Italian Rococo Era Painter, 1712-ca.1793 The records of his parish in Venice show that Francesco Guardi was baptized on Oct. 5, 1712. His father, Domenico, who died when Francesco was 4, had a workshop. Francesco and his elder brother, Gian Antonio, worked in a small studio, carrying out such orders as they could get for almost anything the client wanted:mythological pictures, genre, flower pieces, battle scenes, altarpieces, and even, on rare occasions, frescoes. They did not hesitate to copy compositions by other artists, but what they borrowed they always transformed into something more capricious, less stable, more fragmentary in the refraction of light. Francesco did not emerge as an independent personality until 1760, when his brother died. Then, 48 years old, he married, established his own studio, and devoted himself chiefly to painting views of Venice. For the most part he worked in obscurity, ignored by his contemporaries. He was not even admitted to the Venetian Academy until he was 72 years old. Guardi and Canaletto have always been compared to one another because the buildings they chose to paint were often the same. But the way each artist painted them is very different. Canaletto's world is constructed out of line. It provides solid, carefully drawn, three-dimensional objects that exist within logically constructed three-dimensional space. Guardi's world is constructed out of color and light. The objects in it become weightless in the light's shimmer and dissolve in a welter of brushstrokes; the space, like the forms in space, is suggested rather than described. Canaletto belonged essentially to the Renaissance tradition that began with Giotto and, as it grew progressively tighter and more controlled, pointed the way to neoclassicism. Guardi belonged to the new baroque tradition that grew out of the late style of Titian and, as it became progressively looser and freer, pointed the way toward impressionism. Such differences appear even in Guardi's early view paintings, where he was obviously trying to copy Canaletto, such as the Basin of San Marco. The famous buildings are there, but they are far in the background, insubstantial, seeming to float. In front is a fleet of fishing boats, their curving spars seeming to dance across the surface of the canvas. What is important for Guardi is not perspective but the changing clouds and the way the light falls on the lagoon. Guardi became increasingly fascinated by the water that surrounds Venice. In late works, such as the famous Lagoon with Gondola, buildings and people have been stripped away until there is nothing but the suggestion of a thin line of distant wharfs, a few strokes to indicate one man on a gondola, a long unbroken stretch of still water, and a cloudless sky. Guardi also painted the festivals that so delighted visitors to the city, such as the Marriage of Venice to the Sea. This was a symbolic ceremony in which the doge, in the great gilded galley of the head of state, surrounded by a thousand gondolas, appeared before all Venice, in Goethe's image, "raised up like the Host in a monstrance." Of all Guardi's paintings the most evocative are his caprices, the landscapes born out of his imagination though suggested by the ruined buildings on the lonely islands of the Venetian lagoon. A gentle melancholy clings to such scenes.   Related Paintings of GUARDI, Francesco :. | Landscape | The Torre del-Orologio | Pope Pius VI Blessing the People on Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo sdg | Fire in the San Marcuola Oil Depot sdg | Rio dei Mendicanti |
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William Lionel Wyllie
(often simply W L Wyllie) (5 July 1851 - 6 April 1931) was a prolific English painter of maritime themes in both oils and watercolours. Wyllie was born on 5 July 1851 at 67 Albany Street, Camden, London, the elder son of William Morison Wyllie (d. 1895), a prosperous minor-genre painter living in London and Wimereux, France. His mother was a singer, Katherine Smythe Wyllie (d. 1872). Most of his early summers were spent in France with his parents. He began to draw from an early age, and his natural talent was encouraged by his father and by Lionel Smythe, his step brother. He was given a thorough artistic education; first at the Heatherley School of Fine Art, and then in 1866, aged 15, at the Royal Academy Schools. At the Royal Academy he studied under Edwin Henry Landseer, John Everett Millais and Frederic Leighton, among others.[2] He further demonstrated his precocious talent when he won the Turner Gold Medal in 1869 at the age of eighteen with Dawn after a Storm.
Samuel Owen
(1769-1857), Watercolour painter
Vieira Portuense
(Porto, 13 May 1765 - Funchal, 2 May 1805), who choose the artistic name of Vieira Portuense, was a Portuguese painter, one of the introducers of Neoclassicism in Portuguese painting. He was, in the neoclassical style, one of the two great Portuguese painters of his generation, with Domingos Sequeira. He first studied in Lisbon, later moving to Rome. He traveled through Italy, Germany, Austria and England, before returning to Portugal, in 1800. He met Swiss painter Angelika Kauffmann, from whom he seems to have received influences. He seems to anticipate some motives of the romantic painting in several of his historical paintings, like "Dona Filipa de Vilhena knighting her sons" (1801). He contracted tuberculosis, and moved to Madeira, were he died, aged only 39. He is represented at the National Museum of Ancient Art, in Lisbon, and at the National Museum Soares dos Reis, in Porto. Not to be confused with another Portuguese painter, Francisco Vieira de Matos, better known as Vieira Lusitano.