1728-1779 Dutch Anton Raphael Mengs Gallery Mengs was born in 1728 at Usti nad Labem (German: Aussig) in Bohemia on 12 March 1728; he died in Rome 29 June 1779. His father, Ismael Mengs, a Danish painter, established himself finally at Dresden, whence in 1741 he took his son to Rome. In Rome, his fresco painting of Parnassus at Villa Albani gained him a reputation as a master painter. The appointment of Mengs in 1749 as first painter to Frederick Augustus, elector of Saxony did not prevent his spending much time in Rome, where he had married Margarita Quazzi who had sat for him as a model in 1748, and abjured the Protestant faith, and where he became in 1754 director of the Vatican school of painting, nor did this hinder him on two occasions from obeying the call of Charles III of Spain to Madrid. There Mengs produced some of his best work, and specially the ceiling of the banqueting-hall of the Royal Palace of Madrid, the subject of which was the Triumph of Trajan and the Temple of Glory. Among his pupils there was Agust??n Esteve. After the completion of this work in 1777, Mengs returned to Rome, and there he died, two years later, in poor circumstances, leaving twenty children, seven of whom were pensioned by the king of Spain. His portraits and autoportraits recall an attention to detail and insight, often lost from the grand manner paintings. Besides numerous paintings in the Madrid gallery, the Ascension and St Joseph at Dresden, Perseus and Andromeda at Saint Petersburg, and the ceiling of the Villa Albani must be mentioned among his chief works. In 1911, Henry George Percy, 7th Duke of Northumberland, possessed a Holy Family, and the colleges of All Souls and Magdalen, at Oxford, possessed altar-pieces by Mengs's hand. In his writings, in Spanish, Italian and German, Mengs has put forth his eclectic theory of art, which treats of perfection as attainable by a well-schemed combination of diverse excellences Greek design, with the expression of Raphael, the chiaroscuro of Correggio, and the colour of Titian. He would have fancied himself the first neoclassicist, while in fact he may be the last flicker of Baroque art. Or in the words of Wittkower, In the last analysis, he is as much an end as a beginning. His intimacy with Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who constantly wrote at his dictation, has enhanced his historical importance, for he formed no scholars, and the critic must now concur in Goethe's judgment of Mengs in Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert; he must deplore that so much learning should have been allied to a total want of initiative and poverty of invention, and embodied with a strained and artificial mannerism. Mengs was famous for his rivalry with the contemporary Italian painter Pompeo Batoni.  Related Paintings of Anton Raphael Mengs :. | Retrato de la Marquesa de Llano | Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane | St Foseph-s dream | Evening | Self-portrait |
Related Artists:
Manuel Orazi
French, 1860-1934
Jacob Ferdinand Voet
(c. 1639 - c. 1689/1700) was a Flemish Baroque portrait painter. According to the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD) he was born at Antwerp as the son of the painter Elias Voet.[1] He travelled to Rome in 1679-1680, Milan in 1680, Florence in 1681, Turin in 1682-1684, and returned to Antwerp in 1684. While in Rome he lived with the painter-engraver Cornelis Bloemaert until he was banned for his portraits of women portrayed with unseemly decollet, whereupon they left Rome together. He undertook a journey to Paris in 1686 where he became court painter until he died there.He is registered as a painter of miniature portraits. According to Houbraken, he made his return journey to Antwerp from Turin in the company of Jan van Bunnik, who he had already met in Rome in the company of Cornelis Bloemaert. From Turin they set out for Lyons, where they met Adriaen van der Cabel, Peter van Bloemen, and Gillis Wenix. They set off for Paris in the company of a third painter who was a good painter of "bataljes" or battle scenes. Houbraken reports that this was Jacob, Jan van Bunnik's brother, but had not mentioned him earlier in his Jan van Bunnik biography. The RKD makes no mention of a Jacob van Bunnik.
Edward Moran
(August 19, 1829 in Bolton, Lancashire, England -June 8, 1901 in New York City) was an American artist. He emigrated with his family to America at the age of 15, and subsequently settled in Philadelphia, where after having followed his fathers trade of weaver, he became a pupil of James Hamilton and Paul Weber. In 1862 he became a pupil of the Royal Academy in London; he established a studio in New York in 1872, and for many years after 1877 lived in Paris. He was a painter of marine subjects and examples of his work such as Devile Crag; Island of Grand Manan are in many prominent collections. Among his canvases are 13 historical paintings, intended to illustrate the marine history of America from the time of Leif Ericsson to the return of Admiral Dewey's fleet from the Philippines in 1899. His sons Edward Percy Moran (born 1862) and Leon Moran (born 1864), and his brothers Peter Moran (born 1842) and Thomas Moran.