Ludovico Carracci

Happy Birthday Ludovico Carracci!! Italian Baroque painter, born in 1555, Ludovico Carracci was a painter in Bologna. He was the oldest of two cousins who established the famed Bologonese Painting Academy. He taught his cousins Agostino and Annibale, who both went on to outshine his own painting. Their academy became the premier  training school for painting of the day. They encouraged their students to study nature and figure painting on a large scale. He continued to run it after the cousins left to travel and paint elsewhere. His work includes engravings, frescoes and altar pieces with wide gesturing figures and a soft light, some of which are still in existence today. The painting The Transfiguration, in the National Gallery of Art in Scotland, is a good example of his Baroque style. Note the handling of the fabric in simpler planes when compared to the same of Renaissance painters. Please be aware that the foreshortening of the prostrate figures of the disciples is quite complex. Foreshortening was first masteres by Michelangelo 100 years prior to Carracci.

Daniel Chester French

Happy Birthday Daniel Chester French!! Born in New Hampshire, in 1850, French first studied sculpture in Boston with William Hunt. His father was a lawyer and they were neighbors to Louisa May Alcott and her family, whose sister May encouraged French to pursue a career in sculpture. He is best known for his monumental sculpture of Abraham Lincoln, located in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. I was awestruck when I approached the immense seated figure of one of my heroes.

Firmin Baes

Happy Birthday Firmin Baes!! This painter is from Belgium and born in 1874. His father was also a painter and professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. He was an accomplished pastel artist as well as a painter. His work was concentrated on portraiture and genre scenes. The mother and child pastel I am including here today is titled Sweet Dreams.

 

Max Weber

Happy Birthday Max Weber!! The American artist, born in Russia,1881, studied with Arthur Wesley Dow at the Pratt Institute. He traveled to France and met with artists such as Picasso, Matisse and others. He experimented with Cubism, creating complex compositions with multiple views, patterns and various perspectives. Financially deplete, Weber was forced to return to the US and he became acquainted with Alfred Stieglitz, who supported the budding artist and in return, Weber passed on his experience with European Modernism. Following World War I his work became more expressive and he concentrated on figure painting.

Patrick Reason

Happy Birthday Patrick Reason!! American born artist from 1817, Patrick Reason was a printmaker and illustrator. He became interested in art and designed the frontpiece for Charles Andrews' book The History of New York African-Free Schools. He was an apprentice to Stephen Henry Gimber, an engraver. Reason struggled to find a place in the artworld, not an easy task for a black man in the 1800's. His work describes the hardship of the American slaves and champions abolitionists. The engraving below is titled The Kneeling Slave.

 

John Chamberlain

Happy Birthday John Chamberlain!! American sculptor, born in 1927, in Indiana, John Chamberlain attended the Art Institute of Chicago and Black Mountain College after serving in the Navy. He is considered an Abstract Expressionist and his best loved works are created from junk cars and various metal parts. Some are brightly painted like the one included here and others have been left raw metal with parts chromed. He has had over 100 exhibitions of his work all over the world. Currently, he lives in Shelter Island, New York.

Theodore Rousseau

Happy Birthday Theodore Rousseau!! French landscape painter, born in 1812, Rousseau began painting nature at age 15. He was friends with Millet and Diaz and greatly influenced by the Dutch masters. He became the leader of the Barbizon School a group of landscape painters who attempted a naturalistic study of nature. Like the Impressionists to follow, he painted a gorgeous luminescent light, symbolic in purpose, rather than naturalistic. His intensity is evident in the contrasting tones in Lowland Marsh.