Adam de Coster (1586-1643) | Card players by candlelight

In the absence of signed and documented works by Flemish painter🎨 Adam De Coster (1586-1643), all attributions have been based on Lucas Vorsterman's engraving after a lost original entitled "The Trick-trak player".

The present painting, which was also engraved by Vorsterman, shares a number of similarities with this key, lost work.

Both compositions are multi-figural and lit by candlelight, with a figure in the foreground partially shading the light source.

The artist adopts a low viewpoint in both paintings which means that the table-tops are hardly visible.

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

Werner van den Valckert | A girl holding pancakes in a feigned stone window, 1624

Werner van den Valckert (1580/85-1627) was a Dutch🎨 Golden Age painter and engraver.

Though he was born in Amsterdam, he became a member of the Guild of St. Luke in the Hague between 1600-1605.

By 1614 he had moved to Amsterdam, because his daughter was baptized there. His earliest dated etchings are from 1612.

His surviving paintings are historical allegories and portraits.

He also made a prestigious schuttersstuk, which features the Amsterdam burgermeester Albert Burgh.

George Spencer Watson | Romantic / Portrait painter

George Spencer Watson R.O.I., R.P., A.R.A., R.A. (8 March 1869, in London - 11 April 1934, in London) was an English🎨 portrait artist of the late romantic school who sometimes worked in the style of the Italian Renaissance.

• Career

He studied at the Royal Academy Schools from 1889, and exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1891.

He won Royal Academy Schools Silver Medals in 1889 and 1891, and the Landseer Scholarship in 1892.

He was elected to the Royal Institute of Oil Painters (ROI) in 1900, Royal Society of Portrait Painters (RP) in 1904, Associate of the Royal Academy in 1923, and a Member of the Royal Academy (RA) in 1932.

Antonio Ambrogio Alciati (1878-1929)

Alciati, Antonio Ambrogio - Nato a Vercelli il 5 sett. 1878, studiò pittura a Vercelli con G. Costa, nell'Istituto di Belle Arti, poi a Milano con V. Bignami e C. Tallone all'Accademia di Brera, dove più tardi tenne la cattedra di figura.

Dopo alcuni quadri di un verismo sentimentale e nebuloso - tra T. Cremona e E. Carrière - si dedicò particolarmente al ritratto con una tecnica impressionistica facile e a largo impasto -Ritratto della signorina Binda, premiato a Brera nel 1914.

Partecipò alle Biennali veneziane dalla VII alla XII. Eseguì affreschi in chiese e ville della Lombardia (villa Pirotta a Brunate). Opere sue si conservano nelle Gallerie d'arte moderna di Milano (Ritratto della madre, pastello) e di Roma (Ritratto della signorina Pirotta), nel municipio di Vercelli (La vedova) e in numerose collezioni private. Morì a Milano il 7 marzo 1929. | di Palma Bucarelli, © Treccani, Enciclopedia Italiana

Paul Cezanne, Un grec de la Belle Époque..

In his review of the Second Impressionist Exhibition of 1877, the art critic Georges Riviere (1850-1900) defended Les Baigneurs au repos🎨 of 1875-1876 by terming Cézanne, "Un grec de la Belle Époque" and arguing that:

• "his canvases have the calm and heroic serenity of the paintings and terra-cottas of antiquity, and the ignorant who laugh at the Bathers, for example, impress me like barbarians criticizing the Parthenon".
• "M. Cézanne est, dans ses æuvres, un grec de la belle époque; ses toiles ont le calme, la sérénité héroïque des peintures et des terres cuites antiques, et les ignorants qui rient devant les Baigneurs, par exemple, me font l’effet de barbares critiquant le Panthéon.
• (…) la peinture de M.Cézanne a le charme inexprimable de l’antiquité biblique et grecque, les mouvements des personnages sont simples et grands comme dans les sculptures antiques, les paysages ont une majesté qui s’impose …"

William Acton (1906-1945)

William Hamilton Mitchell Acton (16 August 1906 - 31 August 1945) was an Anglo🎨-Italian painter🎨 who died while in active service during World War II.

• Biography

William Hamilton Mitchell Acton was born in Florence on 16 August 1906, the son of Arthur Acton (1873-1953), an art collector and dealer, and Hortense Lenore Mitchell (1871-1962), the heiress of John J. Mitchell, President of the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank. Harold Acton was his older brother.

He attended Chateau de Lancy, Geneva, and Eton College; at Eton his contemporaries were Robert Byron, Brian Howard, Alfred Duggan and Anthony Powell, who remembers William fondly in his memoirs.