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In 1473 he began directing the work to be done in the ducal chapel in the Castello Sforzesco. Only a few of the frescoes in the ducal chapel still survive today. It is difficult to determine the precise role Bembo played in the decoration of the chapel because he worked alongside several other artists, which would become a theme in his later life. In 1474 he worked on a chapel in the church of Santa Maria da Caravaggio alongside Giacomino Vincemala. He also worked closely with other associates on the polyptych in Pavia where he worked with Vincenzo Foppa and Zanetto Bugatto. In 1476 he painted frescoes of The Procession of the Magi and the Annunciation in the Collegio Castiglioni Chapel, Pavia. His work for the Sforza court officially came to an end following the assassination of Galeazzo Sforza in 1477. He is also well known for his painting Jesus among the Doctors which hangs in the Pitti Palace in Florence. |
Authorship |
Art historians believe his style improved over the years as he learned how to accurately represent space. Despite having a considerable number of works attributed to him, only the portraits of the Sforza family are surely his. There has been much debate over the authenticity of his works due to some of his earlier works being dissimilar from one another, as if they were done by different people. It is hard to assess the breadth of his work because of the predominance of the Bembo name in the region. In addition, given that Bonifacio only has two secured works, it is nearly impossible to determine his style with such a small sample size. Further investigation is needed before any conclusive claims can be made about the authenticity of his works. Many of his attributed works can be found in museums and galleries in Italy. His Coronation of the Virgin can be found in Cremona while his Drawings Illustrating the Story of Lancelot can be found in the library of Florence. |
Tarot cards |
One of Bonifacio's best known works is the deck of tarot cards he painted for Bianca Maria Visconti and Francesco Sforza in the mid fifteenth-century, probably after 1455. This deck is known as the Visconti-Sforza, or "Colleoni Tarot". |
Tarot cards began to appear a little before the mid-fifteenth century, making Bembo one of the first artists to paint a deck of them. Bianca Maria and her husband chose to have Bembo paint the cards because he was their favorite painter. In all, Bembo and his workshop must have painted seventy-eight cards of the full deck. However, the modelling of the putti on six trumps is different from Bembo's style and they are believed to have been painted to replace lost cards. The old attribution to by Antonio Cicognara is now revised, for Franco dei Russi may well be the artist who painted them. Of these seventy-eight, four have been lost over the course of history: the Devil, the Tower, the Knight of Coins, and the Three of Swords. The Three of Swords was lost sometime after 1903 by Count Alessandro Colleoni, who had inherited seventy-five cards. |
The deck is composed of four main suits known as Swords (spade), Cups (coppe), Coins (denari), and Staves (bastoni). In addition the deck had a fifth suit of twenty-one trumps and a wild card known as the Fool. Bembo and his assistants hand painted each individual card with skill, managing to incorporate the Visconti motto into many cards of the four main suits. On the fifth suit he managed to add Sforza devices. The deck is thought to have been painted around 1455, because Francesco Sforza's three-ring device can be found on the Emperor and Empress cards. Each card was painted and illuminated on heavy cardboard and measures 175 by 87 millimeters. |
Given their beauty and elegance, the cards were very rarely played with, if at all, by the Sforza family, based on the relative wear and tear on the cards compared to other decks the family owned. Even today the beauty of the cards has an impact on people. Italo Calvino wrote a novel titled The castle of crossed destinies based on the deck of cards Bembo created. Today, the cards can be found in two different places as the set has been broken up throughout the years. The Morgan Library & Museum, in New York, acquired 35 of the cards in 1911 and they have remained there ever since. At the Morgan Library, the cards are kept in transparent envelopes so they may be examined without handling them. They are also held in a fourteenth century French casket-box decorated in relief with chivalric scenes. Thirteen cards are owned by the Colleoni family who inherited them from the Donati family, and are deposited in the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo. Finally, the Accademia Carrara owns the other 26 cards, that were bequeathed in 1900 to the institution by Francesco Baglioni, a friend of Count Colleoni, who had traded them with Colleoni. |
References |
Sources |
Ticozzi, Stefano (1830). Dizionario degli architetti, scultori, pittori, intagliatori in rame ed in pietra, coniatori di medaglie, musaicisti, niellatori, intarsiatori d'ogni età e d'ogni nazione. Vol. 1. Milan: Gaetano Schiepatti. p. 140. |
Cesar Pietersz, or Cesar Boetius van Everdingen (1616/17 – buried 13 October 1678), older brother of Allart van Everdingen and Jan van Everdingen, was a Dutch Golden Age portrait and history painter. |
Biography |
He was born in Alkmaar and educated in Utrecht, where he learned to paint from Jan Gerritsz van Bronckhorst. Caesar became a member of the painter's guild in Alkmaar in 1632. His first known painting dates from 1636. In 1648 he moved to Haarlem, where he joined the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke and the civic guard (or schutterij) there, where he met Jacob van Campen. From 1648 to 1650 He helped him with the decoration of the Oranje Zaal (Orange room) in Huis ten Bosch. In 1658 he moved back to Alkmaar where he started a workshop and took on pupils. He died and was buried in the Grote- or St. Laurenskerk in Alkmaar. |
Works |
Many of his pictures are to be seen in the museums and private houses of the Netherlands, with several on display at the Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar. His pupils were Jan Theunisz Blanckerhoff, Adriaen Dekker, Hendrik Graauw, and Thomas Heeremans. Houbraken also lists two other pupils; Adriaen Warmenhuizen, and Laurens Oosthoorn. The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid owns a Vertumnus and Pomona c. 1637–1640. |
Gallery |
References |
External links |
Media related to Caesar van Everdingen at Wikimedia Commons |
Caesar van Everdingen on Artnet |
Cesar van Everdingen at Artcyclopedia |
Biography at Web Gallery of Art |
Works and literature at PubHist |
Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro ( piss-AR-oh; French: [kamij pisaʁo]; 10 July 1830 – 13 November 1903) was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas (now in the US Virgin Islands, but then in the Danish West Indies). His importance resides in his contributions to both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Pissarro studied from great forerunners, including Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. He later studied and worked alongside Georges Seurat and Paul Signac when he took on the Neo-Impressionist style at the age of 54. |
In 1873 he helped establish a collective society of fifteen aspiring artists, becoming the "pivotal" figure in holding the group together and encouraging the other members. Art historian John Rewald called Pissarro the "dean of the Impressionist painters", not only because he was the oldest of the group, but also "by virtue of his wisdom and his balanced, kind, and warmhearted personality". Paul Cézanne said "he was a father for me. A man to consult and a little like the good Lord", and he was also one of Paul Gauguin's masters. Pierre-Auguste Renoir referred to his work as "revolutionary", through his artistic portrayals of the "common man", as Pissarro insisted on painting individuals in natural settings without "artifice or grandeur". |
Pissarro is the only artist to have shown his work at all eight Paris Impressionist exhibitions, from 1874 to 1886. He "acted as a father figure not only to the Impressionists" but to all four of the major Post-Impressionists, Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin, and van Gogh. |
Early years |
Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro was born on 10 July 1830 on the island of St. Thomas to Frederick Abraham Gabriel Pissarro and Rachel Manzano-Pomié. His father was of Portuguese Jewish descent and held French nationality. His mother was from a French-Jewish family from St. Thomas. His father was a merchant who came to the island from France to deal with the hardware store of a deceased uncle, Isaac Petit, and married his widow. The marriage caused a stir within St. Thomas's small Jewish community because she was previously married to Frederick's uncle and according to Jewish law a man is forbidden from marrying his aunt. In subsequent years his four children attended the all-black primary school. Upon his death, his will specified that his estate be split equally between the synagogue and St. Thomas' Protestant church. |
When Pissarro was twelve his father sent him to boarding school in France. He studied at the Savary Academy in Passy near Paris. While a young student, he developed an early appreciation of the French art masters. Monsieur Savary himself gave him a strong grounding in drawing and painting and suggested he draw from nature when he returned to St. Thomas. |
After his schooling, Pissarro returned to St. Thomas at the age of sixteen or seventeen, where his father advocated Pissarro to work in his business as a port clerk. Nevertheless, Pissarro took every opportunity during those next five years at the job to practice drawing during breaks and after work. |
Visual theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff claims that the young Pissarro was inspired by the artworks of James Gay Sawkins, a British painter and geologist who lived in Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas circa 1847. Pissarro may have attended art classes taught by Sawkins and seen Sawkins's paintings of Mitla, Mexico. Mirzoeff states, "A formal analysis suggests that [Sawkins's] work influenced the young Pissarro, who had just returned to the island from his school in France. Soon afterward, Pissarro began his own drawings of the local African population in apparent imitation of Sawkins," creating "sketches for a postslavery imagination." |
When Pissarro turned twenty-one, Danish artist Fritz Melbye, then living on St. Thomas, inspired him to take on painting as a full-time profession, becoming his teacher and friend. Pissarro then chose to leave his family and job and live in Venezuela, where he and Melbye spent the next two years working as artists in Caracas and La Guaira. He drew everything he could, including landscapes, village scenes, and numerous sketches, enough to fill up multiple sketchbooks. |
Life in France |
In 1855, Pissarro moved back to Paris where he began working as an assistant to Anton Melbye, Fritz Melbye's brother and also a painter. He also studied paintings by other artists whose style impressed him: Courbet, Charles-François Daubigny, Jean-François Millet, and Corot. He also enrolled in various classes taught by masters, at schools such as École des Beaux-Arts and Académie Suisse. But Pissarro eventually found their teaching methods "stifling," states art historian John Rewald. This prompted him to search for alternative instruction, which he requested and received from Corot.: 11 |
Paris Salon and Corot's influence |
His initial paintings were in accord with the standards at the time to be displayed at the Paris Salon, the official body whose academic traditions dictated the kind of art that was acceptable. The Salon's annual exhibition was essentially the only marketplace for young artists to gain exposure. As a result, Pissarro worked in the traditional and prescribed manner to satisfy the tastes of its official committee. |
In 1859 his first painting was accepted and exhibited. His other paintings during that period were influenced by Camille Corot, who tutored him. He and Corot shared a love of rural scenes painted from nature. It was by Corot that Pissarro was inspired to paint outdoors, also called "plein air" painting. Pissarro found Corot, along with the work of Gustave Courbet, to be "statements of pictorial truth," writes Rewald. He discussed their work often. Jean-François Millet was another whose work he admired, especially his "sentimental renditions of rural life".: 12 |
Use of natural outdoor settings |
During this period Pissarro began to understand and appreciate the importance of expressing on canvas the beauties of nature without adulteration.: 12 After a year in Paris, he therefore began to leave the city and paint scenes in the countryside to capture the daily reality of village life. He found the French countryside to be "picturesque," and worthy of being painted. It was still mostly agricultural and sometimes called the "golden age of the peasantry".: 17 Pissarro later explained the technique of painting outdoors to a student: |
"Work at the same time upon sky, water, branches, ground, keeping everything going on an equal basis and unceasingly rework until you have got it. Paint generously and unhesitatingly, for it is best not to lose the first impression." |
Corot would complete his paintings back in his studio, often revising them according to his preconceptions. Pissarro, however, preferred to finish his paintings outdoors, often at one sitting, which gave his work a more realistic feel. As a result, his art was sometimes criticised as being "vulgar," because he painted what he saw: "rutted and edged hodgepodge of bushes, mounds of earth, and trees in various stages of development." According to one source, such details were equivalent to today's art showing garbage cans or beer bottles on the side of a street. This difference in style created disagreements between Pissarro and Corot. |
With Monet, Cézanne, and Guillaumin |
In 1859, while attending the free school, the Académie Suisse, Pissarro became friends with a number of younger artists who likewise chose to paint in the more realistic style. Among them were Claude Monet, Armand Guillaumin and Paul Cézanne. What they shared in common was their dissatisfaction with the dictates of the Salon. Cézanne's work had been mocked at the time by the others in the school, and, writes Rewald, in his later years Cézanne "never forgot the sympathy and understanding with which Pissarro encouraged him.": 16 As a part of the group, Pissarro was comforted from knowing he was not alone, and that others similarly struggled with their art. |
Pissarro agreed with the group about the importance of portraying individuals in natural settings, and expressed his dislike of any artifice or grandeur in his works, despite what the Salon demanded for its exhibits. In 1863 almost all of the group's paintings were rejected by the Salon, and French Emperor Napoleon III instead decided to place their paintings in a separate exhibit hall, the Salon des Refusés. However, only works of Pissarro and Cézanne were included, and the separate exhibit brought a hostile response from both the officials of the Salon and the public. |
In subsequent Salon exhibits of 1865 and 1866, Pissarro acknowledged his influences from Melbye and Corot, whom he listed as his masters in the catalogue. But in the exhibition of 1868 he no longer credited other artists as an influence, in effect declaring his independence as a painter. This was noted at the time by art critic and author Émile Zola, who offered his opinion: |
"Camille Pissarro is one of the three or four true painters of this day ... I have rarely encountered a technique that is so sure." |
Another writer tries to describe elements of Pissarro's style: |
"The brightness of his palette envelops objects in atmosphere ... He paints the smell of the earth.": 35 |
And though, on orders from the hanging Committee and the Marquis de Chennevières, Pissarro's paintings of Pontoise for example had been skyed, hung near the ceiling, this did not prevent Jules-Antoine Castagnary from noting that the qualities of his paintings had been observed by art lovers. At the age of thirty-eight, Pissarro had begun to win himself a reputation as a landscapist to rival Corot and Daubigny. |
In the late 1860s or early 1870s, Pissarro became fascinated with Japanese prints, which influenced his desire to experiment in new compositions. He described the art to his son Lucien: |
"It is marvelous. This is what I see in the art of this astonishing people ... nothing that leaps to the eye, a calm, a grandeur, an extraordinary unity, a rather subdued radiance ...": 19 |
Marriage and children |
In 1871 in Croydon, England, he married his mother's maid, Julie Vellay, a vineyard grower's daughter, with whom he had seven children, six of whom would become painters: Lucien Pissarro (1863–1944), Georges Henri Manzana Pissarro (1871–1961), Félix Pissarro (1874–1897), Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro (1878–1952), Jeanne Bonin-Pissarro (1881–1948), and Paul-Émile Pissarro (1884–1972). They lived outside Paris in Pontoise and later in Louveciennes, both of which places inspired many of his paintings including scenes of village life, along with rivers, woods, and people at work. He also kept in touch with the other artists of his earlier group, especially Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, and Frédéric Bazille. |
The London years |
After the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, having only Danish nationality and being unable to join the army, he moved his family to Norwood, then a village on the edge of London. However, his style of painting, which was a forerunner of what was later called "Impressionism", did not do well. He wrote to his friend, Théodore Duret, that "my painting doesn't catch on, not at all ..." |
Pissarro met the Paris art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, in London, who became the dealer who helped sell his art for most of his life. Durand-Ruel put him in touch with Monet who was likewise in London during this period. They both viewed the work of British landscape artists John Constable and J. M. W. Turner, which confirmed their belief that their style of open air painting gave the truest depiction of light and atmosphere, an effect that they felt could not be achieved in the studio alone. Pissarro's paintings also began to take on a more spontaneous look, with loosely blended brushstrokes and areas of impasto, giving more depth to the work. |
Paintings |
Through the paintings Pissarro completed at this time, he records Sydenham and the Norwoods at a time when they were just recently connected by railways, but prior to the expansion of suburbia. One of the largest of these paintings is a view of St. Bartholomew's Church at Lawrie Park Avenue, commonly known as The Avenue, Sydenham, in the collection of the National Gallery in London. Twelve oil paintings date from his stay in Upper Norwood and are listed and illustrated in the catalogue raisonné prepared jointly by his fifth child Ludovic-Rodolphe Pissarro and Lionello Venturi and published in 1939. These paintings include Lower Norwood Under Snow, and Lordship Lane Station, views of The Crystal Palace relocated from Hyde Park, Dulwich College, Sydenham Hill, All Saints Church Upper Norwood, and a lost painting of St. Stephen's Church. |
Returning to France, Pissarro lived in Pontoise from 1872 to 1884. In 1890 he again visited England and painted some ten scenes of central London. He came back again in 1892, painting in Kew Gardens and Kew Green, and also in 1897, when he produced several oils described as being of Bedford Park, Chiswick, but in fact all being of the nearby Stamford Brook area except for one of Bath Road, which runs from Stamford Brook along the south edge of Bedford Park. |
French Impressionism |
When Pissarro returned to his home in France after the war, he discovered that of the 1,500 paintings he had done over 20 years, which he was forced to leave behind when he moved to London, only 40 remained. The rest had been damaged or destroyed by the soldiers, who often used them as floor mats outside in the mud to keep their boots clean. It is assumed that many of those lost were done in the Impressionist style he was then developing, thereby "documenting the birth of Impressionism." Armand Silvestre, a critic, went so far as to call Pissarro "basically the inventor of this [Impressionist] painting"; however, Pissarro's role in the Impressionist movement was "less that of the great man of ideas than that of the good counselor and appeaser ..." "Monet ... could be seen as the guiding force.": 280, 283 |
He soon reestablished his friendships with the other Impressionist artists of his earlier group, including Cézanne, Monet, Manet, Renoir, and Degas. Pissarro now expressed his opinion to the group that he wanted an alternative to the Salon so their group could display their own unique styles. |
To assist in that endeavour, in 1873 he helped establish a separate collective, called the "Société Anonyme des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs," which included fifteen artists. Pissarro created the group's first charter and became the "pivotal" figure in establishing and holding the group together. One writer noted that with his prematurely grey beard, the forty-three-year-old Pissarro was regarded as a "wise elder and father figure" by the group. Yet he was able to work alongside the other artists on equal terms due to his youthful temperament and creativity. Another writer said of him that "he has unchanging spiritual youth and the look of an ancestor who remained a young man".: 36 |
Impressionist exhibitions that shocked the critics |
The following year, in 1874, the group held their First Impressionist Exhibition, which shocked and "horrified" the critics, who primarily appreciated only scenes portraying religious, historical, or mythological settings. They found fault with the Impressionist paintings on many grounds: |
The subject matter was considered "vulgar" and "commonplace," with scenes of street people going about their everyday lives. Pissarro's paintings, for instance, showed scenes of muddy, dirty, and unkempt settings; |
The manner of painting was too sketchy and looked incomplete, especially compared to the traditional styles of the period. The use of visible and expressive brushwork by all the artists was considered an insult to the craft of traditional artists, who often spent weeks on their work. Here, the paintings were often done in one sitting and the paints were applied wet-on-wet; |
The use of color by the Impressionists relied on new theories they developed, such as having shadows painted with the reflected light of surrounding, and often unseen, objects. |
A "revolutionary" style |
Pissarro showed five of his paintings, all landscapes, at the exhibit, and again Émile Zola praised his art and that of the others. In the Impressionist exhibit of 1876, however, art critic Albert Wolff complained in his review, "Try to make M. Pissarro understand that trees are not violet, that sky is not the color of fresh butter ..." Journalist and art critic Octave Mirbeau on the other hand, writes, "Camille Pissarro has been a revolutionary through the revitalized working methods with which he has endowed painting".: 36 |
According to Rewald, Pissarro had taken on an attitude more simple and natural than the other artists. He writes: |
"Rather than glorifying—consciously or not—the rugged existence of the peasants, he placed them without any 'pose' in their habitual surroundings, thus becoming an objective chronicler of one of the many facets of contemporary life.": 20 |
In later years, Cézanne also recalled this period and referred to Pissarro as "the first Impressionist". In 1906, a few years after Pissarro's death, Cézanne, then 67 and a role model for the new generation of artists, paid Pissarro a debt of gratitude by having himself listed in an exhibition catalogue as "Paul Cézanne, pupil of Pissarro".: 45 |
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