The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (52 page)

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1865–1925).
English painter. He spent a good deal of time in France and met
Gauguin
at Pont-Aven in 1894. Back in London he became a member of
Sickert's
circle and he was a founding member of the
Camden Town Group
(1911) and the
London Group
(1913). His work was much influenced by Gauguin's bold colour and flat patterning, and in his last years his style became increasingly simplified and schematic. He is best known for paintings featuring horses. His wife, the Polish-born Stanislava de Karlowska (1880–1952), whom he married in 1897, was also a painter. He made several visits to Poland with her.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1753–1828
). English engraver, active for most of his life in New-castle upon Tyne. Bewick ran a busy workshop in which most of the day-to-day jobs involved metal-engraving, but for his own projects he preferred
wood engraving
, and he was the first artist to show the full potential of this technique. He had a great love of the countryside, and his finest works are natural history illustrations, particularly those to his celebrated books
A General History of Quadrupeds
(1790) and
A History of British Birds
(2 vols., 1797 and 1804), for which he wrote the texts himself. The animals and birds are characterized with great skill, but Bewick is as much admired for his tail-pieces—little (sometimes tiny) vignettes with which he concluded his account of each animal or bird. These miniature scenes give a wonderfully shrewd and sensitive picture of rural life, bringing out its bleakness and cruelty as well as its beauty and humour. Bewick himself punningly called these scenes ‘
Tale
-pieces’, for they were ‘seldom without an endeavour to illustrate some truth or point some moral’. The success of his books made wood engraving a popular medium for illustration and his work was carried on by several followers in Newcastle, notably his son Robert (1788–1849). Bewick wrote an autobiography, which was published in an incomplete edition in 1862; the full text did not appear until 1975. A year before his death he was visited by
Audubon
, another great artist-naturalist, who left a touching account of his meeting with this ‘perfect old English-man’, who was ‘kind and attentive’ and still—at the age of 74—‘active and prompt in his labours’, using ‘delicate and beautiful tools…all made by himself’.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1620/1–90).
Dutch painter, little regarded in his day but now considered one of the greatest of still-life painters. He initially specialized in fish subjects, but around the middle of the 17th cent. he began to devote himself to sumptuous banquet tables laden with silver and gold vessels, Venetian glassware, fine fruit, and expensive table coverings of damask, satin, and velvet. Works of this kind, in which he was rivalled only by
Kalf
, gave him even greater opportunity than his fish pieces to demonstrate his ability to show the play of light on varied surfaces and organize forms and colours into an opulently blended composition. He worked in various towns before settling in Overschie in 1678.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

Bibiena
(or Galli-Bibiena)
.

Family of Italian architects,
quadraturisti
, and stage-designers based in Bologna, members of which practised from the 1680s until the 1780s in practically every country of Europe. The founder of the dynasty was
Giovanni Maria Galli
(1625–65), who adopted the name of his birthplace, Bibbiena, a small town in Tuscany. Other members of the family included
Alessandro
(1687–1769),
Antonio
(1700–74),
Carlo
(1728–87),
Ferdinando
(1657–1743),
Francesco
(1659–1739), and
Giuseppe
(1696–1757). They provided fantastically elaborate stage-settings for operas, balls, state occasions, and religious ceremonies, mainly in the service of the Austrian Imperial family in Vienna and of various German princelings. They also built several theatres in Italy and Germany, one of which survives: the Opera House at Bayreuth, decorated by Giuseppe in 1748. The most illustrious and prolific member of the family was Ferdinando, who produced several books on architecture and scenography.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search