The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (354 page)

 
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(1817–1904).
American sculptor. Self-taught, he rarely left Albany in his native New York State, and he was the most successful American sculptor of his period to work in the USA rather than in Europe. He began with
cameo
portraits and had a flourishing business with portrait busts and bas-
reliefs
on religious subjects, but his most celebrated work, now as in his own day, is
The White Captive
(Met. Mus., New York, 1858). Inspired by
Powers's
Greek Slave
, it shows a naked young girl who has been captured by Red Indians but is sustained by her Christianity—this accompanying storyline undoubtedly contributed to its popularity. The statue is fresher in observation than Powers's
Greek Slave
, for although the marble surfaces are impeccably smooth, the chubby proportions of the figure are unidealized and the strikingly characterized head is a portrait of Palmer's daughter.

 
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(1805–81).
English landscape painter and etcher. He showed a precocious talent and exhibited landscape drawings at the
Royal Academy
when he was 14. In 1822 he met
Linnell
, who introduced him to William
Blake
in 1824. Palmer had had visionary experiences from childhood and the effect of Blake upon him was to intensify an inherent mystical bent. In 1826 he moved to Shoreham, near Sevenoaks, Kent, where he was the central figure of the group of artists known as the
Ancients
and produced what are now his most famous works—landscapes charged with a sense of pantheistic fecundity and other—worldly beauty. In about 1832 what he called his ‘primitive and infantine feeling’ for landscape began to fade, and after returning to London in 1835, marrying Linnell's daughter in 1837, and spending a two-year honeymoon in Italy, the break with his visionary manner was complete. His later paintings were in a much more conventional topographical or pastoral mode, highly-wrought and often sentimental in feeling. In his etchings, however, something of his early genius remained; at his death he was working on an edition of Virgil's
Eclogues
, translated and illustrated by himself. His early work was virtually forgotten until the 1920s, but it has subsequently influenced modern romantic landscape artists such as Paul
Nash
and Graham
Sutherland
.

 
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(1655–1726).
Spanish painter and writer on art, active mainly in Madrid, where in 1688 he was appointed a painter to the king. He was famous in his day for frescos in churches in Madrid and elsewhere, but he is now best known for his book
Museo Pictórico y Escala Óptica
(‘Pictorial Museum, and Optical Scale’, Vol. 1, 1715; Vols. 2 and 3, 1724). The first two volumes are devoted respectively to the theory and the practice of art, and the third volume is a collection of biographies, the most important source for the history of Spanish art from the 16th to the early 18th cents. It earned Palomino the nickname ‘the Spanish
Vasari
’.

 
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panel
.

Term in painting for a
support
of wood, metal, or other rigid substance, as distinct from
canvas
. Until the adoption of canvas in the 15th cent. nearly all the movable paintings of Europe were executed on wood, and even up to the beginning of the 17th cent. it is probable that as much painting was done on the one support as on the other. Painters who worked on a small scale often used copper panels (
Elsheimer
is a leading example), and in the colonial art of South America copper and tin and even lead and zinc were used. On a larger scale, slate has occasionally been used as a support, notably by
Rubens
for his altarpiece for Sta Maria in Vallicella (the Chiesa Nuova) in Rome; the picture he originally painted was said to reflect the light unpleasantly and slate was used for the replacement to produce a more matt finish. For wood panels the Italian masters of the
Renaissance
preferred white poplar, while oak was the most common wood used in northern Europe. Many other types were used, however; analysis of the contents of art galleries has yielded a long list, including beech, cedar, chestnut, fir, larch, linden, mahogany, olive, and walnut. In the 20th cent. cedar, teak, and dark walnut are favourites, and modern painters have also used plywood, fibre-board, and other synthetic materials as supports (see also
ACADEMY BOARD
).

 
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