Oil Painting

  Peter Paul Rubens
  1577 – 1640
     Peter Paul Rubens was a prolific seventeenth-century Flemish painter, and a proponent of an exuberant Baroque style that emphasized movement, color, and sensuality. He is well-known for his Counter-Reformation altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, hunt scenes and history paintings of mythological and allegorical subjects. Not just that he was running a large studio in Antwerp that produced paintings popular with nobility and art collectors throughout Europe, but he was also a classically-educated humanist scholar, art collector, and diplomat.

     Rubens was born in 1577, in Siegen, Westphalia, to Jan Rubens and Maria Pypelincks. In 1589, two years after his father’s death, Rubens moved with his mother to Antwerp, where he was raised Catholic. Religion figured prominently and Rubens later became one of the leading voices of the Catholic Counter-Reformation style of painting.

     In Antwerp Rubens received a education, studying Latin and classical literature. By fourteen he began his artistic apprenticeship. He studied under two of the city’s leading painters of the time, Adam van Noort and Otto van Veen. He entered in 1598 the Guild of St. Luke as an independent master.

     1600, Rubens traveled through Italy, visiting Venice, settling in Mantua at the court of duke Vincenzo I of Gonzaga as his diplomat, traveling to Rome, Florence, Mantua, and then Genoa. In Genoa, Rubens painted numerous portraits, in a style that would influence later paintings by Anthony van Dyck, Joshua Reynolds, and Thomas Gainsborough. During this period Rubens received important commission for the high altar of the new church, Santa Maria in Vallicella. The impact of Italy on Rubens was great.

     Rubens planned his departure from Italy for Antwerp1609. His return coincided with a period of renewed prosperity in the city. Soon that year Rubens was appointed court painter by Albert and Isabella, the governors of the Low Countries, and received permission to base his studio in Antwerp. In 1609, Rubens married Isabella Brant, the daughter of a leading Antwerp citizen and humanist Jan Brant.

     In 1610, Rubens built up a studio with numerous students and assistants. His most famous pupil was the young Anthony van Dyck. He collaborated with his good friend the flower-painter Jan Brueghel the Elder. He often sub-contracted elements such as animals or still-life in large compositions to specialists such as Frans Snyders, or Jacob Jordaens.

     His drawings are mostly extremely forceful but not detailed. He also made great use of oil sketches as preparatory studies. Altarpieces such as “The Raising of the Cross” and “The Descent from the Cross” for the “Cathedral of Our Lady” were particularly important in establishing Rubens as Flanders’ leading painter shortly after his return. This painting has been held as a prime example of Baroque religious art.

     After the end of the Twelve Years’ Truce in 1621, the Spanish Habsburg rulers entrusted Rubens with a number of diplomatic missions. Between 1627 and 1630, Rubens’s diplomatic career was particularly active. Rubens was twice knighted, first by Philip IV of Spain in 1624, and then by Charles I of England in 1630. He was also awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree from Cambridge University in 1629. While Rubens’s international reputation with collectors and nobility abroad continued to grow during this decade, he continued to paint monumental paintings: “The Assumption of the Virgin Mary”.

     In 1630, four years after the death of his first wife, the 53-year-old painter married 16-year-old Hélène Fourment. Hélène inspired the voluptuous figures in many of his paintings from the 1630s, including “The Feast of Venus”, “The Three Graces” and” The Judgment of Paris”.

     In 1640, Rubens died at age 63 of gout. Between his two marriages the artist had eight children, three with Isabella and five with Hélène; his youngest child was born eight months after his death.

  Mark Rothko
  1903- 1970
     Mark Rothko was born Marcus Rothkowitz to Jewish family in Dvinsk, Russia (now Latvia). He is American painter and printmaker who is classified as an Abstract Expressionist, although he rejected not only the label but even being an abstract painter.

     After the outbreak of the 1905 revolution in Czarist Russia, his father Jacob, pharmacist, emigrated and settled with the rest of family in Portland, Oregon. Rothko attended Yale University, New Haven, from 1921 to 1923. Soon he left Yale and moved to New York.

     In the autumn of 1925 he took courses at the Art Students League of New York, taught by still-life artist Max Weber, another Russian Jew. It was from Weber that Rothko began to see art as a tool of emotional and religious expression and Rothko’s earliest paintings portray a Weber’s influence. He participated in his first group exhibition at the Opportunity Galleries, New York, in 1928.

     While he teaching painting and clay sculpture at the Center Academy, Rothko became a close friend of Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Joseph Solman and John Graham. Avery’s stylized natural scenes, utilizing a rich knowledge of form and color, would be a strong influence on Rothko, began to address similar subject matter and color. Rothko had his first large one-man show in New York at the Contemporary Arts Gallery, in 1933, showing 15 oil paintings, mostly portraits.

     In late 1935 Rothko joined with Ilya Bolotowsky, Ben-Zion, Adolph Gottlieb, Lou Harris, Ralph Rosenborg, Lou Schankerand, Joe Solomon to form “The Ten” (Whitney Ten Dissenters,) sympathetic to Abstraction and Expressionism.

     He executed easel paintings for the WPA Federal Art Project from 1936 to 1937. By 1936 Rothko knew Barnett Newman. In the early 1940s he worked closely with Gottlieb, developing a painting style with mythological content, simple flat shapes, and imagery inspired by primitive art. By mid-decade his work incorporated Surrealist techniques and images. Peggy Guggenheim gave Rothko a solo show at Art of This Century in New York in 1945.

     In 1947 and 1949 Rothko taught at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, where Clyfford Still was a fellow instructor. With William Baziotes, David Hare, and Robert Motherwell, Rothko founded the short-lived Subjects of the Artist school in New York in 1948. The late 1940s and early 1950s saw the emergence of Rothko’s mature style, in which frontal, luminous rectangles seem to hover on the canvas surface.

     In 1958 the artist began his first commission, monumental paintings for the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gave Rothko an important solo exhibition in 1961. He completed murals for Harvard University in 1962 and in 1964 accepted a mural commission for an interdenominational chapel in Houston. Rothko took his own life on February 25, 1970, in his New York studio.

  Diego Rivera
  1886 -1957
     Diego Rivera was a Mexican painter and muralist. He is perhaps best known by the public world for his 1933 mural, “Man at the Crossroads,” in the lobby of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center. When his patron Nelson Rockefeller discovered that the mural included a portrait of Lenin and other communist imagery, he fired Rivera, and the unfinished work was eventually destroyed by Rockefeller’s staff.

     Diego Rivera was born in Guanajuato City, Guanajuato, Mexico to a Converso family. Rivera was sponsored to study art in Europe by Teodoro A. Dehesa Méndez, the governor of the State of Veracruz.

     On his arrival in Europe in 1907 Rivera initially went to study with Eduardo Chicharro in Madrid, Spain, and from there proceeded to Paris, France. The circle of close friends that included further Ilya Ehrenburg, Chaim Soutine, Modigliani’s wife Jeanne Hébuterne, Max Jacob, gallery owner Leopold Zborowski, and Moise Kisling.

     Paris in those years was witnessing the emergence of cubism in paintings by such eminent painters as Picasso and Braque; inspired by Cezanne. From 1913 to 1918 Rivera himself enthusiastically embraced this new school of art, as his masterly cubist paintings from this time demonstrate. His paintings began to attract attention, and he was able to display them at several exhibitions.

     In 1920 Rivera left France and, after traveling through Italy, returned to Mexico in 1921 to continue his prolific career as an artist. He became involved in the New Mexican mural movement. With such Mexican artists as José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Rufino Tamayo, and the French artist Jean Charlot, he began to experiment with fresco painting on large walls. Rivera soon developed his own style of large, simplified figures and bold colors. Many of his murals deal symbolically with Mexican society and thought after the country’s 1910 Revolution. Rivera’s radical political beliefs, his attacks on the church, and clergy, as well as his flirtations with Trotskyites and left wing assassins made him a controversial figure even in communist circles. Some of Rivera’s best murals are in the National Palace in Mexico City and at the National Agricultural School in Chapingo, near Texcoco.

     In the autumn of 1927 Rivera, accepting an invitation to take part in the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution, arrived in Moscow, Russia; but in 1928 he was expelled by the authorities because of his involvement in anti-Soviet politics and returned to Mexico.

     Rivera then painted several significant works in the United States. From 1930 to 1933 he completed a number of frescoes in the United States, mostly consisting of industrial life.

     Perhaps his finest surviving work in the United States are the 27 fresco panels entitled “Detroit Industry” on the walls of an inner court at the Detroit Institute of Arts that he painted in 1932. His mural “Man at the Crossroads”, begun in 1933 for the Rockefeller Center in New York City, was removed after a furor erupted in the press because his work contained a portrait of Lenin. On June 5, 1940 Rivera returned for the last time to the United States to paint a ten panel mural for the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. “Pan American Unity” was unveiled November 29, 1940. The mural and its archives reside at City College of San Francisco.

     He died on 24 November or 25 November 1957.

  Pierre-Auguste Renoir
  1841-1919
     Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty, and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that “Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to Watteau”.

     Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges, Haute-Vienne, France, the child of a working class family. As a boy, he worked in a porcelain factory where his drawing talents led to him being chosen to paint designs on fine china. He also painted hangings for overseas missionaries and decorations on fans before he enrolled in art school. During those early years, he often visited the Louvre to study the French master painters.

     In 1862 he began studying art under Charles Gleyre in Paris. There he met Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille, and Claude Monet. Although Renoir first started exhibiting paintings at the Paris Salon in 1864, recognition did not come for another ten years. Renoir’s paintings are notable for their vibrant light and saturated color, most often focusing on people in intimate and candid compositions. The female nude was one of his primary subjects. In characteristic Impressionist style, Renoir suggested the details of a scene through freely brushed touches of color. A fine example of Renoir’s early work, and with the influence of Courbet’s realism, is “Diana”, 1867. In the late 1860s, through the practice of painting light and water en plein air, he and his friend Claude Monet discovered that the color of shadows is not brown or black, but the reflected color of the objects surrounding them.

     Renoir experienced his initial acclaim when six of his paintings hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. In the same year two of his works were shown with Durand-Ruel in London. In 1881, he traveled to Algeria, a country he associated with Eugène Delacroix, then to Madrid, Spain, to Italy. One of the best known Impressionist works is Renoir’s 1876 “Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette”. The painting depicts an open-air scene, crowded with people, at a popular dance garden on the Butte Montmartre.

     By the mid-1880s, he had broken with the movement to apply a more disciplined, formal technique to portraits and figure paintings, particularly of women, such as “The Bathers”. He painted in a more severe style, in an attempt to return to classicism. This is sometimes called his “Ingres period”.

     In 1890 he married Aline Victorine Charigot, with whom he had had a son, Pierre. In 1907, he moved to a farm at Cagnes-sur-Mer, close to the Mediterranean coast. Renoir had arthritis which severely limited his movement, and he was wheelchair-bound. In the advanced stages of his arthritis, he painted by having a brush strapped to his paralyzed fingers.

     After 1890, he changed direction again, returning to the use of thinly brushed color which dissolved outlines as in his earlier work. From this period onward he concentrated especially on monumental nudes and domestic scenes, fine examples of which are “Girls at the Piano”, 1892, and “Grandes Baigneuses”, 1918-19. The latter painting is the most typical and successful of Renoir’s late, abundantly fleshed nudes.

     He was a prolific artist. He made several thousand paintings. The warm sensuality of Renoir’s style made his paintings some of the most well-known and frequently-reproduced works in the history of art.

     In 1919, Renoir visited the Louvre to see his paintings hanging with the old masters. He died in the village of Cagnes-sur-Mer, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, on December 3.

  Odilon Redon
  1840 -1916
     Odilon Redon was a French painter and printmaker, one of the outstanding figures of Symbolism. He produced a rich and enigmatic corpus that explores haunted, fantastic, often macabre themes. By his own words: Like music, his drawings transport us to the ambiguous world of the indeterminate.

     Redon was born in Bordeaux, Aquitaine, France. He started drawing as a young child, and at the age of 10 he was awarded a drawing prize at school. At age 15, he began formal study in drawing and sculpture. Rodolphe Bresdin instructed him in etching and lithography.

     At the end of the Franco-Prussian War, he moved to Paris, working almost exclusively in charcoal and lithography. Until 1878 his work didn’t gain any recognition. With “Guardian Spirit of the Waters”, it finally happened and he published his first album of lithographs, titled “Dans le Rêve”, in 1879.

     In the 1890s, he began to use pastel and oils, which dominated his works for the rest of his life. In 1899, he exhibited with the Nabis at Durand-Ruel’s. In 1903 he was awarded the Legion of Honor. His popularity increased when a catalogue of etchings and lithographs was published by André Mellerio in 1913. That same year he was given the largest single representation at the New York Armory Show.

     The ‘mystery’ and the evocation of the Redon’s work represent an exploration of his internal feelings and psyche. He himself wanted to “place the visible at the service of the invisible”. Thus, although his work seems filled with strange being and grotesque dichotomies, his aim was to represent pictorially the ghosts of his own mind, the ghosts of the fallen, invisible world. There is an evident link to Goya in Redon’s imagery of winged demons and menacing shapes, and one of his series was the “Homage to Goya” (1885).

     The most telling source of Redon’s inspiration and the forces behind his works can be found in his journal A Soi-même (To Myself). His process was explained best by himself when he said: “I have often, as an exercise and as sustenance, painted before an object down to the smallest accidents of its visual appearance; but the day left me sad and with an insatiate thirst. The next day I let the other source run, that of imagination, through the recollection of the forms and I was then reassured and appeased.”

  Raffaello Sanzio – Raphael
  1483-1520
     Raphael Sanzio or Raffaello was an Italian master painter and architect of the Florentine school in High Renaissance, celebrated for the perfection and grace of his paintings. He was also called Raffaello Sanzio, Raffaello Santi, Raffaello da Urbino or Rafael Sanzio da Urbino.

     Raphael was born in Urbino. His father, Giovanni Santi, was also a painter in the court of Urbino. His mother and father died soon. Having been orphaned at eleven, Raphael was entrusted to his uncle Bartolomeo, a priest. Raphael had already shown talent. He managed his father’s workshop, 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 and Luca Signorelli. His father probably placed him in Umbrian master Pietro Perugino’s workshop as an apprentice. The subsequent influence of Perugino on Raphael’s early work is most obvious. His first documented work was an altarpiece for the church of San Nicola of Tolentino in Città di Castello. In the following years he painted works for other churches there.

     He moved to Florence at the age of 20, where he was exposed to Leonardo da Vinci, “whom he never ceased to admire as a mentor and father figure”, and to Michelangelo. Raphael learned from both men, but while he made use of their exploration of human anatomy, he added sentiment to his paintings. Raphael’s time in Florence was very productive. Raphael’s paintings were under “a strong Da Vinci influence with its pyramidal composition, contour, balance and interplay of light and dark (chiaroscuro) and sfumato (extremely fine, soft shading instead of line to delineate forms and features),” while others reveal a ‘michelangelic’ inspiration.

     At the end of 1508, he moved to Rome and was immediately commissioned by Julius II to paint some of the rooms at his palace at the Vatican. This marked a turning point, and he was only twenty-five years old. He remained almost exclusively in the service of Julius and his successor Leo X. He painted “a series of frescoes in the papal apartments” as well as those of the “Stanza della Segnatura, which include his vast School of Athens.”

     For a short time he was both the most important architect and painter in Rome. One of his most important papal commissions was the Raphael Cartoons (now Victoria and Albert Museum), a series of 10 cartoons for tapestries with scenes of the lives of Saint Paul and Saint Peter, intended as wall decoration for the Sistine Chapel.

     Raphael, who in Rome lived in Borgo, never married. He prematurely died on Good Friday (April 6, 1520).

     Raphael made no prints himself, but he entered into collaboration with Marcantonio Raimondi who produced engravings after his designs. It created many of the most famous Italian prints of the century, and was important in the rise of the reproductive print. Raphael made preparatory drawings, many of which survive, for Raimondi to translate into engraving. The two most famous original prints to result from the collaboration were “Lucretia” and “The Massacre of the Innocents”. Outside Italy, reproductive prints by Raimondi and others were the main way that Raphael’s art was experienced until the twentieth century.