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ART “4” “2”DAY 23 January
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DEATHS: 1986 BEUYS — 1989 DALI — 1883 DORÉ — 1947 BONNARD — 1944 MUNCH — 1760 GUARDI
BIRTHS: 1938 BASELITZ — 1823 CABANEL — 1832 MANET
^ Died on 23 January 1986: Joseph Beuys, German Conceptual artist born on 12 May 1921.
— Joseph Beuys was born in Kleve, Germany on May 12, 1921. His first one-person exhibition was held in 1953 in Kranenburg. In 1961 he was appointed Professor at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where he had earlier been a student, and he continued teaching there until 1972 when he was dismissed amidst great controversy, a dismissal that finally, in 1978, was deemed unlawful. From the beginning of the 1970s he exhibited widely throughout Europe and the United States, representing Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1976. Joseph Beuys died January 23, 1986, in Düsseldorf, where he had lived for most of his career.
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^ Born on 23 January 1938: Hans-Georg Kern “Georg Baselitz”
— Georg Baselitz was born Hans-Georg Kern, in Deutschbaselitz, in what was later East Germany. In 1956, Baselitz moved to East Berlin, where he studied painting at the Hochschule für bildende und angewandte Kunst. After being expelled, he studied from 1957 to 1962 at the Hochschule der bildenden Künste, West Berlin. During this period, he adopted the surname Baselitz, taken from the name of his birthplace. In searching for alternatives to Socialist Realism and Art Informel [more], he became interested in anamorphosis and in the art of the mentally ill. With fellow student Eugen Schönebeck, Baselitz staged an exhibition in an abandoned house, accompanied by the Pandämonisches Manifest I, 1. Version, 1961, which was published, together with a second version, as a poster announcing the exhibition. In 1963, Baselitz’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Werner & Katz, Berlin, caused a public scandal; several paintings were confiscated for public indecency.
      In 1965, he spent six months in the Villa Romana, Florence, the first of his yearly visits to Italy. Baselitz moved to Osthofen, near Worms, in 1966, and he began to make woodcuts and started a series of fracture paintings of rural motifs. During this time, he also painted his first pictures in which the subject is upside down, in an effort to overcome the representational, content-driven character of his earlier work. In 1975, Baselitz moved to Derneburg, near Hildesheim, and also traveled for the first time to New York and to Brazil for the São Paulo Bienal. In 1976, a retrospective of his work was organized by the Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst, Munich. He established a studio in Florence, which he used until 1981. Baselitz was appointed instructor in 1977 and professor the following year at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Karlsruhe, Germany. In 1980, his reputation established, Baselitz was chosen to represent Germany at the Venice Biennale. During the 1980s and into the 1990s, his work was frequently exhibited at the Michael Werner Galleries, Cologne and New York.
      In 1983, he left the academy in Karlsruhe to assume a professorship at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, which he gave up in 1988 but returned to in the early 1990s. The first volume of the catalogue raisonné of his graphic work was published in 1983 by Galerie Jahn, Munich. In 1987, Baselitz established a studio in Imperia, Italy. — In the art of Georg Baselitz the traditional boundaries between the categories of painting, drawing and printmaking are dissolved. Individual groups of works can be distinguished only in terms of the artist’s chosen technique, while all share the commom artistic goal of painterly intensity. In this way - depending on the choice of material - Baselitz creates either drawn pictures (drawings), painted pictures (paintings), printed pictures (prints) or plastic pictures (wooden sculptures). The different media are not only afforded equal value, they also merge into another.
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— Das grosse Pathos (1965) — Brauna (1975)
— Bildelf (1992) _ This painting is one of a series of large-format paintings dating from 1991 onwards. Baselitz numbered the paintings in the series chronologically, and this number also appears in the title (Bildelf = Picture Eleven). In this cycle Baselitz attempts to explore his previous work in retrospect, "revisiting my paintings' past", as he describes it. Baselitz maintains that in the new works one can find "just about all the methods I have used over the years", likewise the motifs and themes. Bildelf has a geometric base of red and white squares arranged alternately in a chessboard-like pattern, upon which lies a figure made of painted black lines, a reference to the "Heldenbilder" (Hero Paintings) of the 1960s. The green bars superimposed on the figure recall the fractures which characterized the paintings of the period. Baselitz painted this work, and the others in the series, on the studio floor. There is a connection here to Jackson Pollock's 'drip' paintings, however, unilke Pollock, Baselitz takes the idea of being 'in the picture' quite literally; time and again one finds his shoeprints on the canvases. For Bildelf Baselitz climbed into a tub of green paint with his shoes on and then 'walked' the four green bars. The figure too was painted not with a brush, but with his fingers. This technique also refers back to Baselitz' earlier works, paintings he made in the 1970s which bore the words Finger Painting in the title.
— The Gleaner (August 1978, 330x250cm) _ The dark of night laps at the edges of The Gleaner, a fire burns on the upper left, and a sunlike shape hovers beneath the lone figure. Yet Georg Baselitz’s monumental, somber work was painted during a decade of well-being in Germany, when the generation of the wirtschaftswunder — the economic miracle — was only interrupted in its relentless quest for stable prosperity by the occasional political scandal or terrorist attack. How does this image, so clearly a representation of an existentialist condition, address the complex issues facing postwar German art and society? The key lies in the orientation of the gleaner, searching for sustenance in a barren landscape: the figure is depicted upside down. Baselitz has used this device consistently since 1969–70, his intention being, in part, to subvert the criteria for viewing paintings. To this end, Baselitz inverts, and thus negates, the subjects of his work. He cites but does not pay homage to the mythic protagonists that, as in Wagner’s epic operas, have so often been the focus of German art and culture.
      For Baselitz, the individual is the locus of redemption and the cause for despair. He has painted a great number of his antiheroes in guises ranging from military costumes to stark nudity. Baselitz once termed his technique a nonstyle. The upside-down figure, brutality of gesture, and emotive yet distanced strokes have, however, long since become highly recognizable trademarks. Ironically, Baselitz, who initially sought to replace the congealed Expressionism sweeping Europe with a fresh, aggressive style, and comparably controversial subjects, is now regarded as one of the foremost artists of Germany and has been accorded retrospective exhibitions internationally. His work strongly influenced the generation of painters that came of age during the early 1980s. But unlike the Neo-Expressionists he inspired, Baselitz does not rehash past styles, nor is his milieu truly international. Baselitz’s painting remains a deeply felt and authentic engagement with the spiritual depletion of the postwar period in Germany.
Dali^ Died on 23 January 1989:
Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domenech,
Spanish Surrealist painter and printmaker born on 11 May 1904.
— Spanish painter, writer, and member of the surrealist movement. He was born in Figueras, Catalonia, and educated at the School of Fine Arts, Madrid. After 1929 he espoused surrealism, although the leaders of the movement later denounced Dalí as overly commercial. Dalí's paintings from this period depict dream imagery and everyday objects in unexpected forms, such as the famous limp watches in The Persistence of Memory. Dalí moved to the United States in 1940, where he remained until 1948. His later paintings, often on religious themes, are more classical in style. They include Crucifixion and The Sacrament of the Last Supper. Dalí's paintings are characterized by meticulous draftsmanship and realistic detail, with brilliant colors heightened by transparent glazes. Dalí designed and produced surrealist films, illustrated books, handcrafted jewelry, and created theatrical sets and costumes. Among his writings are ballet scenarios and several books, including The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942) and Diary of a Genius (1965).
— Dali was born in the small agricultural town of Figueres, Catalonia, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, 25 km from the French border, the son of a prosperous notary. He spent his childhood in Figueres and at the family's summer home in the coastal fishing village of Cadaques. His first studio was built for him by his parents and was situated in Cadaques. For most of his adult life he lived in a fantastic villa in nearby Port Lligat.
     As a young man, Dali attended the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. His first one-man show was held in Barcelona in 1925. He got international fame when three of his paintings were shown in the third annual Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh in 1928.
     Dali went to Paris the following year, again holding a one-man show, and joined the Paris Surrealist Group. It was in this same year that Dali met Gala Eluard when she visited him in Cadaques with her husband, the French poet Paul Eluard. She became Dali's lover, muse, business manager, and the source of inspiration for many of Dali's greatest works. They were married in 1934 at a civil ceremony and made their first trip to America.
     Dali emerged as a leader of the Surrealist movement and his painting, Persistence of Memory (1931) is still one of the best known surrealist works. But, as war approached, the apolitical Dali clashed with the Surrealists and he was expelled during a trial conducted by the group in 1934. Although he did exhibit works in international surrealist exhibitions throughout the decade, asserting: “le Surréalisme c'est moi”, by 1940 he was ready to move into a new era, one that he termed “classic.”
     During World War II Dali and his wife, Gala, took refuge in the United States, returning after the war's end to Spain. His international reputation continued to grow, based as much on his flamboyance and flair for publicity as on his prodigious output of paintings, graphic works, and book illustrations; and designs for jewellrey, textiles, clothing, costumes, shop interiors, and stage sets. His writings include poetry, fiction, and a controversial autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali.
     Dali returned to the Catholic faith of his youth and he and Gala were married in a second ceremony in 1958, this time in a chapel near Girona, Spain.
     Dali produced two films - An Andalusian Dog (1928) and The Golden Age (1930) — in collaboration with Buñuel. Considered surrealist classics, they are filled with grotesque images.
     In 1974 Dali opened the Teatro Museo Dali in Figueres. This was followed by retrospectives in Paris and London at the end of the decade.
     After Gala's death in 1982, Dali's health began to fail. It deteriorated further after he was severely burned in a fire in Gala's castle in Pubol, Spain, in 1984. Two years later, a pacemaker was implanted. Much of the years 1980-89 were spent in almost total seclusion, first in Pubol and later in his private room in the Torre Galatea, adjacent to the Teatro Museo Dali. Dali died in a hospital in Figueres from heart failure and respiratory complications.
— Salvador Dalì was born in the Catalan town of Figueras, near Barcelona. He was given the same name of his brother, who died at the age of 21 months from a case of meningitis, possibly brought on by his father’s blows to the infant’s head. The second Salvador Dalì became a world-renowned Surrealist painter and avatar of the bizarre, with a combination of technical accomplishment, haunting imagery, and thirst for publicity that made him one of the most recognized artists of the 20th century.
      Dalì was the son of a rich, atheistic notary and a devoutly Catholic, adoring mother. The artist forged a very close relationship to his younger sister, Ana Maria, who remained his only model until 1929 (rumors exist that the relationship crossed the line into incest). Bored in school, Dalì was expelled at the age of fifteen. This expulsion, though, afforded Dalì more time for private art lessons and for mastering the finer points of classical technique that would become crucial to his "lucid dream" style. In 1921, Dalì won acceptance to the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. There he became the youngest member of an avant-garde circle of students that included the surrealist filmmaker, Luis Buñuel, and the poet, Federico Garcia Lorca. Dalì later collaborated with Buñuel on two notorious Surrealist films, Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or. Garcia Lorca soon became a very close friend of Dalì’s (and according to some, possibly Dalì’s lover), spending many holidays at Dalì’s family house in the Spanish beach town of Cadaques. In 1930, however, Lorca and Dalì quarreled violently, and the two reconciled only a year before Lorca’s death in 1936 as a dissident in the Spanish Civil War.
      During his years at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Dalì spent his mornings painting and drawing. Afternoons were spent dressed as a dandy, drinking in cafés and discussing current avant-garde movements like Dadaism, Futurism, and the newly forming Surrealism. Eventually, Dalì’s eccentricities and political beliefs became too much for the Madrid academy. In 1923, he was expelled from school and even jailed for a month for disturbance of the peace and political agitation. He subsequently returned home to work on his paintings in Figueres and at the family beach house in Cadaques. During these student years, Dalì discovered what would become one of the most important influences on his painting style, Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Dalì’s personal take on Freud’s theory of the subconscious became the basis of his so-called "paranoiac-critical method" of painting, by which Dalì discovered or hallucinated images of his own subconscious desires and libidinal urges and painted the results. Dalì called the paintings of this period "hand-painted dream photographs."
      As a result of his "paranoiac critical-method, " Dalì achieved his first significant recognition as an artist and soon became identified with the Surrealist movement. In 1925, Dalì had his first one-man show in Barcelona. In 1928, three of his paintings, including Basket of Bread, were shown in Pittsburgh. 1928 also marked his first trip to Paris, where Spanish painter Joan Miró introduced Dalì to the Surrealists, an artistic movement led by the poet André Breton and dedicated, in Breton’s words, to "reuniting the realms of conscious and unconscious experience". Dalì soon became the best-known member of the group, though other members, including Breton, resented the newcomer’s flair for publicity and ultimately tried to expel the Figueras native.
      The end of the 1920s marked a crucial point in Dalì’s life. In 1929, he met Gala (née Helena Deluvina Diakinoff), a Russian immigrant eleven years older who was then married to the Surrealist poet Paul Eluard. During a summer visit to Cadaques, Gala began a relationship with Dalì that would last over fifty years. The two married in 1934, and Gala became Dalì’s only model and managed all of the artist’s financial affairs, earning herself a reputation as a harpy. At least initially, Gala deserved credit for maintaining order in Dalì’s personal life so that he could concentrate on his art. In 1931, Dalì painted his most famous painting, The Persistence of Memory, with its melting clocks becoming a Surrealist icon. Throughout the 1930s, Dalì’s paintings were including in Surrealist group shows in the U.S. and Europe. These paintings featured wild juxtapositions of animals, objects and biomorphic shapes, usually placed in the harshly lit landscapes of his native Catalan. One buyer astutely commented that Dalì’s titles, like The Lugubrious Game (1929) or Atmospheric Skull Sodomising a Grand Piano (1934), were worth as much as the paintings.
      During World War II, Dalì and Gala took refuge in the U.S., returning to Spain only in 1955. As Dalì’s international fame continued to grow, the artist thirstily sought publicity, stating "My motto has always been, ‘Let them speak of Dalì, even if they speak well of him.’" Unfortunately, Gala’s constant demands for money caused Dalì to take on too many commissions, triggering deterioration in the quality and creativity of his work. During his return to Catholicism during the fifties and sixties, Dalì produced a series of large, classically influenced, religious and historical canvases. While these pieces sold well, art critics received the works less enthusiastically than Dalì’s surrealist works. In addition to painting, Dalì also began his kaleidoscopic output of drawings, poetry, a novel (Hidden Faces), an invention-filled autobiography (The Secret Life of Savador Dalì), book illustrations, and designs for jewelry, textiles, clothing, costumes, shop windows, and stage sets.
      Beyond artistic endeavors, Dalì and his wife captured the public imagination through their increasingly decadent (and well-publicized) social life in New York, Paris, and several Spanish cities. They hosted surrealist balls that resembled performance art happenings, with food served in shoes, live animals as decorations, and bartenders with ties made of hair. Surrounded by a collection of hippies and freaks called the "Court of Miracles," Dalì and Gala also hosted "sexual cabarets" in European castles, populated by transvestites, young girls, and dwarfs. Gala, pushing seventy, topped off this excess by having an extended affair with a man who played Jesus Christ Superstar off-Broadway. Ultimately, Dalì and Gala’s need for more and more money to support their outrageous lifestyle led to "The Dalì Scandal" of the 70s. During these years, Dalì signed several contracts for the reproduction of paintings created many years prior. In addition, he put his name on many other articles besides paintings and prints, the most extreme example being a set of Tarot cards for which he signed over 17'500 copies. These actions ultimately prompted a revaluation during the 1980s of the many Dalì prints on the market.
      In 1974, Dalì opened the Teatro Museo Dalì in Figueres. Retrospectives in Paris and London followed at the end of the seventies, paying tribute to Dalì’s life accomplishments as a painter. After Gala's death from heart failure in 1982, Dalì's slipped in and out of sanity and almost completely stopped eating. During the last years of his life, the artist lived in seclusion, receiving almost no visitors (exceptions were the King and Queen of Spain) and receiving medical help from private nurses. Salvador Dalì died in a hospital in Figueres from heart failure and respiratory complications.
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— Enid Haldorn
— Dorothy Spreckels Munn
— L'Enfant Malade (1914 self-portrait at Cadaqués) — Autoportrait — Autoportrait_au_Cou_de_Raphael — Autoportrait_Cubiste
— The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (1959) _ Three major influences (other than Gala, who was ALWAYS Dali's chief muse) inspired Dali to create this Masterwork, which is more than 4 meters tall. The first of these was the appraching 300th anniversary of the death of Velázquez, who was very important to Dali. The second was that there was considerable academic debate at the time regarding the true nationality of Columbus. Some were asserting that Columbus had been Catalonian rather than Italian, and Dali seized upon this opportunity to further glorify his homeland. Finally, the gallery which commissioned Dali to paint this work, the Huntington Hartford Gallery, was situated on Columbus Circle in New York City.
      The appointment of Columbus to explore the New World by King Ferdinand, and Queen Isabella of Spain is depicted in the upper center of the painting. Just to the right of that, the flying crosses, and the lances, standards and polearms held aloft by the figures below are direct references to the Velázquez painting The Surrender at Breda (or The Lances). In this way, Dali is paying his direct respects to the 17th Century Spanish Master who has so influenced him.
      The center of the painting is dominated by a young Columbus who is leading one of his ships onto the shoreline of the New World. He holds in his right hand, a standard on which the visage of Gala is depicted in the pose of St. Helena, the mother of Constantine. Contantine was the founder of Constantinople and the Byzantium Empire, which so heavily influenced the development of Western Civilization. To the right of Columbus, is a kneeling figure of a monk, who is actually Dali, and in the lower right hand corner, the figure whose head is totally covered by the cloak is representative of the introspective and private side of his wife Gala.
      In the lower left hand corner, a transluscent bishop holds his staff aloft amongst a series of crosses and other objects. This is Saint Narcisso, the Bishop of Gerona, who had been murdered in his own abbey. There was a Spanish legend that said whenever any foreign invaders would advance into the area of St. Narcisso's tomb, that huge clouds of gadflies would pour forth in order to drive the foreign invaders away.
     Behind the lances on the right there is a faint image resembling Dali's Christ of Saint John of the Cross.
      This painting, above all, is a tribute to Dali's Spanish Catholic heritage. The pose of Gala on the banner held by Columbus symbolizes the way in which Gala helped Dali to discover America. She was very much responsible for many of the antics for which he became famous.

— The Vision of Hell (1962) _ This is a highly sophisticated painting that juxtaposes Salvador Dali's earlier style, Surrealism, (for which he was most famous) with a more classical style of religious mysticism which he developed later in life.
      Most critics believe that Dali's greatest works were those done during his Surrealistic period, (before the 1940's). It was then that Dali, greatly influenced by Freud's Interpretation of Dreams tried to enter the subconscious world while he was painting, in order to fathom subconscious imagery. To this end he tried various methods. For example, he attempted to simulate insanity while painting, and he tried setting up his canvas at the base of his bed to paint before sleeping and upon rising.
      During this period of his life certain images repeated themselves in his art: eyes, hands, noses, bones, crutches, clouds, mountains, blood, soft bodies and/or objects. In Vision of Hell we find all of these symbols, called cliches by some critics, but, here they seem to be much more than a trite convention. They are an expression of Dali himself. Too Dali uses the techniques of double images, hidden appearances, counter appearances.
      It is important to note that although in the early 1960's (the time when Vision of Hell was painted) Dali's art was pejoratively classified as "academic", "religious," and "mystic," and despite the fact that he was, at the time, often excluded from the company if Surrealists, Dali deliberately chose the lapse into his previous surrealist style to accomplish these portrayal of hell. Note, his old style, surrealism,dominates these portrayal of hell (the left side of the painting), while his newer style of "Religious Mysticism" is used on the right side of the painting in the portrayal of Our Lady of Fatima. A close look at Our Lady of Fatima shows that an experimental technique was used around her upper body. The paint has texture. It is interesting to note that Dali does not use his wife Gala as the subject for his portrayal of Mary, as he had in previous ones (The Madonna of Port Lligat (1950)); however, in Vision of Hell, Our Lady of Fatima does hold her hands open in a similar way as the Madonna of Port Lligat.
      The central image in the painting is that of eight carving forks, that, in the form of a circle are piercing a body that, typical of Dali's earlier period, is soft. The parts most visible in this human form are the left chest, the left arm and the head. Note, too, the blood. Vision of Hell is Dali's portrayal of death. Whenever an artist seriously approaches the subject of death, we can expect profundity. When this part of the painting is placed side by side with Dali's famous birth painting, Geopolitical Child Watching the Birth of the New Man, (1943) the comparison is startling. Both bodies are curved in a type of fetal position; there are large drops of blood; the arm, the navel and the breast are the central focus of attention. Vision of Hell would be well shown beside ...Birth of a New Man. One painting shows life, the other death.
      Not to be dismissed is the elongated eye of the pierced victim. Eyes have always been a symbol for Dali, particularly in his own polymorphic self-portraits. His paintings The First Days of Spring, Illuminated Pleasure, The Enigma of Desire and The Persistence of Memory all show a head, a face and a prominent eye. Those eyes, however, are all closed. The long extended eye in Vision of Hell is open, as if to say, the victim's eyes have been opened at death. This eye is a double image, typical of Dali. From one side it seems to be a human eye, bent out of shape, from the other it is the eye of a strange creature (Bosch like) with its mouth wide open ready to take a bite.
Hieronymus Bosch Influenced Dali's Vision of Hell
      Dali, as well as other surrealist painters, were greatly influenced by the Dutch painter, Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516). Vision of Hell actually copies a part of Hieronymus Bosch's Hell, portrayed in the right hand panel of the Garden of Earthly Delights (triptych). The burning buildings shown in the top left if Dali's painting closely resemble Bosch's burning building in hell, and, interestingly, Dali also picks up from Bosch's inferno the image of the tattered flag, as well as a rectangular structure from which emanate four rays of light.
Crutches
      In his earlier, much more famous works, Dali frequently employed crutches in his paintings. He, himself, says he finds the crutch to be "the significance of life and death...a support for inadequacy." It is well known that Dali, for a long time, had a fetish about crutches, which stemmed from his youthful desire to place a crutch under the breast of a woman whom he saw working in the fields. The orange/red spirit, shown escaping from the pierced body in Vision of Hell, has two crutches, one under or on each breast. They seem claw-like, clutching. These crutches are more easily seen when the painting is lighted by high intensity artificial light. (Recall that Dali sometimes painted with artificial light and a jewelers eye piece.)
Hidden Self Portrait Salvador
Dali often hides images and faces within his paintings, and many of his works are self-portraits. There are three places in this painting where it seems Dali is portraying himself. First, in the polymorphic body. Second, in a whimsical face which appears in a puff of smoke in the lower left center part of the painting. However, there is another face, hidden face, composed of an eye and a nose, that dominates the painting.
      Before studying this last hidden face in Vision of Hell, remember that eyes and noses are among the dominant symbols in Dali's art. (Refer to The Enigma of Desire, Illuminated Pleasures and The Persistence of Memory). One might do well to look at a photographic portrait of Dali which was done in 1955. In it Dali holds a magnifying glass over his eye and nose.
      The dominant face in Vision of Hell can be found by focusing on the black drops that appear in the middle left side of the painting. These black drops (which echo the red drops on the lighter side) if seen as tears falling from a closed eye, anchor us into position to see a bushy black eyebrow above the crying eye, the inside edge of which is being pierced by two carving forks. If one perceives the eye, then the large white nose, which too is being pierced by carving forks, appears. the hidden face is composed of an eye crying black tears, a bushy eyebrow and a large nose, all of which closely resemble Dali's own features. When viewed in this way, the hell of Hieronymus Bosch appears to be flushing from the mind, (to the left of the eye).
      This dominant and tormented face, floating in the air, recalls the lines which Dali used to inspire the painting, “plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form...raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves...” (from St. Lucia's Description of hell). The "flames that issued from within" could well be the Hieronymus Bosch flames that are issuing from the mind of this tormented face.
      Why did Dali choose to sign his name so prominently in the middle of the painting? Could it be that Vision of Hell is not only a portrayal of the vision of hell seen by the three shepherd children of Fatima (which he was commissioned for $15'000 to portray here) but also a portrayal of Dali himself, tormented and crying. Is a serious portrayal of death, such as this, a minor work?
The Lower Half of the Painting
      The lower half of the painting has yet to be explored. But, one must note that a solitary female figure who stand on the cracked earth is holding a cross in her right hand, just as St. John of the Cross held a cross in Dali's painting The Temptation of St. Anthony (1946). She also had another form in her left hand which may be a shepherd staff. The painting must be examined with a magnifying glass in order to determine this. If it is a shepherd's crook, this figure could very well represent Lucia, the sole survivor and one of the three shepherd children who saw Our Lady of Fatima. and hell. It was Lucia's account of the vision of hell that Salvador Dali studied before he painted Vision of Hell. The White Circle
      The white circle on Our Lady's stomach could very well symbolize Jesus. An extremely thick glob of paint, this circle seems to be molded, like clay, into a shape that still needs to be explored with a magnifying glass. It does recall, in corporal placement, the square tabernacle forms found in Dali's representation of the Madonna of Port Lligat (1949)."
— Endless Enigma — Dali at Age Six, When He Thought He Was a Girl, Lifting the Skin of the Water to See the Dog Sleeping in the Shade of the Sea (1950, 80x99cm) — Dali from the Back Painting Gala from the Back Eternalized by Six Virtual Corneas Provisionally Reflected by Six Real Mirrors — Gala and the Angelus of Millet Preceding the Imminent Arrival of Conical Anamorphoses — Galacidalacidesoxiribunucleicacid {sic} (Homage to Crick and Watson) — The Ship — Ricardo Pichot — Cadaques de dos — Poésie d'Amérique: les athlètes cosmiques — Abraham Lincoln Gala watching the Mediterranean Sea (1976) — Toreador — The temptation of Saint Anthony
— Mercado de esclavos con aparición del busto invisible de Voltaire (1940, 46x55cm) _ Between 1940 and 1941 Salvador Dalí executed two versions of this. They are some of the finest examples of the dual images created following his paranoid-critical method. He painted the first version in Arcachon (France) in 1940 and the second Disappearing Bust of Voltaire in New York a year later. These two works are the result of a lengthy process which Dalí went through with various studies, which show how the artist worked on and corrected the various parts and images making up the work, until he managed to integrate Voltaire’s face into a scene with various anonymous personages, what he called the “slave market”.
      The picture of Voltaire’s face is taken from a 1781 bust by the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, which Dalí may possibly have seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in July 1938, when he went to England for his famous meeting with Sigmund Freud. Dalí brought the bust into the painting by taking advantage of the light and shadows of two figures in front of a gap in the ruined building. The heads of two women form the eyes of the bust, while their collars stand as nose and cheeks.
      The bowl of fruit on the table, in the right-hand part of the painting, is also a dual image: the pear becomes the start of the mountain that lies in the background, while the apple becomes the hips of one of the men in the background. The figure on the left contemplating the scene is probably a portrait of Gala.
— Spain — Burning Giraffe — Horseman of Death — Self Portrait — Invisible Man — The Weaving — Head of Roses — Paranoic Solitude — Singularities — Couple of Clouds — Outskirts of Hi — Signal of Anguish — Narcissus — Sleep — Swans Reflecting — Apparition of aface — Endless Enigma. — Three Ages — Poetry of America — Birth of New Man — Nude from the Back — Melancholy — Galatea — Christ — Raphaelesque — Young Virgin — Madonna of Port Lligat (1950)
— La nariz de Napoleón, transformada en una mujer encinta que pasea melancólicamente su sombra entre ruinas originales (1945, 51x66cm) _ Napoleon was one of the personifications of the artist's superego with which he identified right from the earliest age. Among the not so very many works by other artists owned by Dalí was a 14x11cm 1868 portrait of Napoléon by Meissonier In her memoirs, Dalí's sister tells us the extent to which the figure of Napoleon fired the artist's imagination and life energy in the course of children's games. “Mi hermano decía siempre que quería ser Napoleón. Un día en que íbamos de excursión a la ermita de San Sebastián, estaba tan rendido que ya no podía ni andar. La tieta le hizo un gorro de papel y, poniéndoselo en la cabeza, le dijo que era Napoleón. Inmediatamente se espabiló. Montado en una caña, a modo de caballo, subió animoso la empinada cuesta que lleva a la ermita. Cuando desfallecía, bastaba con que la tieta imitase el redoble de un tambor para que Salvador, montado en su Pegaso, que en aquel momento era un vulgar trozo de caña, subiera galopando hasta la ermita, a pesar de la intensa fatiga que indudablemente sentía. Y a lo más alto llegó sin caer del caballo alado que con tanta propiedad representaba su fértil imaginación” (Anna María Dalí, Salvador Dalí visto por su hermana, 2001)
      The oil painting that the artist executed four decades later took as its point of departure a painted plaster bust of Napoleon, probably inspired by the head of the famous 1846 funerary monument by François Rude Napoléon s'éveillant à l'immortalité. Dalí placed this bust amidst a landscape of ruins and — very much in keeping with his paranoiac — critical works dating from the end of the 1930s - dematerialised it in an interplay of positive-negative optical illusion, to the point that in the background, from the shadow projected by the emperor's prominent nose, there emerged the silhouette of a pregnant woman.
      Dalí worked on this painting every day for three weeks, finally exhibiting it in November/December 1945 at the Bignou Gallery in New York. On the occasion of this event the artist published the first issue of his Dalí News, a newspaper written by himself and also carrying a reproduction of this work.

— 20 prints at FAMSF —
^ Dali's four periods:

— 1. Early (1910-1927)
      The styles and subject matter of this period do not reflect those of his more celebrated surrealist works of the 1930s. In general, the primary subject matter of Dalí's early period is the landscape of his home in northern Catalonia, Spain. Images of the picturesque countryside near Figueres, where the artist was born in 1904, as well as images of the seaside town of Cadaques where the Dalí family had a summer home characterize his early work. In fact, this area with its romantic history and deep traditions had a powerful influence on Dalí's art and imagination throughout his career.
      These early years also contain evidence of Dalí's developing artistic styles, including Impressionism, Cubism, academic studies and realist works in the style of the Dutch Baroque. Learn more about this period by clicking any of the images below.
— Some works from the Early Period: View of Cadaques with the Shadow of Mount Pani (1917) — Self Portrait (Figueres) (1921) — Still Life: Fish with Red Bowl (1923-24) — Still Life: Sandía (1924) — The Basket of Bread (1926)

— 2. Transitional (1927-1928)
      Beginning in mid 1927 and continuing throughout 1928, Dalí entered a "Transitional period" characterized by furious experimentation. The canvases from this period often include different textures created with various paint resins and a collage of coarse sand and gravel from nearby beaches. Dalí also incorporated rocks, cork and other materials into his canvases.
      Though Dalí's friendship with Federico García Lorca was waning, his friendship with another school friend --Luis Buñuel, soon to be one of Spain's most celebrated film makers -- led him to a more passionate exploration of taboo subject matter. Dalí was aware of the Surrealists in Paris and their development of dreamlike images, but he had not yet been introduced to the group and he still had reservations about the quality of their artwork.
      Dalí's imagery became more abstract and often grotesque during this period, indicating that he was under the influence of his fellow Catalan Joan Miró. Miró was eleven years older than Dalí and one of the stars of the surrealist group. Miró's unconventional, childlike imagery had a liberating effect on Dalí. Other artists who influenced Dalí during this period include the cubists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and the surrealists Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy.
— Two works from the Transitional Period: Apparatus and Hand (1927) — Big Thumb, Beach, Moon and Decaying Bird (1928)

— 3. Surrealism (1929-1940)
      Surrealism, a movement in literature and the visual arts, was founded in 1924 in Paris by André Breton [19 Feb 1896 – 28 Sep 1966]. The surrealists believed that logic had failed humankind, so they turned to the unconscious and dreams in an attempt to transcend the boundaries of reason. Heavily influenced by the writings of Sigmund Freud, they dedicated their movement to the expression of the imagination as revealed in dreams, free of the conscious control of reason. Breton once said that Salvador Dalí “incarnated the surrealist spirit,” and, indeed, some of Dalí’s paintings -- most famously The Persistence of Memory -- have become virtually synonymous with the movement in the wider culture. Dalí’s interest in Freud’s psychological theories led him to explore his own fears and fantasies through symbolic images captured on canvas in an ultra-realistic, photographic style. He referred to these paintings as “hand-painted dream photographs.” Dalí's relationship with the other surrealists became troubled and they attempted to expell him from the surrealist group at a "trial" held in Paris in 1934. Dalí sums up his relationship with the group as follows: “The difference between me and the Surrealists is that I am Surrealism.”
— Some works from the Surrealism Period: The First Days of Spring (1929) — The Average Bureaucrat (1930) — Oeufs au Plat Sans Plat (1932)
Ghost of Vermeer— The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used as A Table (1934) _ This is one of Dalí's most precise "miniatures." The artist described such work from the mid 1930s as "hand-painted photographs in color," and indeed the precision of detail and luminosity of this painting give it the appearance of a photograph. Such detailing shows the influence of the Dutch painter Jan Vermeer [1632-1675], whom Dalí greatly admired. Vermeer's work is often described as "photographic," as it is renowned for its inner luminosity and rich detail. These are qualities that Dalí brought to this work as well. Dalí's painting alludes to Vermeer's most popular painting, The Artist in His Studio, by borrowing Vermeer's self-portrait from that work. Yet Dalí uses the Dutch artist's photographic precision to produce a different effect. Instead of creating a record of the everyday as Vermeer did, Dalí created a record of the impossible. He turned the animate into the inanimate by making Vermeer into a piece of furniture--a table. A bottle and glass emphasize this transformation, which renders this figure an apparitional image. In order to heighten the unsettling effect of this work, Dalí placed the Specter of Vermeer in an actual landscape, the setting of a narrow lane found in Dalí's Port Lligat. The extreme contrast causes one's respect for the paranoiac-critical method to soar, for it transforms the usual into the unique and revitalizes the mundane.
— The Weaning of Furniture-Nutrition (1934) — Meditation on the Harp (1932-34) — Old Age, Adolescence, Infancy (The Three Ages) (1940) — Daddy Longlegs of the Evening-Hope! (1940) — Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940)

— 4. Classic (1941 - 89)  
      In 1941, Dalí moved beyond his esoteric, surrealist style in order to make a more universal artistic statement. His interest shifted from personal obsessions to universal themes, and he became fascinated by religion and modern science . Dalí summarized this shift by saying that he intended "to become classic," for, "to be a Surealist forever is like spending your life painting nothing but eyes and noses." Dalí looked back to Classical and Renaissance art for inspiration, while looking forward to the scientific discoveries emerging around him in the 1950s. He desired to be the spokesman for the atomic age, to unite the discoveries of modern science with religion and mysticism.
      Among the works produced during the Classic Period are eighteen large oil paintings, executed between 1948 and 1970, which have been called the "Masterworks". These works represented a different category of creativity from his other work. Each of these paintings occupied Dalí intellectually for at least one year and measures at least 150 cm in one or both dimensions.
— Some works from Classic Period:
click for full image— Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man (1943) _ During Dali's 1940-1948 stay in the US he initiates his classic period with this painting. The ideas for Dalí's classic works were derived from a variety of sources, including contemporary events, his Spanish heritage, and Catholic symbolism, replacing much of the personal symbolism of his surrealist period. While working on this painting in 1943, the artist jotted down some notes. They read: "Parachute, paranaissance (sic), protection, cupola, placenta, Catholicism, egg, earthly distortion, biological ellipse. Geography changes its skin in historic germination."
      Unlike the meanings of his surrealist paintings of the 1930s, this work's meaning is accessible because the surrealistic contradictions are absent. The Geopoliticus Child reflects the newfound importance the US held for the expatriate Catalan artist. The man emerging from the egg is rising out of the "new" nation, the US, which was in the process of becoming a new world power. Africa and South America are both enlarged, representing the growing importance of the Third World, while Europe is being crushed by the man's hand, indicating its diminishing importance as an international power. The draped cloth below [above?] the egg represents the placenta of the new nation. An androgynous figure points to the emerging man, acknowledging the importance of this new world power. The cowering child at her feet represents the spirit of this new age, and the child casts the longer shadow indicating that he will replace the older age.
Disintegration— The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (1954) _ In this Dalí disintegrated the scene from his popular 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory. This disintegration is an acknowledgment of the developments of modern science. The disquieting landscape of his earlier work has here been shattered by the effects of the atomic bomb. All of the elements in the painting are separating from each other. The rectangular blocks in the foreground and the rhinoceros horns floating through space metaphorically suggest that the world is formed of atomic particles that are constantly in motion.
      Forms disintegrating as a result of the bomb populate the barren landscape. The soft skin of the face to the right is fluid, and the soft watch from the 1931 canvas is not just draped over a branch in the dead olive tree, it is ripping apart. By locating this work in the barren region of the Bay of Cullero, Dalí revealed that the atomic bomb has disturbed even the serenity of the artist's isolated Port Lligat. Yet in spite of this painting's bleak implications, Dalí presents the atomic disintegration in a harmonious pattern, indicating the persistence of an underlying order in nature.
— Nature Morte Vivante (1956) — The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (1959) — Velazquez Painting the Infanta Margarita with the Lights and Shadows of His Own Glory (1958) — The Ecumenical Council (1960) — The Hallucinogenic Toreador (1969-70)
^ Died on 23 January 1883: Louis Christophe Paul Gustave Doré, French Romantic painter, printmaker, etcher, lithographer, and book illustrator, born on 06 January 1832.
— Doré was born in Strasbourg and died in Paris. He first made his mark by his illustrations to Rabelais (1854) and to The Wandering Jew and Balzac's Contes Drolatiques (1865) [English translation: Droll Stories]. These are followed by illustrated editions of Dante's Inferno (1861), the Contes of Perrault and Don Quixote (1863), the Purgatorio and Paradiso of Dante (1868), the Bible (1865-66), Paradise Lost (1866), Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1867-68), La Fontaine's Fables (1867). He also executed much in color.
— Doré was the most popular and successful French book illustrator of the mid 19th century. Doré became very widely known for his illustrations to such books as Dante's Inferno (1861), Don Quixote (1862), and the Bible (1866), and he helped to give European currency to the illustrated book of large . He was so prolific that at one time he employed more than forty blockcutters. His work is characterized by a rather naïve but highly spirited love of the grotesque and represents a commercialization of the Romantic taste for the bizarre. Drawings of London done in 1869-71 were more sober studies of the poorer quarters of the city and captured the attention of van Gogh. In the 1870s he also took up painting (doing some large and ambitions religious works) and sculpture (the monument to the dramatist and novelist Alexandre Dumas in the Place Malesherbes in Paris, erected in 1883, is his work).
— LINKS
— 33 Prints at FAMSF — Andromeda — Don Quixote and the Windmill — Don Quixote in his Library — Elaine — The Enigma — The Raven (1884 book with wood engravings 47x37x2cm) — The Raven _ painting based on The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe. — Viviane and Merlin in a Forest (170x122cm) —Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (1855) — Alpine Scene (1865) — Ithuriel and Zephon Hunt Satan from Milton's Paradise Lost — Canto 3 of Paradise from Dante's Divine Comedy — Portrait of François Rabelais, opposite title page in the book Oeuvres de Rabelais (1873 wood engraving 24x19cm)
^ Born on 28 September 1823: Alexandre Cabanel, French artist who died on 23 January 1889.
— The winner of the Prix de Rome in 1845, he ranked with Bouguereau as one of the most successful and influential academic painters of the period and one of the sternest opponents of the Impressionists. The Birth of Venus (Musee d'Orsay, Paris) is his best-known work and typical of the slick and titillating (but supposedly chaste) nudes at which he excelled. It was the hit of the official Salon of 1863, the year of the Salon des Refuses, and was bought by the emperor Napoleon III, who gave Cabanel several prestigious commissions. —
— French painter and teacher. His skill in drawing was apparently evident by the age of 11. His father could not afford his training, but in 1839 his département gave him a grant to go to Paris. This enabled him to register at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts the following October as a pupil of François-Édouard Picot. At his first Salon in 1843 he presented Agony in the Garden and won second place in the Prix de Rome competition (after Léon Bénouville, also a pupil of Picot) in 1845 with Christ at the Praetorium . Both Cabanel and Bénouville were able to go to Rome, as there was a vacancy from the previous year. Cabanel’s Death of Moses, an academic composition, painted to comply with the regulations of the Ecole de Rome, was exhibited at the Salon of 1852. The pictures he painted for Alfred Bruyas, his chief patron at this time (and, like Cabanel, a native of Montpellier), showed more clearly the direction his art had taken during his stay in Italy. Albaydé, Angel of the Evening, Chiarruccia and Velleda were the first of many mysterious or tragic heroines painted by Cabanel and show his taste for the elegiac types and suave finish of the Florentine Mannerists.
      On Cabanel’s return to Paris, the architect Jean-Baptiste Cicéron Lesueur (1794-1883) commissioned him to decorate 12 pendentives in the Salon des Caryatides in the Hôtel de Ville (destr. 1871). Several major decorative commissions followed, which included work on the Hôtel Pereire, the Hôtel Say and the Louvre. Much has been destroyed, but the ceiling in the Cabinet des Dessins in the Louvre, The Triumph of Flora, which combines the hard contours and careful finish of Ingres’s school with a composition and colour that recalls the ceilings of the French Rococo, is probably typical of Cabanel’s talent for achieving sumptuous effects.
      In 1855 Cabanel exhibited Christian Martyr, Glorification of St Louis and Autumn Evening, establishing his academic and official credentials. In 1855 he received the Légion d’honneur and in 1863 he was elected to the Institut and nominated professor (along with Jean-Léon Gérôme and Isidore-Alexandre-Augustin Pils) at the reorganized Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He won the Grande Médaille d’Honneur at the Salons of 1865, 1867 and 1878. His dark-eyed heroines, thinly painted, usually in muted colours, and immaculately drawn, were popular with collectors on both sides of the Atlantic; likewise his mythological paintings, which were a by-product of his decorative works. Nymph Abducted by a Faun (1860) is a solid, decorative group in the manner of Charles Coypel or François Lemoyne. He exhibited the Birth of Venus (1862) in 1863 to widespread acclaim. It is composed like an overdoor by Boucher, although it has been suggested that it was influenced by Ingres’s Odalisque and her Slave (1839). Both paintings were acquired by Napoléon III. In 1867 he painted a huge Paradise Lost for Ludwig II, the King of Bavaria, and in 1868 Ruth for the Empress Eugénie. The full-length portrait of the Emperor that Cabanel painted for the Tuileries in 1865 was liked by critics less than Hippolyte Flandrin’s dreamy portrait exhibited in 1863 (1860), but it was much more popular at court. Cabanel’s portraits were already in demand, and he rivalled Édouard Dubufe and Franz Xavier Winterhalter as portrait painter to the Napoleonic aristocracy. Cabanel was also a successful teacher. His pupils (like those of his master, Picot) often won the Prix de Rome; among the best known are Jules Bastien-Lepage, Édouard Debat-Ponsan, Édouard Théophile Blanchard (1844-79), Henri Gervex and Lodewijk Royer. He was elected regularly to the Salon jury, and his pupils could be counted by the hundred at the Salons. Through them, Cabanel did more than any other artist of his generation to form the character of 'belle époque' French painting. Cabanel’s pictures were always drawn and painted with a high degree of academic virtuosity, combined with an undercurrent of strong feeling, as in the Death of Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta (1870). This made him popular in his lifetime, but it was the wrong combination for the tastes of later generations. After his death his reputation collapsed.
— LINKS
— Mrs. Collis Huntington (1882, 216x128cm)
— The Birth of Venus (1863, 132x229cm) _ This painting was exhibited in 1863 and was bought by the Emperor Napoléon III.
— The Death of Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta (1870)
— Fallen Angel _ In Christianity, the angels of Hell, or dark angels, or devils, or fallen angels, are the evil counterpart of the heavenly host. The chief of them, Satan (or Lucifer), was cast out of heaven for leading a revolt. They are often viewed as the initiators of evil temptations. Famous literary treatments of angels are those of John Milton's Paradise Lost and Dante's Divine Comedy.
— Ophelia (1883, 77x117cm) — Cleopatra trying out poisons on her lovers (1887).
^ Died on 23 January 1947: Pierre Bonnard, French Nabi painter born on 03 October 1867.
— [Faisait-il du bon art? Oui: du beau, du bon, du Bonnard.]
— Les Nabis (Hebrew "Nebiim", "prophets.") were a Parisian group of Post-Impressionist artists and illustrators who became very influential in the field of graphic art. Their emphasis on design was shared by the parallel Art Nouveau movement. Both groups also had close ties to the Symbolists. The core of Les Nabis was Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Ker Xavier Roussel, Félix Vallotton, and Édouard Vuillard.
— French painter, book illustrator, lithographer, and etcher, and a leader of the French "Intimiste" school of painting. He began law studies c. 1885, but abandoned them in 1888 to work for a year at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and at the Académie Julian, where he met Jean Édouard Vuillard (a lifelong friend), Maurice Denis, Paul Ranson, Félix Vallotton, and Paul Sérusier, all of whom formed the "Nabis" group (Hebrew "Nebiim", "prophets.")
      In 1889, after he had sold a champagne poster design, his father allowed him to begin serious training. Japanese art and the precepts of Paul Gauguin then pre-occupied him; his work was characterized by flat, black-outlined areas of warm, decorative color and simplified forms in the current sinuous Art-Nouveau style.
      Humour, allied with keen observation of Parisian life, distinguished his exhibits at the Salon des Independents (from 1891) and his illustrations to La Revue Blanche (from 1893). In 1900 Bonnard's style began to change. His palette became livelier, his brushwork more loose and transparent. He turned more often to landscape and spent long summers in the Seine Valley and southern France. His compositions, deceptively simple in appearance, often embody tricks of perspective the complexity of which he increased by introducing mirrors. For thirty years Bonnard lived with Maria Boursin (known as "Marthe de Méligny") before marrying her in 1925, and she appears in many of his pictures.
— French painter and printmaker, member of the group of artists called the Nabis and afterward a leader of the Intimists; he is generally regarded as one of the greatest colourists of modern art. His characteristically intimate, sunlit domestic interiors and still lifes include The Dining Room (1913) and Bowl of Fruit (1933).
      For his bachelor's degree he studied classics and later law at the insistence of his father, and for a short time in 1888 he worked in a government office. In 1890, after a year's military service, he shared a studio in Montmartre with Denis and Vuillard. Later they were joined by the theatrical producer Aurélien Lugné-Poë, with whom Bonnard collaborated on productions for the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, in Paris. He was influenced by Japanese prints,. During the 1890s Bonnard became one of the leading members of the Nabis, a group of artists who specialized in painting intimate domestic scenes as well as decorative curvilinear compositions akin to those produced by painters of the contemporary Art Nouveau movement.
— LINKS
— Self-Portrait in the Mirror (1939, 56x69cm) — Self~Portrait (1945) — Paysage — Renoir — Frontispiece pour La Lithographie en Couleurs: un homme et une femme dans une loge de théâtre (1898) — une page de La Lithographie en couleurs — Coin de rue vue d'en haut (1899) — Rue le soir sous la pluie (1899) — Dans la rue (1900) — Femme assise dans sa bagnoire (1942) — Family in the Garden (1901) — The Letter (1906) — The Green Shirt (1919) — The Bernheim Brothers (1920) — Terrace at Vernon — Le Cannet (1926) — Le Cannet (1927) — Woman and Dog (1922) — The Sewing Lesson (1926) — Southern France (1930) — Farm (1940) — The Palm — La Loge
— Un village en ruines près du Ham (1917, 63x85cm) _ Bonnard (1867-1947) was one of the group of painters who were assigned at the end of 1916 to go and paint the war. He is also the one who seemed the least prepared for such a task, not that he was indifferent to the war, but because he found his inspiration in an altogether different field, painting female nudes and interior scenes. He did his duty with a single unfinished painting. French troops are waiting among the charred ruins. An old man crouching symbolises despondency and destitution. In the background, there is a Red Cross van - a sign of more disasters. In the state in which the artist left it - incomplete, blurred in places - this work reveals an even more poignant sense of the desolation that rendered any kind of effort useless. We may suppose that, in Bonnard's eyes, a 'finished' painting would have been misplaced at such moments, with art itself apparently having lost its purpose.
— Almond Tree in Bloom (1945) This, Bonnard's last work, belongs to yet another world. A shower of white blobs painted with the tip of the brush settles over a few dark brown strokes that define the tree shape. The ground is done in juxtaposed touches of color. Too ill to hold the brush, Bonnard begged his nephew Charles Terrasse to change a green patch to orange. It is one of the most intensely poetic pictures in this century. The 80-year-old creator had just managed to complete his hymn to joy, discreetly sung in deep solitude.
— Women With Dog (1891, 41x32cm) Like many of Bonnard’s paintings from this period, Women with Dog evokes a world of innocence and simplicity, showing children and animals together in a sort of golden age. In this picture the two girls and a dog concentrate on what appears to be a bunch of chrysanthemums. The interest in decorative pattern and the tilted-up perspective show the influence of Japanese prints, which were especially popular in Paris at the turn of the century.
— [il faisait du bon art] [du beau, du bon, du Bonnart] [Aucun rapport avec le roman d'Anatole France Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard paru en 1881?]
^ Born on 23 January 1832: Édouard Manet, French Realist Impressionist painter and printmaker who died on 30 April 1883.
— Manet made the transition from the realism of Gustave Courbet to Impressionism.
— Born into a prosperous middle-class family, Manet spent a year in the navy before entering the studio of Thomas Couture in 1850, where he stayed until 1856. Couture encouraged strong modeling through light and dark contrasts, and copies Manet made at the Louvre, after Velázquez, Titian, and Rubens among others, nurtured a painterly style of rich color and bold brushwork. Like the realist painters, Manet chose his subjects largely from modern life. His Déjeûner sur l'herbe ( 1863) and Olympia (1863) created scandals both for their unconventional subject matter and their broad handling. A series of paintings on Spanish themes culminated with a trip to Spain in 1865 and firsthand study of works by Velazquez and Goya. At the 1867 Universal Exposition, Manet held a private exhibition, which helped solidify his leadership within the avant-garde. Charles Baudelaire, Theodore Duret, and Émile Zola supported him critically. During the 1870s he worked outdoors like the impressionists, and his work became lighter and more colorful, but he maintained hope for acceptance at the official Salons and never contributed to the impressionist exhibitions. Success came in later years with numerous commissions and portraits. By about 1879, however, he began to feel the effects of a debilitating disease that would eventually cause his death.
—      Édouard Manet was born in Paris into the family of August Manet, an officer in the Ministry of Justice, and his wife Eugénie-Désirée, née Fournier, daughter of a diplomat. His uncle, Edmond-Édouard Fournier, gave the boy his first lessons in drawing. In 1844-1848, Manet studied at the College Rollin, where he met his lifelong friend Antonin Proust. In 1848-49, he was trained as a sea cadet on a voyage to Brazil, but in April 1849 he failed his naval examinations and decided to switch to painting. He entered the studio of Thomas Couture, where he studied for 6 years, between 1850 and 1856. In 1856, he took a long travel through Europe.
      After traveling in Germany, Austria and Italy to study the Old Masters, Manet finally found the answer to all his questionings and aspirations for light and truth in the paintings of Velasquez and Goya at the Louvre. Influenced by these masters and by the example of Courbet, a French realist painter, he gradually evolved a new technique which presented modern aspects by modern methods.
      In 1861, his The Spanish Singer was accepted at the Salon and won an honorable mention. But his submissions to the Salon of 1863, The Picnic among them, were rejected and appeared at the Salon des Refusés. The large canvas became the focus of scandalized critical and public attention.
      In October 28, 1863, Manet married Suzanne Leenhoff in Holland (See her portrait The Reading, on which Mme Manet is depicted being read to by Léon Koëlla). Manet 's wife was Dutch, two years his senior, and an excellent musician. She had been employed by August Manet to give Édouard and his brother Eugène piano lessons. After a relationship lasting more than ten years, Manet finally married Suzanne after his father's death. Léon Koëlla was Suzanne 's son, born in 1852. His father was almost certainly Manet, but he was presented as Suzanne's younger brother. Manet painted Léon Koëlla several times, the most known canvas with him is Luncheon in the Studio, on which Léon Koëlla is the central figure.
      An even greater scandal than that aroused by The Picnic, was caused by Olympia, shown in 1865. The public was infuriated not only by the style, but also by the subject of the picture. 'A yellow-bellied courtesan ', 'a female gorilla made of india-rubber outlined in black ', 'the Queen of Spades after her bath ', 'a parcel of nude flesh or a bundle of laundry ', and other similar characteristics appeared in newspapers. When words were exhausted some 'enthusiasts ' tried to finish with the picture physically, and it was saved only thanks to being hung high, above the reach of the fanatics.
      Although Manet was frequently in the company of members of the Impressionist group, Berthe Morisot, his sister-in-law since December 1874, Degas, and Monet in particular, and they regarded him as a leader, he had no wish to join their group. He was naturally irritated by the critics ' tendency to confuse him with Monet. Manet 's stylistic discoveries, such as 'there are not lines in Nature ', which led to his abandoning of the conventional outline and his shaping the forms by means of color and subtle gradation of tints, decisively influenced the Impressionists, but their representation of light and optical reactions to color were different. Manet never painted what could be called a truly Impressionist picture.
     In 1869, Manet met Eva Gonzalés, who became his student. During the Franco-Prussian War he joined National Guard; when in May 1871 he finally returned to Paris he found his studio partly wrecked. In 1873, his Le Bon Bock achieved considerable success at the Salon. In 1881, Manet exhibited his portraits of Henri Pertuiset and of Rochefort at the Salon, and obtained second class medal. The same year he was received into the Legion of Honor. In 1882, he exhibited for the last time at the Salon, showing Spring and Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Manet died after a long illness, which had been exhausting him for about 5 years.
— Édouard Manet was born into the ranks of the Parisian bourgeoisie. His Mother, Eugenie-Desirée Fournier, was a woman of refinement and god daughter of Charles Bernadotte, the Crown Prince of Sweden. Édouard's father, Auguste Manet, was a magistrate and judge who hoped that Édouard would someday follow in his footsteps, but Édouard was destined to follow another path.
      Although well educated, Manet did not particularly excel within the academic environment but he showed a propensity toward drawing and the arts. His Uncle Charles Fournier encouraged Manet's appreciation for the arts and often took him and his childhood friend, Antonin Proust, on outings to the Louvre. In 1850 after serving in the merchant marines, Manet entered the studio of Thomas Couture where he studied until 1856. He was influenced by the old masters, particulary Velázquez and Goya, but Manet reasoned that ones art should reflect ideas and ideals of the present rather then the past. So disagreeing with Diderot's theory that great art only reflected the costume of the past, Manet sought instead to follow the advice of Baudelaire...to depict a contemporary realism, to be "le peintre de la vie moderne."
     It's worthwhile to note that it was during this time that Paris launched its massive revitalization and modernization of the city under the supervision of Baron Haussmann. Up until 1852, the city had retained its medieval infrastructure which was now becoming most inadequate due to the growing urban population. Haussmann's revitalization efforts not only affected the physical environment of Paris but the cultural and social atmosphere as well. Thousands of jobs were created as streets were widened and lengthened, store fronts redesigned, buildings torn down and redeveloped all in an effort to make Paris the most beautiful and culturally progressive city in the world. It was this modernity with which Manet chose to concern himself.
     Manet began his career with The Absinthe Drinker (1858), a painting depicting a debauched and solitary man amongst the shadows of the back streets of Paris. Paintings like the Absinthe Drinker, and the Old Musician (1862), portray a darker aspect of Parisian life which was quite removed from Manet's circle, but nonetheless very real. La Musique aux Tuileries (1862) peopled with Manet's friends and family celebrates fashionable society. His loose handling of paint and lack of subject separated this painting from the highly finished canvasses approved of by the academy, and accepted by the Salon. In addition, the painting's ambience anticipates the "snapshot" quality taken up so well by Degas, and developed further by the Impressionists.
     Spanish Guitar Player, also painted in 1862, reflected the Parisian love of "all things Spanish" and was one of Manet's first works to be accepted by the Salon. Manet put great emphasis on Salon acceptance. In fact, he believed that success as an artist could only be obtained through recognition at the Salon. Ironically, however, it was not Spanish Guitar Player which brought him his much sought after recognition but the rejected Déjeûner sur l'herbe (1863). The Salon jury of 1863 had been exceptionally brutal and thousands of paintings had been refused. To counter these refusals, the Salon des Refusés was established and it was here that Déjeûner sur l'herbe was exhibited. Although influenced by Raphael and Giorgione, Déjeûner did not bring Manet laurels and accolades. It brought criticism. Critics found Déjeûner to be anti-academic and politically suspect and the ensuing fire storm surrounding this painting has made Le Déjeûner sur l'herbe a benchmark in academic discussions of modern art. The nude in Manet's painting was no nymph, or mythological being...she was a modern Parisian women cast into a contemporary setting with two clothed men. Many found this to be quite vulgar and begged the question "Who's for lunch?" The critics also had much to say about Manet's technical abilities. His harsh frontal lighting and elimination of mid tones rocked ideas of traditional academic training. And yet, it is also important to understand that not everyone criticized Manet, for it was also Déjeûner which set the stage for the advent of Impressionism.
     Olympia, also painted in 1863, caused a similar uproar and the controversy surrounding these two paintings truly dismayed Manet. It was not at all his intention to create a scandal. Manet was not a radical artist, such as Courbet; nor was he a bohemian, as the critics had thought. Recently married to Suzanne Leenhoff, the well mannered and well bred Manet was an immaculately groomed member of high society. As Henri Fantin-Latour's Portrait of Manet suggests — this man was the quintessential Parisian flaneur. But Manet's unique technical innovations intrigued the likes of Pierre Renoir and Claude Monet and set free the traditional and conservative reigns of academic painting.
      Political events between the years 1867-1871 were turbulent ones for Paris, and the Franco-Prussian war left Paris besieged and defeated. Manet turned his eye to these events in his works entitled Execution of Maximilian, Civil War and The Barricade. In 1870, Manet sent his family south to protect them from the fighting in Paris and signed on as a gunner in the National Guard. There is much primary documentation in the form of letters to family and friends which expresses Manet's horror and dismay at the war and these paintings stand as testaments to Manet's sentiments. The Execution of Maximilian (1868) reaches out to Goya's Third of May but despite its masterly influence the painting was banned from being exhibited in Paris due to the "Frenchness" of the executioners costume. And yet along with his expressions of political disillusionment, Manet also continued producing works such as The Balcony (1868), Portrait of Émile Zola (1868), and The Railroad (1872).
     By 1874 Manet's reputation as experimental artist and leader of the Impressionists was firmly established. The Café Guerbois, near Manet's studio became the gathering spot for Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Degas and Pissaro and although Manet presided over the regular meeting and debates held at the café, he was not enthusiastic about his role as leader of the avant-garde. In 1874, when the Impressionists held their first exhibition at Nadar's studio, Manet refused to participate. He chose instead to remain focused on the Salon. He never exhibited in any of the eight Impressionist exhibitions and yet by no means did Manet abandon the Impressionists. He worked closely with Monet in Argenteuil during 1874 and often gave financial support to his friends who needed it. It was during this time that Manet came closest to painting in the Impressionist style. Paintings such as The Monet Family in Their Garden at Argenteuil (1874), The Banks of the Seine at Argenteuil (1874), and Monet's Boat Studio (1874) approach the notions of reflected light and atmosphere of Impressionism but Manet never becomes assimilated into the true Impressionist style.
     In his last great masterpiece, Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), Manet returns again to studio painting, a somber palette and eliminated mid tones. The café concert is a theme which Manet had been treating in the late 70's in paintings such as Corner in a Café Concert and The Café. But here at Bar at the Folies-Bergères, we are no longer spectators, but participants in the painting. While the Barmaid occupies the center of the piece, the painting is filled with a menagerie of characters from seated couples to trapeze artists. Glittering chandeliers and electric lights fill the upper portion of the work. Here, as in Déjeûner sur l'herbe, optical contradictions abound.
     Throughout his oeuvre Manet painted modern day life, yet many of his paintings are so much more than simple mimetic depictions. If Manet's work seems to be full of contradictions, or to employ a lack of perspective from time to time, then perhaps that was the true reality of Paris in Manet's time. Always controversial, Manet sought to record the days of his life using his own unique vision. From beggars, to prostitutes, to the bourgeoisie he sought to be true to himself and to reproduce “not great art, but sincere art.” He died in Paris
— LINKS
— Self-portrait with palette (1878) _ Self-portrait with skull~cap (1879)
— Execution of Maximilian of Austria by Mexican Rebels (1868) — Head of Christ, (1865, 47x39cm)
— A Friar at Prayer (1864) — Le Vieux Musicien (1862) — Chez La Modiste (1881)
— Sur la plage à Boulogne (1869) — Le port de Calais (1871) — La corrida (1865)
— Jeune homme épluchant une poire (Léon Leenhoff) (1869) — Argenteuil (1874)
— Le Grand Canal à Venise (Venise bleue) (1874) _ a different Le Grand Canal à Venise (1874)
— Bateaux de Pêche sur la Plage, Saint-Pierre-en-Porte, Normandie (1873, 48x64cm)
— Le Déjeûner sur L'Herbe (1863, 214x269cm) _ detail 1 _ detail 2 — Le Déjeûner sur l'Herbe _ Le Déjeûner sur L'Herbe — Les Hirondelles (1874) — Stéphane Mallarmé (1876) — Emmanuel Chabrier (1880) — La Rochenoier (1882) peintre d'animaux — Jeanne: printemps (1881) — Autumn, Portrait of Mery Laurent in a Brown Fur Cape (1881) — Un bar aux Folies-Bergères (1882)
— Corner of a Café-Concert (1880) _ Corner of a Café-Concert _ This work was originally the right half of a painting of the Brasserie de Reichshoffen, begun in about 1878 and cut in two by Manet before he completed it. This half was then enlarged on the right and a new background was added. The Brasserie de Reichshoffen was in the Boulevard Rochechouart, Paris. At the time, brasseries with waitresses were fairly new in the city.
— At the Café (1880) _ This is the left half of the painting of which the right half is Corner of a Café-Concert.
— Corner of a Café-Concert and At the Café rejoined (even if they don't quite match any more).
— Singer at a Café-Concert. (1879)
— At the Café-Concert (1879, 47x39cm) _ Toward the end of his career, Manet, a pioneering realist, undertook several paintings depicting scenes in the interior of the Brasserie de Reichshoffen in Paris. The most developed of these, At the Café Concert, shows an older gentleman and a young woman seated at the counter in a crowed café. An image of the singer is reflected in the mirror on the back wall. Because of these figures' dispassionate expressions and their self-absorption, At the Café Concert has been interpreted as an indictment of the isolation of the individual in modern society.
— 99 images at WebShots

^ Died on 23 January 1944: Edvard Munch, Norwegian painter born on 12 December 1863.
— Printer, etcher. Painter and printmaker. Intense, evocative treatment of psychological and emotional subjects was a major influence on the development of German Expressionism during the early 20th century. His painting The Scream (1893) is regarded as an icon of existential anguish.
— Munch was born in Loten, Norway. He grew up in Christiania (now Oslo) and studied art under Christian Krohg, a Norwegian naturalistic painter. Munch's parents, a brother, and a sister died while he was still young, which probably explains the bleakness and pessimism of much of his work. Paintings such as The Sick Child (1886), Vampire (1893-94), and Ashes (1894) show his preoccupation with the darker aspects of life. Munch traveled to Paris in 1885, and his work began to show the influence of French painters — first, the impressionists, and then the postimpressionists--as well as art nouveau design. Like many young artists Munch reacted against conventional behavior, and in 1892 he took part in a controversial exhibit in Berlin. His circle of friends included several writers, one of whom was the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Munch designed the sets for several of Ibsen's plays. Between 1892 and 1908, Munch spent much of his time in Paris and Berlin, where he became known for his prints — etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts. After 1910 Munch returned to Norway, where he lived and painted until his death. In his later paintings Munch showed more interest in nature, and his work became more colorful and less pessimistic. Munch died in Ekely, near Oslo. He left many of his works to the city of Oslo, which built a museum in his honor.
— Edvard Munch was a Norwegian artist whose brooding and anguished paintings and graphic works, based on personal grief and obsessions, were instrumental in the development of expressionism. Born in Løten, Norway, Munch began painting at the age of 17 in Christiania (now Oslo). A state grant, awarded in 1885, enabled him to study briefly in Paris. For 20 years thereafter Munch worked chiefly in Paris and Berlin. At first influenced by impressionism and postimpressionism, he then turned to a highly personal style and content, increasingly concerned with images of illness and death. In 1892, in Berlin, an exhibition of his paintings so shocked the authorities that the show was closed. Undeterred, Munch and his sympathizers worked throughout the 1890s toward the development of German expressionist art. Perhaps the best known of all Munch's work is The Scream (1893). This, and the harrowing The Sick Child (1886), reflect Munch's childhood trauma, occasioned by the death of his mother and sister from tuberculosis. Melancholy suffuses paintings such as The Bridge -- in limp figures with featureless or hidden faces, over which loom the threatening shapes of heavy trees and brooding houses. Reflections of sexual anxieties are seen in his portrayals of women, alternately represented as frail, innocent sufferers or as lurid, life-devouring vampires.
      In 1908 Munch's anxiety became acute and he was hospitalized. He returned to Norway in 1909 and died in Oslo. The relative tranquillity of the rest of his life is reflected in his murals for the University of Oslo (1910-16), and in his vigorous, brightly colored landscapes. Although his later paintings are not as tortured as his earlier work, a return to introspection marks his late self-portraits, notably Between Clock and Bed (1940). Munch's considerable body of etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts is now considered a significant force in modern graphic art; the work is simple, direct, and vigorous in style, and powerful in subject matter. Few of Munch's paintings are found outside Norway. His own collection is housed in the Munch Museet.
— “Art,” wrote Edvard Munch, “is the antithesis of nature.” Munch's most famous paintings reflect his interior conflicts in intensely subjective images that are often morbid and disturbing. He spent most of his twenties in Paris and Berlin. Paul Gauguin's work particularly influenced him, demonstrating the possibilities of distilling intense emotions into universal experiences through simplified, sinuous forms and evocative blocks of pure color. By validating the concept of painting one's emotional response to a subject, Munch pointed the way for the development of German Expressionist painting. His most ambitious work, The Frieze of Life, begun in 1888, was never completed. He hoped to create a room for this series of paintings to deal with “the modern life of the soul,” but he ended up selling works individually and then making new versions of them.
      By 1900 Munch had created his most important works. In 1908 he suffered a nervous breakdown, after which his paintings changed. Instead of the revelation of private despair, he looked into the world for more optimistic and universal symbols. Munch's prints, which often shared subject matter with his paintings, may have been his most influential creations
— LINKS
— Self-Portrait with a Burning Cigarette — Two Women on the Beach (1898) — The Kiss — Spring — The Dead Mother (1900, 100x90cm) — Death in the Sick-Room — Despair — Melancholy — Mondschein (1896, 40x47cm)
— The Sick Child, (1886, 120x118cm). _ Edvard Munch derived the subject-matter for many of his works from events in his own life. Love and death are central themes. The Sick Child evokes memories of his sister Sofie, who died of tuberculosis when Edvard was fourteen. The girl in the picture is a hired model. Propped up by a pillow, she is sitting in a chair, a pale hand on the blanket over her lap. To the right we see the aunt, her head bowed in grief. All attention is focused on the head of the young girl, seen in profile against the pillow. She gazes across the room, perhaps into eternity. Depictions of the ill and dying were not unusual in the art of his day, but Munch adds a new dimension to a current theme. In order to give expression to atmosphere and space, he applies thick layers of paint, and scores the surface with his palette knife. Naturalist that he is, he wants to convey the impression of his own eyelashes as he squints towards his sitters. This is the first of five versions of this painting; the latest dates from 1925. Several prints, too, varying in technique and composition, treat the same subject. [compare the same subject by Metsu, Hooch, Francisco
^ Died on 23 January 1760: Giovanni (or Gian) Antonio Guardi, Italian painter born in 1698.
— Gian Antonio Guardi was a member of a family of artists. He was the elder brother of Francesco Guardi, who is famous for his views of Venice, and is the best-known member of the family. They collaborated on some religious paintings. The only certain work by Gianantonio is the Death of St Joseph (in Berlin): this was thought to have been destroyed in 1945, but reappeared in 1965. Gianantonio was the head of the family studio. Giambattista Tiepolo married the to the sister of the Guardi brothers, and it was possibly through his influence that Gianantonio became a founder member of the Venetian Academy in 1756. The major problem in Guardi studies concern the authorship of paintings representing The Story of Tobit that decorate the organ loft of S. Raffaele in Venice. Critical opinion is sharply divided as to whether these brilliant works, painted with brushwork of breathtaking freedom, are by Francesco or Gianantonio (there is dispute also over the dating), but if they are indeed by Gianantonio, he too must rank as a major figure.
— LINKS
— The Marriage of Tobias (1750) _ To the middle years of the eighteenth century belongs one of the most remarkable examples of decorative painting in Venice. The ancient church of the Angelo Raffaele (perhaps founded as early as the seventh century) is now rather out of the way and looks dull in its unfinished form, which dates from the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Inside, above the doorway, is a great Baroque organ loft, its parapet decorated with a cycle of seven brilliantly painted scenes. The scenes are episodes from the story of Tobias, who is guided by Archangel Raphael to catch a miraculous fish that will heal his father's blindness. The painting is by Gianantonio Guardi, one of the important artists 'rediscovered' by the twentieth century. Long almost forgotten, the painter here emerges as one of the most imaginative artists of the eighteenth century. Gianantonio trained his younger brother Francesco Guardi, who collaborated on these decorations. The picture shows the principal scene that occupies the parapet of the organ loft. The centre of the painting is empty, except for a distant landscape. Tobias and his wife, Sarah, are represented on the right in prayer before their nuptial bed.
— The Angel Appears to Tobias (1750) _ The hovering angel is derived from a painting by Sebastiano Ricci in San Stae, Venice. Gianantonio Guardi often borrowed poses or motifs from other painters, recasting them in his own vivid manner.
— The Departure of Tobias (1750) _ A close examination of the details of this painting reveals the brilliancy of its handling. The artist's rapid brush-work has created three vibrant, flickering figures and bathed the scene in shimmering light. The background and setting are barely suggested by a few indefinite forms.
— The Healing of Tobias's Father (1750) _ What further possibilities could be squeezed from the rococo after Tiepolo were developed by the Guardi brothers and by Fragonard. Gian Antonio and Francesco Guardi represent the same phenomenon, probably active in the same studio and possibly in some sort of collaboration, until the death of Gian Antonio in 1760. Out of the art particularly of Pellegrini they produced a more dazzlingly colored, more melting style — but one that had none of Pellegrini's international success, being restricted chiefly to serving a decorative function in obscure churches and villas of the Veneto. In many ways the closest affinities of this style are with Maulbertsch, and it remains more typical of the Tyrol than of Venice. Their compositions are quite often shamelessly borrowed; when not borrowed they are often shamelessly incoherent. In them objects are splintered by light in a sort of proto-impressionism. Perspective, organized aerial space, the Palladian solidity of Tiepolo, these are exchanged for a personal style of coloured handwriting - now brilliantly calligraphic, and now brilliantly cloudy, which uses reality as a sparking off point. The most perfect expression of this style remains in the Tobias series for the organ loft of the church of Angelo Raffaele in Venice. In them it is as if the brush had barely touched the surface of the canvas, so rapidly does it move, obeying its own laws, and leaving the whole surface crackling with vitality. Everything shares the same texture, given by the painter. The compositions, framed by trees, set within deliberately decorative fronds and branches, are as capricious as some fan-design by Watteau. Normal reality has been dissolved and replaced by a new luminous atmosphere in which everything exists only in so far as light defines it. Indeed, the lines run like electric wire broken here and there by flashes of fire which give a glowing softness even to wood or metal or stone.
— Madonna and Saints (1748) _ Gianantonio Guardi's most important religious painting was also a work of astounding novelty. The scene seems to be accelerating at a vertiginous space. The seed is conveyed above all through the nervous brushstrokes which get continually shorter or are interrupted. The effect is brilliantly successful.

Died on a 23 January:
1924 James Wilson Morrice, Canadian painter born on 10 August 1865. — LINKS
1810 John Hoppner, English painter born on 04 April 1758. — LINKS

Born on a 23 January:
1846 Lucio Rossi, Italian artist who died on 29 October 1913.
1829 Anton Seitz, German artist who died on 27 November 1900.
1810 John Rogers Herbert, British painter who died on 17 March 1890. — LINKS
1767 Jeanne-Elisabeth Chaudet Husson “Gabiou”, French artist who died on 18 April 1832.
1622 Abraham Arend Diepraam, Dutch painter who died in July 1670. — LINKS
1600 Alexandre Keerinck (or Kierings, Carings), Flemish artist who died in 1652.
1578 Bartolomeo Schedoni (or Schidone), Italian artist who died on 23 December 1615. — LINKS

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