David's Hall of Fame

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, born 15 July 1606 in Leiden, was the son of a miller, Harmen Gerritsz. van Rijn (1568-1630), and his wife Neeltgen van Zuytbrouck (1568-1640). The youngest son of at least ten children, Rembrandt was not expected to carry on his father's business. Since the family was prosperous enough, they sent him to the Leiden Latin School, where he remained for seven years. In 1620 he enrolled briefly at the University of Leiden, perhaps to study theology. Orlers (see person bibliography), Rembrandt's first biographer, however, related that because "by nature he was moved toward the art of painting and drawing," he left the University to study the fundamentals of painting with the Leiden artist Jacob Isaacsz. van Swanenburgh (1571-1638). After three years with this master, Rembrandt left for Amsterdam in 1624, where he studied for six months under Pieter Lastman (1583-1633), the most important history painter of the day.

After returning to Leiden Rembrandt quickly developed a reputation as a history painter and portraitist. By 1628 his work, and that of his colleague in Leiden, Jan Lievens (1609-1674), was enthusiastically praised by the secretary to the Prince of Orange, Constantijn Huygens (1596-1674). Huygens admired particularly Rembrandt's uncanny ability to convey feeling through gesture and expression and through dramatic contrasts of light and dark. That same year, Rembrandt, at the age of twenty-two, took on his first pupils, Gerard Dou (1613-1675) and Isaac Jouderville (1612-1645/1648). Documents indicate that Jouderville paid Rembrandt 100 guilders a year to study with him.

By 1631 Rembrandt had become financially involved with the Amsterdam art dealer Hendrick van Uylenburgh (c. 1587-1661). The nature of Van Uylenburgh's enterprise, which was called "an academy" in its day, is not entirely understood, but it appears that he orchestrated an active art studio that specialized in portrait commissions. In any event, Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam around 1632, living with Van Uylenburgh and running his "academy" until 1635. Rembrandt achieved tremendous success. He received many commissions and attracted a number of students who came to learn his method of painting. Artists who had previously been trained elsewhere, including Jacob Backer (1608-1651), Govaert Flinck (1615-1660), and Ferdinand Bol (1616-1680), came to work during these years at Van Uylenburgh's studio under Rembrandt's guidance.

In 1633 Rembrandt became engaged to Van Uylenburgh's niece, Saskia (1612-1642), daughter of a wealthy and prominent Frisian family. They married the following year. In 1639, at the height of his success, Rembrandt purchased a large house on the Sint-Anthonisbreestraat in Amsterdam for a considerable amount of money. To acquire the house, however, he had to borrow heavily, a debt that would eventually figure in his financial debacles of the mid-1650s. Rembrandt and Saskia had four children, but only Titus, born in 1641, survived infancy. After a long illness Saskia died in 1642, the very year Rembrandt painted The Night Watch (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).

During the 1640s life became more unsettled for Rembrandt. Geertje Dirckx (1600/1610-1656?) soon entered the household as a nurse for Titus and became a companion for Rembrandt. In 1649 Rembrandt dismissed her and entered into a life-long relationship with Hendrickje Stoffels (1626-1663). While Hendrickje seems to have been a warm and caring companion for Rembrandt, the early 1650s were fraught with personal turmoil. Rembrandt and Geertje Dirckx became embroiled in a number of contentious law suits that give the impression that the artist treated his former mistress quite badly. Rembrandt and Hendrickje never married because of stipulations in Saskia's will, but that situation caused Hendrickje public humiliation when she became pregnant in 1654. She was called before a council of the Dutch Reformed Church and censored for having "lived with Rembrandt like a whore." Their daughter Cornelia was baptized on 30 October 1654.

Financial difficulties also beset Rembrandt during these years, and he was forced to declare insolvency in 1656. His estate, including his large art collection, was auctioned in 1657 and 1658. Rembrandt then moved to an artist's quarter in the Jordaan district of Amsterdam, eventually renting a relatively small house on the Rozengracht where he lived for the rest of his life. Hendrickje and Titus subsequently formed a business partnership to protect him from further demands by creditors.

Although Rembrandt did receive a number of important portrait commissions during the late 1650s and early 1660s, stylistic trends had veered away from his deeply personal manner of painting. He became more and more isolated from the mainstreams of Dutch art. No students are documented to have worked with him during the latter half of the 1650s, and only one student, Aert de Gelder (1645-1727), is known to have come to study with him in the 1660s.

Rembrandt's financial situation remained poor during the 1660s. He owed a substantial amount of money, in particular to the art dealer and collector Lodewijk van Ludick, a debt he hoped to repay with the money he would receive from his large painting for one of the lunettes in the Amsterdam Town Hall, The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis (National Museum, Stockholm). Rembrandt's composition, however, was rejected by city authorities in 1662. To try to raise funds he was then forced to sell Saskia's grave in the Oude Kerk. He never regained financial solvency, and existed during the last years of his life by living on the savings of his daughter Cornelia.

Although Rembrandt remained famous as an artist, there were many burdens in his personal life during his last years. In 1663 a plague that ravaged Amsterdam claimed the life of Hendrickje. Four years later Titus married Madgalena van Loo (1642-1669), but the following year, in 1668, he also died, the victim of another plague epidemic. When Rembrandt died on 4 October 1669, he was buried in an unknown rented grave in the Westerkerk, Amsterdam. [This is an edited version of the artist's biography published, or to be published, in the NGA Systematic Catalogue]

The Girl with the Pearl Earring, 1665. Mauritshuis, The Hague.

Dutch painter. Among the great Dutch artists of the 17th century, he is now second in renown only to Rembrandt, but he made little mark during his lifetime and then long languished in obscurity. Almost all of the contemporary references to him are in colourless official documents and his career is in many ways enigmatic. Apart from a visit to The Hague in 1672 (to act as an expert witness concerning a group of Italian paintings of disputed authenticity), he is never known to have left his native Delft. He entered the painters' guild there in 1653 and was twice elected 'hooftman' (headman), but his teacher is not known. His name is often linked with that of Carel Fabritius, but it is doubtful if he can have formally taught Vermeer, and this distinction may belong to Leonaert Bramer, although there is no similarity between their work. Only about thirty-five to forty paintings by Vermeer are known, and although some early works may have been destroyed in the disastrous Delft magazine explosion of 1654, it is unlikely that the figure was ever much larger; this is because most of the Vermeers mentioned in early sources can be identified with surviving pictures, whilst only a few pictures now attributed to him are not mentioned in these sources - thus there are few loose ends. This small output may be at least partially explained by the fact that he almost certainly earned most of his living by means other than painting. His father kept an inn and was a picture-dealer and Vermeer very likely inherited both businesses. In spite of this he had grave financial troubles (he had a large family to support his wife bore him fifteen children, and she was declared insolvent in the year after his death).

Only three of Vermeer's paintings are dated - The Procuress (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, 1656), The Astronomer (Louvre, Paris, 1668), and its companion The Geographer (Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, 1669). (Another signed and dated work, St Praxedis mopping up the Blood of the Martyrs of 1655, appeared in the 1970s, but it is of doubtful authenticity. It is in a private collection.) It is difficult to fit his other paintings into a convincing chronology, but his work nevertheless divides into three fairly clear phases. The first is represented by only two works - Christ in the House of Mary and Martha (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh) and Diana and her Companions (Mauritshuis, The Hague} - both probably dating from a year or two before The Procuress. They are so different from Vermeer's other works - in their comparatively large scale, their subject matter, and their handling - that Diana and her Companions was long attributed to the obscure Jan Vermeer of Utrecht (c. 1630-after 1692), in spite of a genuine signature. The Procuress marks the transition to the middle phase of Vermeer's career, for although it is fairly large and warm in tonality - like the two history paintings - it is a contemporary life scene, as were virtually all Vermeer's pictures from now on. In the central part of his career (into which most of his work falls) Vermeer painted those serene and harmonious images of domestic life that for their beauty of composition, handling, and treatment of light raise him into a different class from any other Dutch genre painter. The majority show one or two figures in a room lit from the onlooker's left, engaged in domestic or recreational tasks. The predominant colours are yellow, blue, and grey, and the compositions have an abstract simplicity which confers on them an impact out of relation to their small size. In reproduction they can look quite smooth and detailed, but Vermeer often applies the paint broadly, with variations in texture suggesting the play of light with exquisite vibrancy - the critic Jan Veth aptly described his paint surface as looking like 'crushed pearls melted together'. From this period of Vermeer's greatest achievement also date his only landscape - the incomparable View of Delft (Mauritshuis), in which he surpassed even the greatest of his specialist contemporaries in lucidity and truth of atmosphere - and his much-loved Little Street (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). Another painting of this period is somewhat larger in scale and unusual in subject for him - The Artist's Studio (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), in which Vermeer shows a back view of a painter, perhaps a suitably enigmatic self portrait. In the third and final phase of his career Vermeer's work lost part of its magic as it became somewhat harder.

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (March 30, 1746–April 16, 1828).

Goya was a court painter to the Spanish Crown and a chronicler of history. He has been regarded both as the last of the Old Masters and as the first of the moderns. The subversive and subjective element in his art, as well as his bold handling of paint, provided a model for the work of later generations of artists, notably Manet and Picasso.

Many of Goya's works are on display in the Museo del Prado in Madrid."(Source: Wikipedia)

The Death of Marat (1793). Oil on canvas 162 × 128 cm Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels

Jacques-Louis David (August 30, 1748 – December 29, 1825) was a highly influential French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the prominent painter of the era. In the 1780s his cerebral brand of history painting marked a change in taste away from Rococo frivolity toward a classical austerity and severity, chiming with the moral climate of the final years of the ancien régime.

David later became an active supporter of the French Revolution and friend of Maximilien Robespierre, and was effectively a dictator of the arts under the French Republic. Imprisoned after Robespierre's fall from power, he aligned himself with yet another political regime upon his release, that of Napoleon I. It was at this time that he developed his 'Empire style', notable for its use of warm Venetian colours. David had a huge number of pupils, making him the strongest influence in French art of the 19th century, especially academic Salon painting. (Source: Wikipedia)

Woman with a Pearl. Paris: Musée du Louvre.

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, the first of the great modern landscapists, was born in Paris. The son of a wealthy cloth merchant, Corot was a businessman before he became, at the age of twenty-six, an artist. Consequently, he was able to paint without the necessity of selling his work. After a period of study with two academic painters, Corot went to Italy in 1825 where he spent two years roaming the countryside outside Rome as had Claude Lorrain two centuries before. Unlike Claude, however, Corot did not sketch; he painted directly from nature upon small canvases, observing carefully, translating his visual experiences directly and concentrating on architectural clarity and the play of light upon volume. This process led to an entirely new concept of landscape painting. Corot kept his discoveries to himself, however, and sent only Neoclassical landscapes to the Paris Salons.

In 1828 he returned to France to paint in the soft, gentle light of the Ile-de-France, near Paris. In this period, Corot produced a group of hazy landscapes with misty grays veiling nature's color, an effect achieved by overpainting while his underpainting was still wet. This was a revolutionary step that led further along the path followed by the Impressionists. Corot continued to paint in almost entire obscurity and it was not until 1848 that it became known that he also painted figures with an exquisite poetic grace.

By 1855, his work was in great demand and he was able, because of his private income and his position on the admissions jury for the Salons, to assist many young and struggling artists, either by gifts of money or by signing his name to canvases by those less fortunate than he was. Corot painted more than three thousand works: small sketches and paintings from nature done in Italy, France, Switzerland, and Holland; large Salon works on historical themes; figure paintings and; and after 1850, landscapes painted from memory in the misty green tonality with which his name is associated. Corot's influence upon modern art was profound for he was the first to study nature and so was able to give his works that quality of the real that comes from direct and immediate visual experience. (Source: 3D-Dali.com)