The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (206 page)

Grien , Hans Baldung
.

See
BALDUNG
.

 
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(1606–80).
Italian landscape painter. He developed an attractive landscape style in the manner of the mature Annibale
Carracci
, and his work, which was popular with collectors and much engraved, helped to spread the tradition of
ideal
landscape in Europe. Grimaldi worked mainly in Rome, painting frescos as well as easel paintings, notably at the Villa Doria Pamphili, where he was also employed as an architect. In 1649–51 he worked in Paris.

 
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Grimmer
.

Two Flemish painters,
Jacob
(
c.
1526–90) and his son
Abel
(
c.
1570–
c.
1619), whose styles are so similar that it is often difficult to distinguish between their works. They worked in Antwerp, painting mainly landscape and
genre
subjects in an attractive style, full of lively anecdote, that places them among the best followers of
Breugel
. Jacob's work was praised by van
Mander
and others.

 
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(1836–93).
English painter. He specialized in a distinctive type of nocturnal townscape, usually featuring gas lights and wet streets, and
Whistler
said of him ‘I considered myself the inventor of Nocturnes until I saw Grimmy's moonlit pictures.’ Grimshaw's paintings, however, unlike Whistler's, are sharp in focus and rather acidic in colouring, although often remarkably atmospheric. They were very popular (in spite of the fact that he rarely exhibited at the
Royal Academy
) and he was much imitated, not least by two of his sons,
Arthur
(1868–1913) and
Louis
(1870–1943?). Their father worked in his native Leeds and in other northern towns, as well as in London.

 
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(1887–1927).
Spanish painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and designer, active mainly in Paris, where he settled in 1906. In his early years there he earned his living mainly with humorous drawings for various periodicals and he did not begin painting in earnest until 1910. By this time he was strongly influenced by his fellow Spaniard
Picasso
and his serious painting was almost entirely in the
Cubist
manner. He made such rapid strides that by 1912 he was becoming recognized as the leading Cubist painter apart from the founders of the movement, Picasso and
Braque
. His work stood out at the
Section d'Or
exhibition in that year, attracting the attention of collectors and dealers (Gertrude
Stein
was among those who bought his paintings and
Kanhweiler
gave him a contract). In 1913–14 he developed a personal version of Synthetic Cubism, in which
papier collé
played an important part. He said that he conceived of his paintings as ‘flat, coloured architecture’ and his methods of visual analysis were more systematic than those of Picasso and Braque . His subjects were almost all taken from his immediate surroundings (mainly still lifes, with occasional landscapes and portraits), but he began with the image he had in mind rather than with an object in the external world: ‘I try to make concrete that which is abstract…
Cézanne
turns a bottle into a cylinder, but I make a bottle—a particular bottle—out of a cylinder.’ In 1919 Gris had his first major one-man exhibition (at the Galerie l'Effort Moderne in Paris), but in the following year he suffered a serious attack of pleurisy and from then on his health was poor; for this reason he spent much of his time in the South of France. In this last period of his life his style became more painterly (
Violin and Fruit Dish
, Tate Gallery, London, 1924). Apart from paintings, his work included polychrome sculpture, book illustrations, and set and costume designs for
Diaghilev
. He wrote a few essays on his aesthetic ideas and a collection of his letters, edited and translated by Douglas
Cooper
, was published in 1956.

 
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