The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (181 page)

(1865–1931).
Finnish painter, graphic artist, and designer. A major figure in the
Art Nouveau
and
Symbolist
movements, Gallen-Kallela travelled widely and was well known outside Finland, particularly in Germany (he had a joint exhibition with
Munch
in Berlin in 1895 and exhibited with Die
Brücke
in Dresden in 1910). He was deeply patriotic (he volunteered to fight in the War of Independence against Russia in 1918, even though he was in his fifties) and he was inspired mainly by the landscape and folklore of his country, above all by the Finnish national epic
Kalevala
(‘Land of Heroes’). His early work was in the 19th-cent. naturalistic tradition, but in the 1890s he developed a flatter, more stylized manner, well-suited to the depiction of heroic myth, with bold simplifications of form, strong outlines, and vivid—sometimes rather garish—colours. Apart from easel paintings, Gallen-Kallela's work included book illustrations (notably for an edition of
Kalevala
, 1922) and he did a number of murals for public buildings (including the Finnish National Museum, Helsinki, 1928). His designs for stained glass, fabrics, and jewellery gave an important stimulus to the development of Finnish crafts. He is regarded not only as his country's greatest painter, but also as the chief figure in the creation of a national art. His former house in Helsinki is now a museum dedicated to his work.

 
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(1816–1902).
Belgian picture dealer and print publisher who settled in London in 1840 and became the dominant figure in his profession. In the three decades between his arrival in England and his retirement to the Continent in 1871, ‘Gambart, more than any other individual, transformed the London art world. He founded a system for the promotion and sale of pictures on an international scale; contributed increasingly to the status of the artist in society; and brought the London, if not the European, art trade from infancy to maturity … [He] became a print publisher of international repute, who exploited the possibilities of the print so as to raise it to the level of pure popular art’ (Jeremy Maas ,
Gambart: Prince of the Victorian Art World
, 1975).

 
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(1840–1924).
American socialite and art collector. She married into a prominent Boston family and spent most of her life in that city, where she patronized numerous artistic causes (including the Boston Symphony Orchestra) and dazzled and occasionally scandalized polite society (she had love affairs and attended boxing matches). Her interest in art was guided by Bernard
Berenson
, one of her protégés, who helped her to assemble a superb collection of Italian Renaissance paintings, including
Titian's
The Rape of Europa
, which has often been claimed as the greatest painting in America. Other highlights of her collection include some outstanding 17th-cent. Dutch paintings and her full-length portrait (1888) by
Sargent
(to whom she had been introduced by Henry James ). The portrait shows off her celebrated figure (she wears her pearls round her waist rather than her neck) and was considered rather shocking—in the spirit of Sargent's earlier
Madame X
(it was rumoured that he and Mrs Gardner were lovers). Her husband, the financier Jack Gardner , died in 1898, and the following year she began building Fenway Court in Boston as both a home and a museum. The building, completed in 1902, is modelled on a Venetian Renaissance palace and incorporates various architectural fragments that she bought on her numerous trips to Europe. She supervised the construction with immense care, acting virtually as site foreman. In her will she left the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to Boston as a public institution with the proviso that the collection should be maintained exactly as she had arranged it. The British art historian Sir Philip Hendy , who published a catalogue of the Gardner Museum in 1931, described it as ‘probably the finest collection of its compact size in the world’. In addition to paintings, sculpture, drawings, and prints, it contains objects of many other types, including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glassware, manuscripts, and books.

 
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(1481?–1559).
Italian painter, active mainly in Ferrara.
Vasari
says that he twice visited Rome, and his work—derivative but beautifully crafted—was heavily influenced by
Raphael
. He was the first to paint in such a manner in Ferrara and was influential in spreading the High
Renaissance
style. His output was large (frescos, altarpieces, small devotional works, also a few mythologies); there are many examples in Ferrarese churches and, for example, in the National Gallery, London. In 1550 he went blind.

 
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(1891–1915).
French sculptor and draughtsman, active in England for most of his short career and usually considered part of the history of British rather than French art. In 1910 he took up sculpture in Paris without formal training, and in the same year he met Sophie Brzeska, a Polish woman 20 years his senior, with whom he lived from that time, both of them adopting the hyphenated name. In 1911 they moved to London, which Gaudier had visited briefly in 1906 and 1908, and lived for a while in extreme poverty. He became a friend of Wyndham
Lewis
and other leading literary and artistic figures, and his work was shown in avant-garde exhibitions, such as the
Vorticist
exhibition of 1915. In 1914 he enlisted in the French army and was killed in action the following year, aged 23. Gaudier developed with astonishing rapidity from a modelling style based upon
Rodin
towards a highly personal manner of carving in which shapes are radically simplified in a manner recalling
Brancusi
(
Red Stone Dancer
, Tate, London, 1913). In England, only
Epstein
was producing sculpture as stylistically advanced as Gaudier-Brzeska at this time. In his lifetime his work was appreciated by only a small circle, but since his death he has become widely recognized as one of the outstanding sculptors of his generation and has acquired something of a legendary status as an unfulfilled genius. In addition to his sculptures he left behind some splendid animal drawings.