The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (463 page)

(1909–79).
British engraver, letter-cutter, designer, and painter. After working for the Cambridge University Press and a small commercial printer, he set up on his own as a wood-engraver in 1934 and from 1939 also worked (self-taught) as a letter-cutter in stone. His highly varied output included book illustrations (his speciality was quiet rural scenes), memorial tablets (including that to Sir Winston Churchill in Westminster Abbey, 1965) and the design of £5 and £10 notes for the Bank of England (1963–4).

 
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stopping-out varnish
.

An acid-resisting varnish used in
etching
,
aquatint
, and similar processes.

 
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(1597–1657).
French still-life painter, active mainly in Strasburg. He painted in a spare, stiff, almost archaic style that has appealed greatly to modern taste—most of his paintings have come to light since the 1930s. The best collection is in the Musée de l'Œuvre de Notre Dame, Strasburg.

 
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(
c.
1450–1533).
German sculptor, with
Riemenschneider
the greatest wood-carver of his age. He is first recorded in 1477, when he moved from Nuremberg to Cracow in Poland. There he carved his largest work, the huge altarpiece for St Mary's Church (1477–89), and also made the red marble tomb of King Casimir IV in the cathedral (1492). In 1496 he returned to Nuremberg, where his successful career was blighted when (in an attempt to recoup some money he regarded as having been misappropriated in an investment) he forged a document in 1503 and was convicted and branded through both cheeks. He was also confined to the city limits of Nuremberg (he fled but returned), and although he was to some extent rehabilitated, he never regained his former position. He died a wealthy man, but his old age was embittered by disputes with the city authorities.
A good many documented and signed works by Stoss survive and his style is distinctive—bold and powerfully characterized, with exaggerated gestures and expressions and draperies rendered in an ornate, almost calligraphic manner. Indeed, Stoss's work is so individual that the famous figure of
St Roch
in SS. Annuziata, Florence, is almost universally accepted as his, even though it is undocumented and was attributed by
Vasari
to ‘Janni Francese’ (Janni the Frenchman). Vasari wrote eloquently of the virtuosity of the carving, describing the draperies as ‘cut almost to the thinness of paper, and with a beautiful flow in the arrangement of the folds, so that nothing more wonderful is to be seen’. Stoss sometimes, as here, left his figures unpainted, but otherwise his work is entirely in the late
Gothic
spirit. He is recorded as being a painter and engraver as well as a sculptor and he also declared himself competent as a civil engineer. His work had great influence in Germany.

 
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(1775–1834).
English painter, book illustrator, and designer. He was a prolific and versatile artist, his designs ranging from monuments to jewellery, and although his paintings were mainly small-scale historical pieces in a sentimentalized classical manner, he also did occasional more ambitious works, for example the decoration of the staircase at Burghley House (begun 1794) and of the dome of the upper hall of the Advocates' Library, Edinburgh (1822). His book illustrations were mainly in the field of English novels and poetry.

 
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Stradano
or Stradanus , Giovanni
.

See
STRAET
.

 
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