Biography of Rembrandt van Rijn

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (15 July 1606 – 4 October 1669), one of the most eminent painters and engravers of the Dutch school, was the son of a miller (Herman Gerritaz van Rijn).

He was born in 1606, at a small village on the banks of the Rhine, between Leyderdorp and Leyden, whence he was called Rembrandt van Rijn, though his family name was Gerritaz.

He attended for a short time the Latin School at Leyden; and after studying art three years under Jacob van Swanenburg, and for a very limited period under Pieter Lastman at Amsterdam and Jacob Pinas at Haarlem, he returned home and devote himself to the study of nature.

It is said that his father, being in easy circumstances, intended him for one of the learned professions, but was induced by Rembrandt’s passion for the art to allow him to follow his inclination.

About 1630, Rembrandt move to Amsterdam. He not only resided with the art dealer Hedrick van Uylenbergh but also invested in the business both financially and through his own labor, teaching pupils and executing Uylenbergh’s steady stream of portrait commissions.

He copied nature with all its defects, as he saw it in his own country; and even this he sometimes debased, but seldom rose above it. There is a vein of good sense running through his works. His print of Christ healing sick, esteemed the most capital of his etchings, sold for thirty guineas: his portrait of the Burgomaster Six, has sold for more.

His famous paintings including: Night Watch (1642), the Staalmeesters (1662), and Jewish Bride (1665). Rembrandt’s portraits are also of great importance and go far beyond the conventions of the times. He was dogged by bad luck in his later life when commissions flagged and he was force to sell his possessions.
Biography of Rembrandt van Rijn

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (25 February 1841 – 3 December 1919) one of the famous impressionist painters in France believed, “A picture must be an amicable thing, joyous and pretty. There are enough troublesome things in life without inventing others.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges, Haute-Vienne, France, the child of a working class family. He was one of seven children in his family. His father Leonard Renoir was a tailor. His mother Marguerite Merlet, worked as a seamstress.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

At the age of 13, he worked in a porcelain factory where his drawing talents led to him being chosen to paint designs on fine china. He also painted hangings for overseas missionaries and decorations on fans before he enrolled in art school.

During those early years, he often visited the Louvre to study the French master painters. From 1860 to 1864, he was registered copyist at the Louvre. This meant he was allowed to visit museum copy the work of other artists.

Renoir had very little money, and sometimes could not even afford to paint, Ho work was met with some acceptance, however and he exhibited at the Salon for the first time in 1864 with Dancing Esmeralda.

In 1862 he began studying art under Charles Gleyre in Paris. There he met Alfred Sisley, Frederic Bazille, and Claude Monet. At times during the 1860s, he did not have enough money to buy paint. Although Renoir first exhibited paintings in 1864, recognition did not come for another ten years

La Moulin de la Galette, 1876, Musee d’Orsay 

One of the best known Impressionist works is Renoir's 1876 Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (Le Bal au Moulin de la Galette). The painting depicts an open-air scene, crowded with people, at a popular dance garden on the Butte Montmartre close to where he lived.

In 1892, exhibition organized by dealer Durand-Ruel marks the beginning of broad acclaim for his work.

Renoir dies of heart a heart attack in December 3, 1919 in Cagnes-sur-Mer.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

False Start by Jasper Johns

The False Start is one of the popular oil paintings of Jasper Johns and was made on canvas 170.8 centimeters long and 137.2 centimeters wide. The colorful painting has always impressed the people since the time it was released. The magnificent use of varied kinds of colors in painting is most impressive. Jasper Johns completed the painting in 1959.

Who is Jasper Johns? Born in Augusta, Georgia in 1930, Jasper Johns grew up in Allendale, South Carolina. He was the only child of William Jasper Johns and Jeannette Riley Johns. He studied at the University of South Carolina for three semesters before moved Parson School of Design.

Drafted into US Army in 1951, he started an art exhibition program for soldier at Fort Jackson, S.C. Together with Robert Rauschenberg, Johns is widely acknowledged as one of the most important American painters in the postwar era.

Beginning in 1959 his paintings included more painterly gestures as in False Start and Highway. In 1960 John’s dealer, Leo Castelli, had sold False Start for $3,150 to collector Robert Scull, who had made his money in the taxicab business.

He then sold False Start in the six figure range to François de Menil, the son of John and Dominique de Menil, heirs to the Schlumberger oil fortune. Castelli figured giving the booming market that the painting might sell for as much as $10 million, although had been estimated to fetch only $8 million tom $9 million.

SI Newhouse bought Jasper John’s painting False Start for $17 million in 1988, at the top of an overhead art market.

In early 1990s, at the bottom of the market, SI Newhouse started to sell what Castelli calls “some very good paintings.”

In Oct 12, 2006, the painting was sold to the Kenneth C. Griffin, for $80 million, making it the most expensive painting by a living artist.

False Start features sketchy bursts of vibrant colors with the names of the colors stenciled on them with contrasting hues. The naming of colors with differently colored, stenciled lettering seems to criticize abstract expressionism.
False Start by Jasper Johns 

German painter and graphic artist Max Beckman

Max Beckman was born in Leipzig on February 1884. He was one of Germany’s leading Expressionist painters. After his father early death, when Beckman was only 10, his family move to Brunswick and he was sent to a boarding school.

Beckman studied at the Weimar Academy (1900-1903) and then worked in Berlin.

He painted his first self-portrait at the age 15. His early paintings were influenced by impressionism, and he also produced works with biblical and mythological themes, reflecting his admiration of medieval art.

In 1906, Beckman painted his Great Scene of Death and Small Scene of Death, in which he tried to express and come to terms with his own grief at his mother’s painful death.

At the start of World War 1 (1914) he served as a medical orderly but was discharged following a nervous breakdown. These experiences of war profoundly influenced his later work.

In 1919, in the aftermath of the war, Beckman visited Berlin.  This was in March, at the height of the street fighting between revolutionaries and Freikops.

He responded to the chaos and violence in German’s cities with two of his most significant works of the period: Die Nacht (The Night) and the portfolio of large lithographs titles Die Holle (Hell).

The beginning is the eight of nine triptychs Beckman producing during the last two decades of his life between 1932 and 1950.

Beckman retained his life an instinctive fell to the art of the past, gravitating towards images and epochs in which he saw powerful and simple expression.

He taught in Frankfurt until 1933, when he was dismissed by the Nazi regime as a ‘degenerate artist’

He went first to Berlin, then to Paris and Amsterdam, and finally (in 1947) to the United States, where he taught a produced work that was lighter and less harsh. In the last two years of his life Beckman received academic honors and prizes in the United States and at the Venice Biennale.
German painter and graphic artist Max Beckman

Biography of French painter Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne is born in Aix-en-Provence Jan 19, 1839. He is a French painter and always called as a father of modern arts. He is famous for his landscapes and still-life paintings.

His father, Louis-Auguste Cézanne, was hardheaded businessman and banker whose standards of value were based primarily on money and accumulation.

From 1859 to 1861 Cézanne studied law in Aix and developed his early love of art by taking drawing lessons.

His canvases from 1861 to 1871, mostly portraits, are characterized by dark tones, thick paint, and strong lighting.

His lack of immediate success plus his father’s continuing disapproval of the unrespectable profession of painting, no doubt combined to make him think of giving up painting altogether.

Later, Camille Pissarro convinced Cézanne to adopt the broken brushwork and light palette of the impressionists.

Cézanne’s paintings were shown in the first exhibition of the Salon des Refuse’s in 1863, which displayed works not accepted by the jury of the official Paris Salon.

He claimed that his ambition was to "make of impressionism something solid and durable like the art of museums." By 1883 the artist was conveying mass and volume through a series of hatched strokes.

One of the painting is The Bather. It shows central male bather with his hands placed upon his waist and his head angled downwards towards the ground.

Cézanne exhibited little in his lifetime and worked in increasing artistic isolation, remaining in the South of France, in his beloved Provence, far from Paris.

Cezanne is thought of as a postimpressionist artist because he added new ideas to the impressionist style of painting.

On October 22 he died 1906, having nearly realized an ambition that he professed to friends on numerous occasions: to die while painting.

Paul Cézanne regarded as one of the fathers of modern art, he was an important figure in the development of 20th century art and a inspiration to Cubists and painters of the abstract.
Biography of French painter Paul Cézanne