1684-1721 Antoine Watteau Art Locations He is best known for his invention of a new genre, the fete galante, a small easel painting in which elegant people are depicted in conversation or music-making in a secluded parkland setting (see under FETE CHAMPETRE). His particular originality lies in the generally restrained nature of the amorous exchanges of his characters, which are conveyed as much by glance as by gesture, and in his mingling of figures in contemporary dress with others in theatrical costume, thus blurring references to both time and place. Watteau work was widely collected during his lifetime and influenced a number of other painters in the decades following his death, especially in France and England. His drawings were particularly admired. Documented facts about Watteau life are notoriously few, though several friends wrote about him after his death (see Champion). Of over two hundred paintings generally accepted as his work   Related Paintings of Jean-Antoine Watteau :. | The Embarkation for Cythera (mk05) | Die Champs elyssees, Detail | The Indiscretion | View through the trees in the Park of Pierre Crozat | Wenetian festivitles |
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Gustavus Hesselius
(1682 - May 25, 1755) was a Swedish born painter who emigrated to the New World in 1711. He was the father of painter John Hesselius and cousin of the religious leader Emanuel Swedenborg. Hesselius left his home country of Sweden for Wilmington, Delaware in 1711. There he lived until 1717 when he moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he lived until 1721. In 1721, he moved to Prince George's County, Maryland and became a portrait painter, though he had been trained in Sweden. That same year, he received the first recorded public art commission in the American colonies, he painted The Last Supper. He also painted a Crucifixion. Some time around 1735, Hesselius returned to Philadelphia where spent the rest of his life and traveling. He was listed as a member of the Gloria Dei (Old Swedes') Church in Philadelphia. He also worked as an organ builder, having built an organ for the Moravian Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1746. From about this time on, he focused on building organs, referring painting commissions to his son John. J. Hall Pleasants has said that Hesselius became "America's earliest portrait painter of note." In 1994 he was named to the Prince George's County Hall of Fame.
GRECO, El
Greek-born Spanish Mannerist Painter, 1541-1614 Greek painter, designer and engraver, active in Italy and Spain. One of the most original and interesting painters of 16th-century Europe, he transformed the Byzantine style of his early paintings into another, wholly Western manner. He was active in his native Crete, in Venice and Rome, and, during the second half of his life, in Toledo. He was renowned in his lifetime for his originality and extravagance and provides one of the most curious examples of the oscillations of taste in the evaluation of a painter,
MANDER, Karel van
b. 1548, Meulebeke, d. 1606, Amsterdam Dutch painter, poet, and writer. Born of a noble family, after much wandering he settled in Haarlem in 1583 and founded a successful academy of painting with Hendrik Goltzius and Cornelis Cornelisz (1562 C 1638). He is best known for The Book of Painters (1604), which contains about 175 biographies of Dutch, Flemish, and German painters of the 15th C 16th centuries; it became for the northern countries what Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Painters had been for Italy.