The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (419 page)

(1360?–1430).
The most famous of Russian
icon
painters. The 600th anniversary of his birth was celebrated by Soviet Russia in 1960, but there is some evidence that he may have been born a decade later and there is little secure knowledge of his life or works. In 1405 he worked as assistant to
Theophanes
in the Cathedral of the Annunciation in the Kremlin at Moscow, but it has not been possible to distinguish his share there or in the Cathedral of the Dormition at Vladimir, where he is also said to have painted murals. The work that stands at the centre of his
œuvre
is the celebrated icon of the Old Testament Trinity (that is, the three angels who appeared to Abraham) in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (
c.
1411). In its gentle lyrical beauty this marks a move away from the hieratic
Byzantine
tradition, and other icons in a similar style have been attributed to Rublev.

 
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(1784–1855).
French
Romantic
sculptor. He was a fervent admirer of Napoleon Bonaparte and his emotionally charged work expresses the martial spirit of the Napoleonic era more fully than that of any other sculptor. In 1812 he won the
Prix de Rome
, but he was unable to take it up because of the Napoleonic Wars, and when Napoleon abdicated in 1814 he went into exile in Brussels with
David
. On his return to Paris in 1827 he became highly successful with public monuments, most notably his celebrated high
relief
on the Arc de Triomphe,
Departure of the Volunteers in
1792, popularly known as
The Marseillaise
(1833–6). None of Rude's other works matches the fire, dynamism, and heroic bravura of this glorification of the French Revolution, but he created another strikingly original work in his monument
The Awakening of Napoleon
(1845–7) in a park at Fixin, near his native Dijon, which shows the emperor casting off his shroud. In spite of the dramatic movement of his work, it always has a solidity that reveals his classical training and his lifelong admiration of the
antique
.

 
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(1628/9–82).
The greatest and most versatile of all Dutch landscape painters. He was born in Haarlem, where he probably received training from his father
Isaac
, who was a painter as well as a frame-maker and picture-dealer (no works by him are known to survive). His uncle Salomon van
Ruysdael
(this distinction in spelling occurs consistently in their own signatures) presumably also played a part in his artistic education. Ruisdael was extremely precocious, however; his earliest known paintings date from 1646 and already reveal a mature and distinctive artistic personality. He was also versatile and prolific (about 700 paintings are reasonably attributed to him); he painted forests, grain fields, beaches and seascapes, watermills and windmills, winter landscapes and Scandinavian torrents influenced by Allart van
Everdingen
; he could conjure poetry from a virtually featureless patch of duneland as well as from a magnificent panoramic view. Even more than his range, however, it is the emotional force of his work that distinguishes him from his contemporaries. He moved away decisively from the ‘tonal’ phase of Dutch landscape represented by his uncle; in place of subtle atmospheric effects he favoured strong forms and dense colours and his brushwork is vigorous and
impasted
. His emotional, subjective approach found its most memorable expression in
The Jewish Cemetery
(versions in the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden,
c.
1660), where tombstones and elegiac ruins, symbols of man's transitory and ephemeral existence, are contrasted with nature's power of renewal.
Ruisdael travelled to the Dutch/German border with his friend Nicolaes
Berchem
in the early 1650s, and one of the pictures that resulted was the celebrated
Bentheim Castle
(Beit Coll., Blessington, Ireland, 1653), in which the castle heroically crowns the top of a steep, rugged hill, transformed by Ruisdael's imagination from the mild slope it is in actuality. In about 1656 he moved to Amsterdam, where he lived for the rest of his life (although he was buried in St Bavo's Cathedral in Haarlem). He evidently had a reasonably prosperous career, but little is known about his life and it was long thought he had died insane in the workhouse at Haarlem, a fate that is now known to have befallen his cousin and near-name-sake Jacob van
Ruysdael
. There is still uncertainty, however, concerning the story, reported by
Houbraken
and supported by other tantalizing evidence, that Ruisdael practised as a surgeon. It seems unlikely that he could have found the time for this (he is said to have taken a medical degree at Caen in Normandy in 1676, when he was in his late 40s), but other prolific Dutch painters, for example
Steen
(who ran a tavern), managed to pursue two careers. Ruisdael's only documented pupil was
Hobbema
, but his influence was resounding, both on his Dutch contemporaries and on artists in other countries in the following two centuries—
Gainsborough
, *Constable, and the
Barbizon School
for example. Examples of his work are in many public collections, the finest representation being in the National Gallery, London.

 
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Runciman , Alexander
(1736–85) and
John

(1744–68)
. Scottish painters, brothers, who painted religious, literary, and historical subjects in a proto-
Romantic
manner. John, the more brilliantly gifted, died young during a sojourn by both brothers in Italy. His masterpiece,
King Lear in the Storm
(NG, Edinburgh, 1767), has freshness and originality, with nothing of the staginess of most 18th-cent. Shakespearian pictures. Alexander's major work, the decoration of Penicuik House near Edinburgh with romantically treated subjects from Ossian and the history of Scotland, ranked with
Barry's
paintings in the Society of Arts as the most ambitious British decorative scheme of the time, but it was destroyed by fire in 1899. Some of its compositions survive in a series of spirited etchings he based on them.

 
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