The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (215 page)

(1848–92).
American still-life painter. He was born in Ireland and brought to America as a child, living mainly in Philadelphia until a stay in Europe in 1880–6, and thereafter in New York. He specialized in elaborate
trompel'œil
compositions, often involving firearms or musical instruments (
After the Hunt
, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, 1885). Although his works were long popular with the public, they were generally dismissed by critics as mere sleight of hand until about 1945, when they began to win favour for their strength of composition.

 
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(1819–1916).
French landscape painter and engraver. He did not take up painting until 1846, but he was then very prolific and won considerable success and fame. He is sometimes classed with the
Barbizon School
, but his work shows more specifically the influence of
Corot
.

 
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(1885–1970).
Canadian painter, active mainly in Toronto. From 1904 to 1908 he studied in Berlin, and his work became imbued with bold
Expressionist
colour. Until 1920 views of houses and cityscapes were his main interest, but after meeting J. E. H. MacDonald in 1911 he turned as well to landscape and became one of the founder members of the
Group of Seven
. In 1918 Harris had discovered Algoma, in northern Ontario, and the lushness of the countryside was suited to the dramatic and colourful style he had developed (
Autumn, Algoma
, Victoria University, Toronto, 1920). Later he sought out more spectacular scenery in the Rockies and even in the Arctic, his work expressing a desire for spiritual fulfilment through immersion in the vital forces of overpowering landscape. This transcendental quality was maintained when Harris turned to abstraction in the 1930s.

 
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(1877–1943).
American painter, whose work represented an advanced response to modernist trends in European art. In 1912, help from
Stieglitz
(who had given him his first one-man exhibition in 1909), enabled him to travel to Europe, but finding
Cubist
Paris little to his taste he went to Munich and Berlin, where the
Expressionism
of
Kandinsky
and
Jawlensky
proved more congenial, and he exhibited with the
Blaue Reiter
in Berlin in 1913. Later that year he returned to America and exhibited at the
Armory Show
. From 1914 to 1916 he was again in Europe, visiting London, Paris, Berlin, and Munich. During these years he painted in an abstract manner with Expressionist overtones, as in the famous
Painting No. 5
(Whitney Mus., New York, 1914–15), a picture painted in rich Expressionist colours and incorporating military emblems and decorations of wartime Germany. Instead of continuing on this path, however, on his return to the USA in 1916, he began to paint near-*
Constructivist
abstracts in clear pastel hues. In 1917 he abandoned abstraction and from 1918 to 1920 did dramatic pastels of the New Mexico landscape, upon which in the early 1920s he based equally dramatic though more formalized oils. In the 1920s and early 1930s he led a wandering, unsettled life, visiting France, Italy, Germany, and New Mexico. He settled in Maine in 1934 and his late works consisted mainly of rugged mountain and coastal scenes. Hartley was a lonely, reclusive, rather haunted character whose work reveals on intense feeling for the beauty of nature.

 
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(1904–89).
German-born painter who became a French citizen in 1946. Early in his career he met
Kandinsky
and he began painting abstracts in 1922. In 1935 he fled from Germany and settled in Paris. During the war he served in the French Foreign Legion and was seriously wounded. After the war he returned to Paris, and developed a highly original and vibrant style of abstract painting in which thick black lines and blotches predominate in a manner superficially analogous to calligraphic scribbling. They won him a reputation as one of the main precursors of
Art Informel
.

 
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