Pietro Antonio Rotari (1707-1762) | A peasant girl In profile wearing a white scarf

Pietro Antonio Rotari (30 September 1707 - 31 August 1762) was an Italian painter🎨 of the Baroque period🎨.

Born in Verona, he led a peripatetic career, and died in Saint Petersburg, where he had traveled to paint for the Russian court.

His portraits, mostly of women, are renowned for being beautiful and realistic.

Rotari's works were generally limited to royal portraits held by notables such as emperors and court ladies.

Godfried Schalcken (1643-1706) | Genre painter

Godfried Schalcken or Gottfried Schalken was a Dutch🎨 genre and portrait painter.

He was noted for his mastery in reproducing the effect of candlelight, and painted in the exquisite and highly polished manner of the Leiden fijnschilders.

• Life and work

Godfried Schalcken was born in Made, North Brabant, the son of Cornelis Schalcken and Aletta Lydius.

Canaletto | Vedute of Venice

Giovanni Antonio Canal (18 October 1697 - 19 April 1768), commonly known as Canaletto (Italian: [kanaˈletto]), was an Italian painter🎨 of city views or vedute, of Venice, Rome and London.

He also painted imaginary views (referred to as capricci), although the demarcation in his works between the real and the imaginary is never quite clearcut.

He was further an important printmaker using the etching technique.

Market painting | Page 3

Constantine Paul Lafargue (1729-1782)

Jean-Baptiste Greuze | Broken Eggs, 1756

Broken Eggs attracted favorable comment when exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1757.

One critic noted that the young serving girl had a noble pose worthy of a history painter.

The canvas was painted in Rome, but the principal source may have been a seventeenth-century Dutch work by Frans van Mieris the Elder (1635-1681) - State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, which Jean-Baptiste Greuze (French painter🎨, 1725-1805) would have known from an engraving.

The broken eggs symbolize the loss of the girl's virginity. | © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Jean Baptiste Greuze | Broken Eggs, 1756 (detail) | Metropolitan Museum of Art

Market painting | Page 2

Hendrik Martensz Sorgh (Dutch Baroque Era painter, ca.1611-1670)

Gaspar van Wittel | Baroque / Vedutista painter

Caspar van Wittel or Gaspar van Wittel - born Jasper Adriaensz van Wittel; Italian name variations: Gaspare Vanvitelli, Gasparo degli Occhiali- (1652/1653, Amersfoort - September 13, 1736, Rome) was a Dutch painter🎨 and draughtsman who had a long career in Rome.

He played a pivotal role in the development of the genre of topographical painting known as veduta.

He is credited with turning topography into a painterly specialism in Italian art.

John Constable RA (1776-1837) | Clouds study

John Constable, RA was an English🎨 landscape painter in the naturalistic tradition.

Constable considered the sky of paramount importance to landscape painting, and in a letter of 1821 to his close friend John Fisher, he wrote:

‘It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the keynote, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment … The sky is the source of light in Nature, and governs everything’.

Clouds is one of around fifty extant paintings of the sky which Constable made in Hampstead, between 1821 and 1822, and it has been speculated that he produced more than one hundred such studies at the time.

Constable made his intense examination, which he called ‘skying’, to precisely record different weather and atmospheric conditions, in preparation for his grand landscapes. | The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) Australia

Benedetto Luti | Christ and the Woman of Samaria, 1715-1720

Artist: Benedetto Luti⏩ (Italian, Florence 1666–1724 Rome)
Date: 1715-20
Medium: Oil on copper
Dimensions: 15 × 12 1/8 in. (38.2 × 30.9 cm)
Classification: Paintings
Credit Line: Rogers Fund, by exchange, 2015
Accession Number: 2015.645
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 623

Benedetto Luti | Study of a Girl in Red, 1717

Artist: Benedetto Luti (Italian, Florence 1666-1724 Rome)

Date: 1717

Medium: Pastel and chalk on blue laid paper, laid down on paste paper

Dimensions: 16 1/2 x 13 3/8 in. (41.9 x 34 cm)

Classification: Pastels and Oil Sketches on Paper

Credit Line: Gwynne Andrews Fund, 2007

Accession Number: 2007.361

Vicente López Portaña | The Marquess of Remisa, 1844

Title: The Marquess of Remisa
Author: Vicente López Portaña** (Spanish painter**, 1772-1850)
Date: 1844
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: w147.5 x h232
Current location: Museo Nacional del Romanticismo

Van Gogh about Jean-François Millet

Vincent van Gogh in a letter to Theo, from The Hague, 5 Nov 1882 - original manuscript of letter no. 280 - at Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam:

"..I fear that in a few years there may be a kind of 'panic', in this form: 'since Millet' we have sunk very low - the word decadence, now whispered or pronounced in veiled terms (see Herkomer), will then sound like an alarm bell. Many, like I myself, now keep quiet, because they already have the reputation of being awkward customers, and talking about it doesn't help".

John Frederick Lewis (British, 1805-1876)

John Frederick Lewis (1805-1876)

John Frederick Lewis was an British** Orientalist painter specialized in Oriental and Mediterranean scenes. Lewis travelled in Spain and Morocco between 1832-1834.

His very careful and loving representation of Islamic architecture, furnishings, screens, and costumes set new standards of realism, which influenced other artists, including the leading French** Orientalist painter Jean-Léon Gérôme** in his later works.

Jan Portielje (1829-1908)

Dutch/Belgian painter Jan Frederik Pieter Portielje studied in Amsterdam at the School of Art under J Bing and in Antwerp under Dyckmans.
Jan Portielje enjoyed great acclaim during his lifetime, participating successfully in numerous exhibitions in Holland, Belgium and abroad.

Jan Frederik Pieter Portielje (1829-1908)

Jan Frederik Pieter Portielje was a Dutch / Belgian Academic Classical painter of genre and portraits.
Born in Amsterdam, 29 April 1829 and died in Antwerp, 6 Feb 1908.
Jan Portielje studied in Amsterdam at the School of Art under J Bing and in Antwerp under Dyckmans. Jan Portielje enjoyed great acclaim during his lifetime, participating successfully in numerous exhibitions in Holland, Belgium and abroad.

Laurits Andersen Ring (1854-1893)

Danish artist Laurits Andersen Ring was born on 15 August 1854 and died on 10 September 1933.
He was one of the finest Danish painters of his generation, a golden generation that established Danish painting in the eyes of the world, numbering amongst his contemporaries his friend Harmmershoi (1864-1916), Holsoe (1863-1935), Ilsted (1861-1933) and Monsted (1859-1941).

Gaspar van Wittel | The Darsena, Naples, ca. 1700-1718

Title: The Darsena, Naples.
Author: Gaspar van Wittel (Amersfoort, 1652/53-Roma, 1736).
Date: ca. 1700-1718.
Medium: Oil on canvas.
Dimensions: 74 x 171.8 cm.
Current location: Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection on loan at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Inv. no. (CTB.1996.36).

Luis Paret Y Alcazár | Charles III dining before the Court, 1775

Author: Paret y Alcázar, Luis (Madrid, 1746 - Madrid, 1799).
Title: Charles III dining before the Court.
Date: Ca. 1775.
Technique: Oil.
Support: Panel.
Dimension: High/Height: 50 cm.; Width: 64 cm.
Provenance: Lionel Harris, London, 1933; Acquisition, 1933.
Current location: Museo Nacional del Prado.

Benedetto Luti | Baroque painter

Benedetto Luti (17 November 1666 - 17 June 1724) was an Italian painter**.
In 1691, he moved to Rome, where he was patronized by Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, an enthusiast of Luti's pastel portraiture.
Luti was one of the first artists to work in pastels as the final composition as opposed to initial studies for paintings or frescoes. He also worked in oils and painted frescoes, including for the Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano.