Paris Salon
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The Salon, or rarely Paris Salon, beginning in 1667 was the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Between 1748 and 1890 it was arguably the greatest annual or biennial art event in the Western world, at the 1761 Salon, thirty-three painters, nine sculptors, and eleven engravers contributed. From 1881 onward, it has been managed by the Société des Artistes Français, in 1667, the royally sanctioned French institution of art patronage, the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, held its first semi-public art exhibit at the Salon Carré. The Salons original focus was the display of the work of recent graduates of the École des Beaux-Arts, exhibition at the Salon de Paris was essential for any artist to achieve success in France for at least the next 200 years. Exhibition in the Salon marked a sign of royal favor, in 1725, the Salon was held in the Palace of the Louvre, when it became known as Salon or Salon de Paris. In 1737, the exhibitions, held from 18 August 1737 to 5 September 1737 at the Grand Salon of the Louvre and they were held, at first, annually, and then biennially, in odd-numbered years. They would start on the feast day of St. Louis, once made regular and public, the Salons status was never seriously in doubt. In 1748 a jury of awarded artists was introduced, from this time forward, the influence of the Salon was undisputed. The Salon exhibited paintings floor-to-ceiling and on every inch of space. The jostling of artwork became the subject of other paintings. Printed catalogues of the Salons are primary documents for art historians, critical descriptions of the exhibitions published in the gazettes mark the beginning of the modern occupation of art critic. The French revolution opened the exhibition to foreign artists, the vernissage of opening night was a grand social occasion, and a crush that gave subject matter to newspaper caricaturists like Honoré Daumier. Charles Baudelaire, Denis Diderot and others wrote reviews of the Salons, the 1848 revolution liberalized the Salon. The amount of refused works was greatly reduced, the increasingly conservative and academic juries were not receptive to the Impressionist painters, whose works were usually rejected, or poorly placed if accepted. The Salon opposed the Impressionists shift away from traditional painting styles, in 1863 the Salon jury turned away an unusually high number of the submitted paintings. An uproar resulted, particularly from regular exhibitors who had been rejected, in order to prove that the Salons were democratic, Napoleon III instituted the Salon des Refusés, containing a selection of the works that the Salon had rejected that year. It opened on 17 May 1863, marking the birth of the avant-garde, the Impressionists held their own independent exhibitions in 1874,1876,1877,1879,1880,1881,1882 and 1886. In 1881, the government withdrew official sponsorship from the annual Salon, in December 1890, the leader of the Société des Artistes Français, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, propagated the idea that Salon should be an exhibition of young, not-yet awarded, artists
23.
Paul Durand-Ruel
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Paul Durand-Ruel was a French art dealer who is associated with the Impressionists and the Barbizon School. He was one of the first modern art dealers who provided support to his painters with stipends, born Paul-Marie-Joseph Durand-Ruel in Paris, his father was a picture dealer. In 1865 young Paul took over the business, which represented artists such as Corot. In 1867 he moved his gallery from 1 rue de la Paix, Paris, to 16 rue Laffitte, during the 1860s and early 1870s Durand-Ruel was an important advocate and successful art dealer of the Barbizon School. However Durand-Ruel soon established a relationship with a group of painters who would become known as the Impressionists. In December 1870 he opened the first of ten Annual Exhibitions of the Society of French Artists at his new London gallery at 168 New Bond Street, under the management of Charles Deschamps. He recognized the artistic and fashionable potential of Impressionism as early as 1870, eventually Durand-Ruel had exhibitions of Impressionism and other works, at his Paris and London galleries. During the final three decades of the 19th century Durand-Ruel became the best known art dealer and most important commercial advocate of French Impressionism in the world and he succeeded in establishing the market for Impressionism in the United States as well as in Europe. Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and he represented many lesser known artists including Maxime Dethomas or Hugues Merle amongst others. Regarding the Americans’ open-mindedness towards impressionism, Durand-Ruel once said, The American public does not laugh, “Without America, ” he said, “I would have been lost, ruined, after having bought so many Monets and Renoirs. The two exhibitions there in 1886 saved me, but thanks to that public, Monet and Renoir were enabled to live and after that the French public followed suit. ”Durand-Ruel had an intense rivalry with Parisian art dealer Georges Petit. Durand-Ruel was the subject of a temporary exhibition titled Inventing Impressionism held at the National Gallery in London in 2015. Two exhibition catalogs from the Durand-Ruel Galleries, National Gallery exhibition devoted to Durand-Ruel 4 March –31 May 2015
24.
Salon (art)
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The Salon, or rarely Paris Salon, beginning in 1667 was the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Between 1748 and 1890 it was arguably the greatest annual or biennial art event in the Western world, at the 1761 Salon, thirty-three painters, nine sculptors, and eleven engravers contributed. From 1881 onward, it has been managed by the Société des Artistes Français, in 1667, the royally sanctioned French institution of art patronage, the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, held its first semi-public art exhibit at the Salon Carré. The Salons original focus was the display of the work of recent graduates of the École des Beaux-Arts, exhibition at the Salon de Paris was essential for any artist to achieve success in France for at least the next 200 years. Exhibition in the Salon marked a sign of royal favor, in 1725, the Salon was held in the Palace of the Louvre, when it became known as Salon or Salon de Paris. In 1737, the exhibitions, held from 18 August 1737 to 5 September 1737 at the Grand Salon of the Louvre and they were held, at first, annually, and then biennially, in odd-numbered years. They would start on the feast day of St. Louis, once made regular and public, the Salons status was never seriously in doubt. In 1748 a jury of awarded artists was introduced, from this time forward, the influence of the Salon was undisputed. The Salon exhibited paintings floor-to-ceiling and on every inch of space. The jostling of artwork became the subject of other paintings. Printed catalogues of the Salons are primary documents for art historians, critical descriptions of the exhibitions published in the gazettes mark the beginning of the modern occupation of art critic. The French revolution opened the exhibition to foreign artists, the vernissage of opening night was a grand social occasion, and a crush that gave subject matter to newspaper caricaturists like Honoré Daumier. Charles Baudelaire, Denis Diderot and others wrote reviews of the Salons, the 1848 revolution liberalized the Salon. The amount of refused works was greatly reduced, the increasingly conservative and academic juries were not receptive to the Impressionist painters, whose works were usually rejected, or poorly placed if accepted. The Salon opposed the Impressionists shift away from traditional painting styles, in 1863 the Salon jury turned away an unusually high number of the submitted paintings. An uproar resulted, particularly from regular exhibitors who had been rejected, in order to prove that the Salons were democratic, Napoleon III instituted the Salon des Refusés, containing a selection of the works that the Salon had rejected that year. It opened on 17 May 1863, marking the birth of the avant-garde, the Impressionists held their own independent exhibitions in 1874,1876,1877,1879,1880,1881,1882 and 1886. In 1881, the government withdrew official sponsorship from the annual Salon, in December 1890, the leader of the Société des Artistes Français, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, propagated the idea that Salon should be an exhibition of young, not-yet awarded, artists
25.
Hugues Merle
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Hugues Merle was a French painter who mostly depicted sentimental or moral subjects. He has often compared with William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Hugues Merle was born in 1823 in Saint Martin and he studied painting with Léon Cogniet. Merle started exhibiting at the Salon in 1847 and he received second class prizes in 1861 and 1863. In 1866 he was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, hugues Merle became a friend of Paul Durand-Ruel in the early 1860s. Durand-Ruel had started buying paintings by Merle in 1862 and introduced the artist to painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Merle was later often compared to Bouguereau and “became a considerable rival of Bouguereau in subject and treatment”. In the mid-1860s, Merle painted several portraits of Paul Durand-Ruel, his wife, hugues Merle died in 1881 in Paris. His son Georges Merle also became a painter
26.
Genre works
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Genre art is the pictorial representation in any of various media of scenes or events from everyday life, such as markets, domestic settings, interiors, parties, inn scenes, and street scenes. Such representations may be realistic, imagined, or romanticized by the artist, some variations of the term genre art specify the medium or type of visual work, as in genre painting, genre prints, genre photographs, and so on. Rather confusingly, the meaning of genre, covering any particular combination of an artistic medium. Painting was divided into a hierarchy of genres, with painting at the top, as the most difficult and therefore prestigious. But history paintings are a genre in painting, not genre works, the following concentrates on painting, but genre motifs were also extremely popular in many forms of the decorative arts, especially from the Rococo of the early 18th century onwards. Single figures or small groups decorated a huge variety of such as porcelain, furniture, wallpaper. Genre painting, also called genre scene or petit genre, depicts aspects of life by portraying ordinary people engaged in common activities. A work would often be considered as a genre work even if it could be shown that the artist had used a known member of his family. In this case it would depend on whether the work was likely to have intended by the artist to be perceived as a portrait—sometimes a subjective question. The depictions can be realistic, imagined, or romanticized by the artist, because of their familiar and frequently sentimental subject matter, genre paintings have often proven popular with the bourgeoisie, or middle class. Genre themes appear in all art traditions. These were part of a pattern of Mannerist inversion in Antwerp painting, giving low elements previously in the background of images prominent emphasis. The generally small scale of these paintings was appropriate for their display in the homes of middle class purchasers. Often the subject of a painting was based on a popular emblem from an Emblem book. The merry company showed a group of figures at a party, other common types of scenes showed markets or fairs, village festivities, or soldiers in camp. In Italy, a school of painting was stimulated by the arrival in Rome of the Dutch painter Pieter van Laer in 1625. He acquired the nickname Il Bamboccio and his followers were called the Bamboccianti, whose works would inspire Giacomo Ceruti, Antonio Cifrondi, jean-Baptiste Greuze and others painted detailed and rather sentimental groups or individual portraits of peasants that were to be influential on 19th-century painting. Spain had a tradition predating The Book of Good Love of social observation and commentary based on the Old Roman Latin tradition, practiced by many of its painters and illuminators
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Nymph
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A nymph in Greek mythology and in Latin mythology is a minor female nature deity typically associated with a particular location or landform. They are beloved by many and dwell in mountainous regions and forests by lakes, charybdis and Scylla were once nymphs. Other nymphs, always in the shape of young maidens, were part of the retinue of a god, such as Dionysus, Hermes, or Pan, or a goddess, nymphs were the frequent target of satyrs. The Greek word νύμφη has bride and veiled among its meanings, other readers refer the word to a root expressing the idea of swelling. The mythologies of classicizing Roman poets were unlikely to have affected the rites and cult of individual nymphs venerated by people in the springs. Among the Roman literate class, their sphere of influence was restricted, the ancient Greek belief in nymphs survived in many parts of the country into the early years of the twentieth century, when they were usually known as nereids. At that time, John Cuthbert Lawson wrote and they might appear in a whirlwind. Such encounters could be dangerous, bringing dumbness, besotted infatuation, when parents believed their child to be nereid-struck, they would pray to Saint Artemidos. Due to widespread use of the term among lay persons and stereotypes attached, professionals nowadays prefer the term hypersexuality, the word nymphet is used to identify a sexually precocious girl. The term was made famous in the novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, the main character, Humbert Humbert, uses the term many times, usually in reference to the title character. Thus the classes of nymphs tend to overlap, which complicates the task of precise classification, rose mentions dryads and hamadryads as nymphs of trees generally, meliai as nymphs of ash trees, and naiads as nymphs of water, but no others specifically. She is the consort of Acheron, and the mother of Ascalaphus, leuce, lover of Hades Minthe, lover of Hades, rival of Persephone Melinoe Orphic nymph, daughter of Persephone and Zeus disguised as Pluto. Her name is an epithet of Hecate. Nymphs in such groupings could belong to any of the mentioned above. For lists of Naiads, Oceanids, Dryades etc and this motif supposedly came from an Italian report of a Roman sculpture of a nymph at a fountain above the River Danube
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Henri Matisse
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Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse was a French artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is primarily as a painter. Although he was labelled a Fauve, by the 1920s he was increasingly hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. His mastery of the language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century. Matisse was born in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, in the Nord department in northern France and he grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois, Picardie, France. In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as an administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification. He first started to paint in 1889, after his mother brought him art supplies during a period of following an attack of appendicitis. He discovered a kind of paradise as he described it. In 1891 he returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian and became a student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau, initially he painted still lifes and landscapes in a traditional style, at which he achieved reasonable proficiency. Chardin was one of the painters Matisse most admired, as an art student he made copies of four of Chardins paintings in the Louvre, in 1896 and 1897, Matisse visited the Australian painter John Peter Russell on the island Belle Île off the coast of Brittany. Russell introduced him to Impressionism and to the work of van Gogh and he later said Russell was my teacher, and Russell explained colour theory to me. In 1896 Matisse exhibited five paintings in the salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, with the model Caroline Joblau, he had a daughter, Marguerite, born in 1894. In 1898 he married Amélie Noellie Parayre, the two raised Marguerite together and had two sons, Jean and Pierre, Marguerite and Amélie often served as models for Matisse. In 1898, on the advice of Camille Pissarro, he went to London to study the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and then went on a trip to Corsica. Upon his return to Paris in February 1899, he worked beside Albert Marquet and met André Derain, Jean Puy, Matisse immersed himself in the work of others and went into debt from buying work from painters he admired. The work he hung and displayed in his home included a plaster bust by Rodin, a painting by Gauguin, a drawing by van Gogh, in Cézannes sense of pictorial structure and colour, Matisse found his main inspiration. Many of Matisses paintings from 1898 to 1901 make use of a Divisionist technique he adopted after reading Paul Signacs essay and his paintings of 1902–03, a period of material hardship for the artist, are comparatively somber and reveal a preoccupation with form. Having made his first attempt at sculpture, a copy after Antoine-Louis Barye, in 1899, he devoted much of his energy to working in clay, fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910
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Legion of Honour
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The Legion of Honour, full name National Order of the Legion of Honour, is the highest French order of merit for military and civil merits, established 1802 by Napoléon Bonaparte. The order is divided into five degrees of increasing distinction, Chevalier, Officier, Commandeur, Grand Officier and Grand-Croix. The orders motto is Honneur et Patrie and its seat is the Palais de la Légion dHonneur next to the Musée dOrsay, in the French Revolution, all French orders of chivalry were abolished, and replaced with Weapons of Honour. The Légion however did use the organization of old French orders of chivalry, the badges of the legion also bear a resemblance to the Ordre de Saint-Louis, which also used a red ribbon. Napoleon originally created this to ensure political loyalty, the organization would be used as a facade to give political favours, gifts, and concessions. The Légion was loosely patterned after a Roman legion, with legionaries, officers, commanders, regional cohorts, the highest rank was not a grand cross but a Grand Aigle, a rank that wore all the insignia common to grand crosses. The members were paid, the highest of them extremely generously,5,000 francs to an officier,2,000 francs to a commandeur,1,000 francs to an officier,250 francs to a légionnaire. Napoleon famously declared, You call these baubles, well, it is with baubles that men are led, do you think that you would be able to make men fight by reasoning. That is good only for the scholar in his study, the soldier needs glory, distinctions, rewards. This has been quoted as It is with such baubles that men are led. The order was the first modern order of merit, under the monarchy, such orders were often limited to Roman Catholics, and all knights had to be noblemen. The military decorations were the perks of the officers, the Légion, however, was open to men of all ranks and professions—only merit or bravery counted. The new legionnaire had to be sworn in the Légion and it is noteworthy that all previous orders were crosses or shared a clear Christian background, whereas the Légion is a secular institution. The jewel of the Légion has five arms, in a decree issued on the 10 Pluviôse XIII, a grand decoration was instituted. This decoration, a cross on a sash and a silver star with an eagle, symbol of the Napoleonic Empire, became known as the Grand Aigle. After Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French in 1804 and established the Napoleonic nobility in 1808, the title was made hereditary after three generations of grantees. Napoleon had dispensed 15 golden collars of the legion among his family and this collar was abolished in 1815. The Légion dhonneur was prominent and visible in the French Empire, the Emperor always wore it and the fashion of the time allowed for decorations to be worn most of the time
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Menton
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Menton is a commune in the Alpes-Maritimes department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte dAzur region in southeastern France. Situated on the French Riviera, along the Franco-Italian border, it is nicknamed perle de la France. The Menton area has been inhabited since the era, and is the site of the original Grimaldi Man find of early modern humans, as well as remains of Neanderthals. In Roman times, the Via Julia Augusta, a road connecting Placentia with Arelates passed through Menton, running along the Rue Longue in the old town. The first major settlement occurred during the 11th century CE, when the Count of Ventimiglia constructed the Château de Puypin on the Pépin hill, north, Menton was thus incorporated into the Republic of Genoa. The first mention of Menton dates from 21 July 1262, in the treaty between Charles of Anjou and Genoa. Its position on the border between the Angevin-ruled Provence and the Republic of Genoa, which at the time claimed Monaco as its western limit, acquired in 1346 by Charles Grimaldi, Lord of Monaco, Menton was ruled by the Princes of Monaco until the French Revolution. Annexed during the Revolution, Menton remained part of France through the First Empire and it belonged to the district of Sanremo in the department of Alpes-Maritimes, which at the time included Monaco and Sanremo. In 1814, Menton was included in a reconstituted principality of Monaco which, after Napoleons Hundred Days in 1815, the Princes of Monaco were obliged to do homage to the King for Menton, although not for Monaco itself. In 1848, Menton, along with its neighbour Roquebrune, seceded from Monaco, due at least in part to a tax imposed on lemon exports. The county of Nice was thus annexed to France that June, and Napoleon III paid 4 million francs in compensation to the prince of Monaco, by the end of the 19th century, tourism was an important factor in Mentons growth. The town was popular with English and Russian aristocrats who built many of the hotels, villas. Many of these hotels and palaces were pressed into service as hospitals during World War I to allow injured troops to recuperate in a pleasant climate, Menton was the only sizable settlement captured by Italy during its invasion of France in June 1940. Following the armistice of June 22,1940, two-thirds of the territory of the commune was annexed by Italy as terra irredenta, the annexation lasted until 8 September 1943. Although officially returned to Vichy France, Menton was in fact occupied by Nazi Germany until its liberation by American and Canadian troops of the First Special Service Force on 8 September 1944. Menton, nicknamed the Pearl of France, is located on the Mediterranean Sea at the Franco-Italian border, the fishing industry was devastated in the 1980s and 1990s when a combination of overfishing and hypoxia in the bay. At the time, the devastation was attributed to the dubiously nicknamed killer algae Caulerpa taxifolia spread throughout the coastal sea floor. Menton has got a hot-summer Mediterranean climate, frosts are extremely rare but occasionally occur every few year
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Montparnasse Cemetery
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Montparnasse Cemetery is a cemetery in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris, part of the citys 14th arrondissement. Created from three farms in 1824, the cemetery at Montparnasse was originally known as Le Cimetière du Sud, cemeteries had been banned from Paris since the closure, owing to health concerns, of the Cimetière des Innocents in 1786. At the heart of the city, and today sitting in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, is Passy Cemetery, Montparnasse Cemetery is the resting place of many of Frances intellectual and artistic elite as well as publishers and others who promoted the works of authors and artists. There are also graves of foreigners who have made France their home, as well as monuments to police. The cemetery is divided by Rue Émile Richard, the small section is usually referred to as the small cemetery and the large section as the big cemetery. Although Baudelaire is buried in this cemetery, there is also a cenotaph to him, because of the many notable people buried there, it is a highly popular tourist attraction. Divisions 5 and 30 were originally Jewish enclosures and contain many Jewish graves, the main entrance to the cemetery is on Boulevard Edgar Quinet which leads to the big cemetery. There are smaller entrances to both the big and small cemeteries on Rue Émile Richard, list of burials at Montparnasse Cemetery A list of many buried at the cemetery Montparnasse Cemetery at Find a Grave Information and help in touring Montparnasse cemetery In English
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Psyche (mythology)
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Cupid and Psyche is a story originally from Metamorphoses, written in the 2nd Century AD by Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis. It concerns the overcoming of obstacles to the love between Psyche and Cupid or Amor, and their union in a sacred marriage. Although the only extended narrative from antiquity is that of Apuleius, Eros, since the rediscovery of Apuleiuss novel in the Renaissance, the reception of Cupid and Psyche in the classical tradition has been extensive. The story has been retold in poetry, drama, and opera, and depicted widely in painting, sculpture, Psyches Roman name through direct translation is Anima. The tale of Cupid and Psyche is placed at the midpoint of Apuleiuss novel, the novel itself is a first-person narrative by the protagonist Lucius. Transformed into a donkey by magic gone wrong, Lucius undergoes various trials and adventures, Psyches story has some similarities, including the theme of dangerous curiosity, punishments and tests, and redemption through divine favor. As a structural mirror of the plot, the tale is an example of mise en abyme. The happy ending for Psyche is supposed to assuage Charites fear of rape, there were once a king and queen, rulers of an unnamed city, who had three daughters of conspicuous beauty. The youngest and most beautiful was Psyche, whose admirers, neglecting the worship of the love goddess Venus, instead prayed. It was rumored that she was the coming of Venus. Venus is offended, and commissions Cupid to work her revenge, Cupid instead scratches himself with his own dart, which makes any living thing fall in love with the first thing it sees. As soon as Cupid scratches himself he falls deeply in love with Psyche, although her two humanly beautiful sisters have married, the idolized Psyche has yet to find love. Her father suspects that they have incurred the wrath of the gods, Psyche is arrayed in funeral attire, conveyed by a procession to the peak of a rocky crag, and exposed. Marriage and death are merged into a rite of passage. Zephyr the West Wind bears her up to meet her match, and deposits her in a lovely meadow. The transported girl awakes to find herself at the edge of a cultivated grove, exploring, she finds a marvelous house with golden columns, a carved ceiling of citrus wood and ivory, silver walls embossed with wild and domesticated animals, and jeweled mosaic floors. A disembodied voice tells her to make herself comfortable, and she is entertained at a feast that serves itself, although fearful and without sexual experience, she allows herself to be guided to a bedroom, where in the darkness a being she cannot see makes her his wife. She gradually learns to look forward to his visits, though he always departs before sunrise and forbids her to look upon him, and soon she becomes pregnant
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The Young Shepherdess
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The Young Shepherdess is an 1885 painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. It is owned by the San Diego Museum of Art and this and similar images by the artist attracted collectors in Europe and America because of their nostalgic content. In such works the artist depicted a variety of poses and expressions, in portraying a shepherdess Bouguereau is working within the pastoral mode or theme, as developed by ancient Greek and Hellenistic artists and poets. French painters who preceded him in this include Claude Lorrain, Poussin, and Watteau
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Avant-garde
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The avant-garde are people or works that are experimental, radical, or unorthodox, with respect to art, culture, and society. It may be characterized by nontraditional, aesthetic innovation and initial unacceptability, the avant-garde pushes the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm. The avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of modernism, the avant-garde also promotes radical social reforms. Several writers have attempted, with limited success, to map the parameters of avant-garde activity, the Italian essayist Renato Poggioli provides one of the best-known analyses of vanguardism as a cultural phenomenon in his 1962 book Teoria dellarte davanguardia. Other authors have attempted both to clarify and to extend Poggiolis study, bürgers essay also greatly influenced the work of contemporary American art-historians such as the German Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. Buchloh, in the collection of essays Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry critically argues for an approach to these positions. Subsequent criticism theorized the limitations of these approaches, noting their circumscribed areas of analysis, including Eurocentric, chauvinist, and genre-specific definitions. The concept of avant-garde refers primarily to artists, writers, composers and thinkers whose work is opposed to cultural values. For Greenberg, these forms were therefore kitsch, phony, faked or mechanical culture, for instance, during the 1930s the advertising industry was quick to take visual mannerisms from surrealism, but this does not mean that 1930s advertising photographs are truly surreal. In this way the autonomous artistic merit so dear to the vanguardist was abandoned and sales became the measure. It has become common to describe successful rock musicians and celebrated film-makers as avant-garde, nevertheless, an incisive critique of vanguardism as against the views of mainstream society was offered by the New York critic Harold Rosenberg in the late 1960s. Since then it has been flanked by what he called avant-garde ghosts to the one side, and this has seen culture become, in his words, a profession one of whose aspects is the pretense of overthrowing it. Avant-garde in music can refer to any form of working within traditional structures while seeking to breach boundaries in some manner. The term is used loosely to describe the work of any musicians who radically depart from tradition altogether, although most avant-garde composers have been men, this is not exclusively the case. Women avant-gardists include Pauline Oliveros, Diamanda Galás, Meredith Monk, there are movements in theatre history that are characterized by their contributions to the avant-garde traditions in both the United States and Europe. Among these are Fluxus, Happenings, and Neo-Dada, Avant-garde – Wikipedia book Barron, Stephanie, and Maurice Tuchman. The Avant-garde in Russia, 1910–1930, New Perspectives, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C. Los Angeles, CA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art ISBN 0-87587-095-3, Cambridge, MA, ISBN 0-671-20422-X Berg, Hubert van den, and Walter Fähnders
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Edgar Degas
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Edgar Degas was a French artist famous for his paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings. He is especially identified with the subject of dance, more than half of his works depict dancers and he is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism, although he rejected the term, preferring to be called a realist. He was a draftsman, and particularly masterly in depicting movement, as can be seen in his rendition of dancers, racecourse subjects. His portraits are notable for their complexity and for their portrayal of human isolation. At the beginning of his career, Degas wanted to be a history painter, in his early thirties, he changed course, and by bringing the traditional methods of a history painter to bear on contemporary subject matter, he became a classical painter of modern life. Degas was born in Paris, France, into a wealthy family. He was the oldest of five children of Célestine Musson De Gas, a Creole from New Orleans, Louisiana, and Augustin De Gas and his maternal grandfather Germain Musson, was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti of French descent and had settled in New Orleans in 1810. Degas began his schooling at age eleven, enrolling in the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and his mother died when he was thirteen, and his father and grandfather became the main influences on him for the remainder of his youth. Degas began to paint early in life, by the time he graduated from the Lycée with a baccalauréat in literature in 1853, at age 18, he had turned a room in his home into an artists studio. Upon graduating, he registered as a copyist in The Louvre Museum, Degas duly enrolled at the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris in November 1853, but applied little effort to his studies. In April of that year Degas was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts and he studied drawing there with Louis Lamothe, under whose guidance he flourished, following the style of Ingres. In July 1856, Degas traveled to Italy, where he would remain for the three years. In 1858, while staying with his aunts family in Naples and he also began work on several history paintings, Alexander and Bucephalus and The Daughter of Jephthah in 1859–60, Sémiramis Building Babylon in 1860, and Young Spartans around 1860. In 1861 Degas visited his childhood friend Paul Valpinçon in Normandy and he exhibited at the Salon for the first time in 1865, when the jury accepted his painting Scene of War in the Middle Ages, which attracted little attention. The change in his art was influenced primarily by the example of Édouard Manet, upon the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Degas enlisted in the National Guard, where his defense of Paris left him little time for painting. During rifle training his eyesight was found to be defective, after the war, Degas began in 1872 an extended stay in New Orleans, Louisiana, where his brother René and a number of other relatives lived. Staying at the home of his Creole uncle, Michel Musson, on Esplanade Avenue, Degas produced a number of works, many depicting family members. One of Degass New Orleans works, A Cotton Office in New Orleans, garnered favorable attention back in France, Degas returned to Paris in 1873 and his father died the following year, whereupon Degas learned that his brother René had amassed enormous business debts
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Paul Gauguin
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Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a French post-Impressionist artist. Underappreciated until after his death, Gauguin is now recognized for his use of color. His work was influential to the French avant-garde and many artists, such as Pablo Picasso. Many of his paintings were in the possession of Russian collector Sergei Shchukin and he was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist, and writer. He was also a proponent of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms. Gauguin was born in Paris, France to Clovis Gauguin and Alina Maria Chazal on June 7,1848 and his birth coincided with revolutionary upheavals throughout Europe that year. His father, a 34-year-old liberal journalist, came from a family of petit-bourgeoisie entrepreneurs residing in Orléans and he was compelled to flee France when the newspaper for which he wrote was suppressed by French authorities. Gauguins mother, the 22-year-old Aline Marie Chazal, was the daughter of Andre Chazal, an engraver, and Flora Tristan and their union ended when Andre assaulted his wife Flora and was sentenced to prison for attempted murder. Paul Gauguins maternal grandmother, Flora Tristan, was the daughter of Thérèse Laisnay. Details of Thérèses family background are not known, her father, Don Mariano, was a Spanish nobleman, members of the wealthy Tristan Moscoso family held powerful positions in Peru. Nonetheless, Don Marianos unexpected death plunged his mistress and daughter Flora into poverty, when Floras marriage with Andre failed, she petitioned for and obtained a small monetary settlement from her fathers Peruvian relatives. She sailed to Peru in hopes of enlarging her share of the Tristan Moscoso family fortune and this never materialized, but she successfully published a popular travelogue of her experiences in Peru which launched her literary career in 1838. An active supporter of early socialist societies, Gauguins maternal grandmother helped to lay the foundations for the 1848 revolutionary movements, placed under surveillance by French police and suffering from overwork, she died in 1844. Her grandson Paul idolized his grandmother, and kept copies of her books with him to the end of his life. In 1850, Clovis Gauguin departed for Peru with his wife Alina and he died of a heart attack en route, and Alina arrived in Peru a widow with the 18-month-old Paul and his 2 ½ year-old sister, Marie. Gauguins mother was welcomed by her granduncle, whose son-in-law would shortly assume the presidency of Peru. To the age of six, Paul enjoyed an upbringing, attended by nursemaids. He retained a vivid memory of period of his childhood which instilled indelible impressions of Peru that haunted him the rest of his life
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Realism (arts)
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Realism in the arts is the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding artistic conventions, implausible, exotic and supernatural elements. Realism has been prevalent in the arts at many periods, and is in part a matter of technique and training. In the visual arts, illusionistic realism is the depiction of lifeforms, perspective. Realist works of art may emphasize the mundane, ugly or sordid, such as works of realism, regionalism. There have been various movements in the arts, such as the opera style of verismo, literary realism, theatrical realism. The realism art movement in painting began in France in the 1850s, the realist painters rejected Romanticism, which had come to dominate French literature and art, with roots in the late 18th century. Realism is the precise, detailed and accurate representation in art of the appearance of scenes. Realism in this sense is also called naturalism, mimesis or illusionism, realistic art was created in many periods, and it is in large part a matter of technique and training, and the avoidance of stylization. It becomes especially marked in European painting in the Early Netherlandish painting of Jan van Eyck, however such realism is often used to depict, for example, angels with wings, which were not things the artists had ever seen in real life. It is the choice and treatment of matter that defines Realism as a movement in painting. The development of increasingly accurate representation of the appearances of things has a long history in art. It includes elements such as the depiction of the anatomy of humans and animals, of perspective and effects of distance. Ancient Greek art is recognised as having made great progress in the representation of anatomy. Pliny the Elders famous story of birds pecking at grapes painted by Zeuxis in the 5th century BC may well be a legend, roman portraiture, when not under too much Greek influence, shows a greater commitment to a truthful depiction of its subjects. The art of Late Antiquity famously rejected illusionism for expressive force, scientific methods of representing perspective were developed in Italy and gradually spread across Europe, and accuracy in anatomy rediscovered under the influence of classical art. As in classical times, idealism remained the norm, intriguingly, having led the development of illusionic painting, still life was to be equally significant in its abandonment in Cubism. The depiction of ordinary, everyday subjects in art also has a history, though it was often squeezed into the edges of compositions. However these objects are at least largely there because they carry layers of complex significance, pieter Bruegel the Elder pioneered large panoramic scenes of peasant life
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Kenneth Clark
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Clark was born in London, the only child of Kenneth MacKenzie Clark and Margaret Alice McArthur. The Clarks were a wealthy Scottish family with roots in the textile trade and his great-great-grandfather had invented the cotton spool. Kenneth Clark the elder, reputedly the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo, had retired in 1909 at the age of 41 to become a member of the idle rich. Clark was educated at Wixenford School, Winchester College and Trinity College, Oxford, in 1927 he married a fellow Oxford student, Elizabeth Jane Martin, who was Irish and the daughter of Dr. Emily Winifred Dickson, first female Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. The couple had three children, Alan, in 1928, and twins Colette and Colin in 1932, greatly influenced by John Ruskin and a protégé of the most influential art critic of the time, Bernard Berenson, Clark quickly became the British art establishments most respected aesthete. After a stint as fine art curator at Oxfords Ashmolean Museum, in 1933 at age 30 and he remains the youngest person ever to hold the post. The following year he also became Surveyor of the Kings Pictures, as Director of the National Gallery he oversaw the successful relocation and storage of the collection to avoid the Blitz and continued a programme of concerts and performances. In 1939, Clark visited Australia, and later referred to it as that intolerable continent, adding that Australian galleries had the worst art, as Director of The National Gallery he wrote Southampton Art Gallerys acquisitions policy which included a growing collection of modern oil paintings. He was also an advisor to the Ministry of Information commissioning Dylan Thomas amongst others to write scripts for propaganda films, in 1946 Clark resigned his directorship in order to devote more time to writing. Between 1946 and 1950 he was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. He was a board member and also served as Chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain from 1955 to 1960. In the preface to his book, The Nude, a study of art, Clark wrote. There is difficulty of form, a survey would be long and repetitive. And there is a difficulty of scope, since Jacob Burckhardt no responsible art historian would have attempted to cover both antique and post-mediaeval art, in 1955, Clark bought Saltwood Castle in Kent. Kenneth Clark was created Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in 1938 and he was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1976. In 1959, he received the Grand Decoration with Sash for Services to the Republic of Austria and he was one of the founders, in 1954, of the Independent Television Authority, serving as its Chairman until 1957. In 1969 he wrote and presented Civilisation for BBC television, a series on the history of Western civilisation as seen through its art, afterwards Clark was persuaded to write a book version of Civilisation but lamented that without the visual and musical accompaniment it was weak. Also broadcast in the US on PBS in 1969, Civilisation was successful on both sides of the Atlantic, gaining Clark an international profile, according to Clark, the series was created in answer to growing criticism of Western civilisation, from its value system to its heroes
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New York Cultural Center
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2 Columbus Circle is a 12-story building located on a small, trapezoidal lot on the south side of Columbus Circle on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City. Bordered by 58th Street, 59th Street, Broadway, and Eighth Avenue, the seven-story Grand Circle Hotel, designed by William H. Cauvet, stood at this address from 1874, later called the Boulevard Hotel, it was demolished in 1960. In 1964, A&P heir Huntington Hartford hired architect Edward Durell Stone to build a museum for him at 2 Columbus Circle, at the time, Hartford had one of the worlds greatest art collections with a Rembrandt, Claude Monets, Manet, Turner, Salvador Dalí. Hartford commissioned Salvador Dalí to paint a painting called The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus for the opening, the opening attracted many celebrities, such as the Duke of Windsor. 2 Columbus Circle opened as the Gallery of Modern Art, displaying Hartfords collection, until 2005, the building was a 12-story modernist structure, designed by Stone for Hartford, to display his art collection. As Stone designed it, the building was marble-clad with Venetian motifs and it had filigree-like portholes and windows that ran along an upper loggia at its top stories. With architect Philip L. Goodwin, Stone had previously designed the Rockefeller familys Museum of Modern Art in the International style, Hartford wanted his Gallery of Modern Art to represent an alternative view of modernism. The building was often called The Lollipop Building in reference to a review by architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable in which she called it a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops. However, three decades later she admitted that she got a lift, a sense of pleasure when she walked past it. By 1969, the Gallery of Modern Art closed, fairleigh Dickinson University received 2 Columbus Circle as a gift from Hartford and operated it as the New York Cultural Center, where art exhibitions were sometimes hosted. Six years later, Gulf and Western Industries purchased 2 Columbus Circle, in exchange for tax breaks, Sumner Redstone got a clause that Hartford had, which said that the building could never be renovated or destroyed. The building went unused until 1980, when Gulf and Western presented 2 Columbus Circle to the City of New York as a gift, the City of New York accepted 2 Columbus Circle and installed the headquarters for the Department of Cultural Affairs. The New York Convention and Visitors Bureau also started being housed in 2 Columbus Circle, the Museum of Arts and Design, now at 2 Columbus Circle, was founded in 1956 by the American Craft Council together with philanthropist Aileen Osborn Webb, as the Museum of Contemporary Crafts. In 1986, it relocated to 40 West 53rd Street and was renamed the American Craft Museum, in 2002 it changed its name again to the Museum of Arts and Design. Concurrently, interest in landmarking this building had begun in 1996, soon after the building turned thirty years old, in this year, Robert A. M. Stern included it in his article A Preservationists List of 35 Modern Landmarks-in-Waiting written for the New York Times. Stones design at 2 Columbus Circle was listed as one of the World Monuments Funds 100 Most Endangered Sites for 2006, MAD was designated as the site developer of 2 Columbus Circle by the New York City Economic Development Corporation in June 2002. In 2004, the National Trust for Historic Preservation called it one of Americas 11 Most Endangered Historic Places, despite a serious preservation effort, the New York City Department of Buildings approved the permit for MAD to begin removing 2 Columbus Circles facade. The museums plans to alter the buildings original design touched off a preservation battle involving many notable people
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Robert Isaacson
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Robert Isaacson was a collector, scholar, and art dealer eulogized upon his death as the Berenson of nineteenth century academic studies. In Rome in the early 1950s, Isaacson dated the poet James Merrill, the couple visited Istanbul together—the visit proved a formative experience in Merrills career—and the two men remained close friends until the poets death in 1995. Upon Isaacsons return to New York, he became an art dealer almost by accident, in keeping with Isaacsons will, thirteen important paintings from his collection were auctioned by Christies on 6 May 1999 to benefit a charitable foundation. Records for the Robert Isaacson Gallery, Hewitt Gallery, Durlacher Bros. and related business and exhibition papers are on deposit with the Smithsonian Institution
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Petit Palais
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The Petit Palais is an art museum in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, France. Built for the 1900 Exposition Universelle, it now houses the City of Paris Museum of Fine Arts, the Petit Palais is located across from the Grand Palais on Avenue Nicolas II, today Avenue Winston-Churchill. The other façades of the face the Seine and Avenue des Champs-Elysees. The Petit Palais is one of 14 museums of the City of Paris that have incorporated since January 1,2013. In 1894 a competition was held for the 1900 Exhibition area, the Palais de lIndustrie from the 1855 World’s Fair was considered unfitting and was to be replaced by something new for the 1900 Exhibition. Architects had the option to do what they pleased with the Palais de l’Industrie, in the end, Charles Girault won the competition and built the Petit Palais as one of the buildings that replaced the Palais de l’Industrie. The construction of the Petit Palais began on October 10,1897 and was completed in April 1900, the total cost of the Petit Palais at the time of the construction was 400,000 pounds. Charles Girault largely draws on the seventeenth and early eighteenth century French style for the Petit Palais. Additionally his work, such as the central porch and the triple arcade, has many references to the stables at Chantilly. Girault’s plan for the Petit Palais had minimal alterations from the design to the execution, the plan was original and fit perfectly in its given location. The Petit Palais is a shape with its larger side as the main façade facing the Grand Palais. The building’s shape makes a semi-circular courtyard at the center, the Beaux-Arts style Petit Palais was designed by Charles Girault, and is around an octi-circular courtyard and garden, similar to the Grand Palais. Its ionic columns, grand porch, and dome echo those of the Invalides across the river, the tympanum depicting the city of Paris surrounded by muses is the work of sculptor Jean Antoine Injalbert. The Petit Palais was built to be a building that would become a permanent fine arts museum after the exhibition. The materials of the building—stone, steel, and concrete as well as the decoration were to demonstrate that the Petit Palais was built to be enduring, the main façade of the building faces the Grand Palais. The focal point of the façade is the entrance, “a central archway set in an archivolt topped by a dome. Two wings flank the main entrance and these wings, continuing to the end pavilions, are embellished with free-standing columns that frame the tall windows. The exterior of the pavilions are embellished with arched windows from the side around to the rear façades and these grand windows provide side lighting for the outer three galleries of the interior museum
42.
Wadsworth Atheneum
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The Wadsworth Atheneum is an art museum located in Hartford, Connecticut. Founded in 1842 and opened in 1844, it is the oldest continually operating art museum in the United States. The museum is located at 600 Main Street in a distinctive building in downtown Hartford, Connecticut. With 75,000 square feet of space, the museum is the largest art museum in the state of Connecticut. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970, the museum is a member of the North American Reciprocal Museums program. The Wadsworth, as it is most commonly known, was constructed on the site of the home of Daniel Wadsworth in the heart of downtown Hartford. Its architects were Alexander Jackson Davis and Ithiel Town, who designed the castle that is the Atheneums oldest building, construction began in 1842 after the museum was incorporated on June 1 of that year. The museum opened on July 31,1844 and has operated continuously since then, the Wadsworth family, being one of the oldest and most affluent in the city, contributed numerous valuable pieces of art to be displayed at the time the museum opened. The first collection consisted of 78 paintings, two busts, one portrait miniature, and one bronze sculpture. Building on the Wadsworth familys largess, generations of more recent donors have added to the museums collections, foremost among them are Elizabeth Jarvis Colt, widow of firearms magnate Samuel Colt, and financier and Hartford native John Pierpont Morgan. In 1927, the received a million-dollar bequest from banker Frank Sumner. The design required demolishing the Goodwin Building, put up in 1969, however, the proposal was scrapped in 2003 due to fundraising difficulties and changes in the museums leadership. A later plan to expand into the former Hartford Times building was abandoned due to cost concerns. The $33 million renovation, designed by the Hartford-based architecture firm Smith Edwards McCoy, was completed in 2015, the collections span more than 5,000 years of world history. Just outside the castle is a statue of Nathan Hale, dated 1899, a short distance away, within the Connecticut State Capitol is another, better-known sculpture of Hale by Bela Pratt, a copy of his original at Yale University. The Atheneum also owns the A. Everett Austin House, a National Historic Landmark, the house, located in Hartfords historic West End, is open to the public as a museum. Since its beginning, the Wadsworth has had a tradition of firsts. In 1933, the Wadsworth sponsored George Balanchines immigration to the United States from the Soviet Union, shortly after his immigration, Balanchine founded the School of American Ballet, which led to the formation of the New York City Ballet
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