Name the European Artist
Can You Identify these 18th-Century European Painters?
![David Wilkie's painting Letter of Introduction, Wikimedia Commons [public domain]](http://images.suite101.com/126557_wilkie_letter_of_introduction3.jpg "David Wilkie's painting Letter of Introduction, Wikimedia Commons [public domain]")
See how well you know these 18th-century English, Spanish, French, German, and Scottish painters. You might learn something new!
Which artist:
1. Had among his pall-bearers three dukes, two marquesses, and three earls?
Joshua Reynolds
Reynolds (1723-1792) was an 18th-century English painter who specialized in portraits, creating as many as 3,000 portraits. Early in his career, he spent two years in Italy where he studied the Old Masters and acquired a taste for the “Grand Style” which promoted idealization of the imperfect. Reynolds was the driving force behind the founding of the Royal Academy of Arts and served as its first president. He had friends among London’s intelligentsia, including Dr. Samuel Johnson, and is known as the renowned English portraitist of “the Age of Johnson.” He had a strong critic in poet/artist William Blake, however, who published his scathing Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses, in one part stating that Reynolds “was Hired to Depress art.” Blake attacked Reynolds for his ignorance, his errors of judgments, and his self-contradictions. Blake’s dislike for Reynolds was perhaps because Reynolds was an academic – where Blake had turned his back on the academic training – and a conservative – where Blake was a political radical with sympathies for the poor. Reynolds’ artistic rival Thomas Gainsborough was buried modestly in a quiet churchyard; when Reynolds was buried his pall-bearers included three dukes, two marquesses, three earls, a viscount, and a baron.
2. Was left deaf following an illness in 1792?
Francisco Goya
Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) was the 18th century's foremost Spanish painter – a court painter whose best work was created outside the restraints of his official duties. Goya was apprenticed to a local painter and then studied painting in Italy. Upon his return he created frescoes for the local cathedral. These frescoes secured his reputation. Next he began working on designs for royal tapestries in Madrid (his first royal commission). He moved on to doing portraits for the Spanish aristocracy. He gradually developed his own distinctive style of painting that investigated his inner thoughts, fantasies, and devices of his imagination. He made critical observations about people and their natures, creating satirical caricatures and his so-called Black Paintings like the disturbing "Saturn Devouring One of his Sons." Experts believe that events that Goya lived through, like the Inquisition, France’s invasion of Spain, his deafness from an illness in 1793, and his resulting feelings of isolation, are important to understanding his work, which became quite dark in mood and frequently depicts human misery in a satiric and sometimes nightmarish fashion.
3. Was made a baron by Charles X of France in 1824?
Antoine-Jean Gros
Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835), French Romantic painter, studied under his father, a successful Parisian miniature painter and portraitist. Gros made the acquaintance of Josephine de Beauharnais, Napoleon’s wife, and through her met Napoleon. From this point on, Gros’ life was forever changed. Working for Napoleon as a war artist, Gros would paint many large canvases of important scenes of Napoleon’s battles and would see his career success skyrocket. These paintings, according to art historian David O’Brien in his recent book After the Revolution (2006), have come to be regarded as masterpieces of both art and propaganda. This success earned Gros the title of Baron. After Napoleon’s defeat, Gros resorted to painting classic mythological pieces and never again experienced the same notoriety. Thereafter evidently haunted by a sense of failure, Gros drowned himself in the Seine.
4. Drowned in 1818 while swimming in the Tiber?
Carl Philipp Fohr
Fohr (1775-1818) was a short-lived 18th-century German Romantic painter. Fohr worked to create a new kind of art – borrowed from pictorial medieval art – in which German legend and folklore are featured in landscape settings. He tragically met an early death at the age of 23 in the Tiber while his first attempt at a large-scale painting "Mountain Landscape with Shepherds" remained incomplete. He left only five oil paintings.
5. Died at sea and was buried off Gibraltar?
David Wilkie
David Wilkie (1785-1841) was a Scottish painter of historical art, cabinet pictures, and genre pictures. His fame is mainly due to his genre pictures in the Dutch style. However, the humble simplicity of his compositions were in total contrast to the artificial and contrived nature of much the genre painting of his day. His work signaled a turning-point in British Art and he is famous as one of the founders of a new “Scottish School” of painting. Later he changed his style, trying to imitate the depth and richness of coloring of the old masters. In 1840 Wilkie went on an extended voyage to the East. Passing through Holland and Germany, he reached Constantinople, where, while detained by the war in Syria, he painted a portrait of the young sultan. He then sailed for Smyrna and traveled to Jerusalem, then went on to Alexandria. On his return trip he became ill and died at sea off the coast of Gibraltar.
Source:
Bailey, Colin J. The Art Quiz Book: 2000+ Questions on Painters and Paintings. Station Press: Scotland, 1995.
