The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (239 page)

(1882–1974).
Canadian landscape painter, active mainly in Toronto, where he settled in 1913 after extensive travels in Europe. He was one of the leading artists in the
Group of Seven
and in the latter part of his long career became a venerated senior figure in Canadian painting. Jackson visited virtually every region of Canada, including the Arctic, and responded particularly to the hilly region of rural Quebec along the St Lawrence River. From 1921 he returned there almost every spring, and the canvases he prepared from sketches made there are probably his finest work. Their easy, rolling rhythms, and rich and full colouring had a far-reaching impact on Canadian landscape painting.

 
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(1589/90–1644).
Scottish portrait painter, active in Aberdeen and Edinburgh. His name has been indiscriminately applied to a great number of Scottish portraits of the period, as he is virtually the only 17th-cent. Scottish painter about whom anything is known. A now discounted tradition has it that he trained with
Rubens
and he has been flatteringly called ‘the Scottish van
Dyck
’, but his style was closer to Cornelius
Johnson's
. It is difficult to assess, however, as most of the works that are certainly by him are in a bad state of preservation. John Michael
Wright
was his pupil.

 
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(1896–1989).
American art dealer and writer on art. Between the departure of Peggy
Guggenheim
from the USA in 1947 and the rise of Leo
Castelli
in the 1960s he was the most important figure in promoting the work of avant-garde American artists, particularly the
Abstract Expressionists
. Janis wrote
Abstract and Surrealist Art in America
(1944) and (with his wife Harriet )
Picasso: The Recent Years
, 1939–1946 (1946). He was also interested in
naïve art
and in 1939 ‘discovered’ one of the outstanding American naïve painters, Morris Hirshfield (1872–1946).

 
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(
c.
1575–1632).
Flemish figure and portrait painter, active mainly in Antwerp. He was in Rome in 1598 and back in Antwerp by 1601. A second visit to Italy seems likely, for although in 1601 he was painting in a
Mannerist
style (
Diana and Callisto
, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest), by 1609 (
Scaldis and Antwerpia
, Musée Royal, Antwerp) his work had become much more solid, sober, and classical, suggesting close knowledge of
Caravaggio
in particular. For the next decade Janssens was one of the most powerful and individual painters in Flanders, but during the 1620s his work became less remarkable as he fell under the all-pervasive influence of
Rubens
. His pupils included Gerard
Seghers
and Theodoor
Rombouts
.

 
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(1864–1941).
Russian
Expressionist
painter, active mainly in Germany. Originally he was an army officer, but in 1906 he resigned his commission and moved to Munich to devote himself completely to art. Munich was to be his home until the outbreak of the First World War, but he travelled a good deal in this period, making several visits to France, for example (he was the first of his Munich associates to have direct contact with advanced French art). In 1905 he met
Matisse
in Paris and was influenced by the strong colours and bold outlines of the
Fauves
. He combined them with influences from the Russian traditions of icon painting and peasant art to form a highly personal style that expressed his passionate temperament and mystical conception of art. A mood of melancholy introspection—far removed from the ebullience of Fauvism—is characteristic of much of his work and it has been said that he ‘saw Matisse through Russian eyes’. In 1909 he was one of the founders of the
Neue künstlervereinigung
, and apart from
Kandinsky
he was the outstanding artist of the group. His most characteristic works of this period are a series of powerful portrait heads, begun in 1910 (
Portrait of Alexander Sacharoff
, Städtisches Museum, Wiesbaden, 1913). On the outbreak of war in 1914 Jawlensky took refuge in Switzerland, where he remained until 1921. His work there included a series of ‘variations’ on the view from a window—small, semi-abstract landscapes with a meditative, religious aura. Like Kandinsky and others, Jawlensky believed in a correspondence between colours and musical sounds and he named these pictures
Songs without Words
. In 1918 he began a series of nearly abstract heads, in which he reduced the features to a few curves and lines. Unlike Kandinsky, however, he always based his forms on nature. From 1921 he lived in Wiesbaden, and in 1924 he joined with Kandinsky,
Klee
, and
Feininger
to form the
Blaue Vier
. From 1929 he suffered from arthritis and by 1938 this had forced him to abandon painting completely.

 
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