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ART “4” “2”-DAY  12 MAY
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DEATH: 1897 ROELOFS
BIRTHS: 1854 JUEL — 1854 SADLER — 1828 ROSSETTI — 1812 LEAR — 1885 SIRONI — BAPTISM: 1662 VAN BLOEMEN
^ Born on 12 May 1745: Jens Jørgensen Juel, Danish artist who died on 27 December 1802. — [Was every one of his paintings a Juel jewel?]
— Noted for his landscapes and portraits, Juel painted compositionally balanced works in a harmonious palette, continuing a classical painterly tradition. The son of a vicar at Gamborg on Funen, Juel went to Hamburg (then under Danish sovereignty), where he studied under the German artist Johann Michael Gehrmann [–1770]. In 1765 Juel briefly returned to Fünen and then to Copenhagen, where he studied at the Kunstakademi until 1771. While at the academy he came under the influence of Carl Gustaf Pilo, a professor there from 1748 and best known for his portraits of the Danish royal family. It was also at the academy that Juel perfected his considerable talent in drawing.
— Among Juel's students there were Caspar David Friedrich, and Philipp Otto Runge.
LINKS
Jean-Armand Tronchin (1779) — Madame de Pragins (1779)
A Strom Brewing behind a Farmhouse in Zealand (1795)
A Noblewoman with her Son (1800) — A Running Boy (1802)
Isabelle de Charrière:: Mme de Charrière [1740-1805] was a writer.
^ Born on 12 May 1854: Walter Dendy Sadler, British genre painter who died on 13 November 1923.
— Sadler was one of the true masters of domestic genre along with his contemporary Frank Moss Bennett. His subjects were usually set in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries with sentimental, romantic and humorous themes. Before painting a scene he would create elaborate settings in which local villagers would often pose as models. Indeed as he often used the same props and models, these can be seen repeated in successive paintings in different guises. The home, the inn, the lawyers office, the garden and the golf course all provide subjects for his wit and clever social observation.
— Sadler studied at Heatherley's Art School in London, and with W. Simmler in Dusseldorf. Exhib. at RA from 1873, also at SS, GG and elsewhere. His subjects were mostly costume pieces of the 18th or early-19th C period, often with humorous or sentimental themes, e.g. Scandal and Tea, A Meeting of Creditors, An Offer of Marriage, etc. About 1896 he moved to Hemingford Crag, near St. Ives, Huntingdon, where he died. His pictures were very popular and much reproduced through engravings
— Sadler was born in Dorking, and brought up in Horsham, where he showed a precocious talent for drawing. At age 16 he decided to become a painter and enrolled for two years at Heatherly's School of Art in London, subsequently studying in Germany under W. Simmler. He exhibited at the Dudley Gallery from 1872 and at the Royal Academy from the following year through to the 1890s.
      He painted contemporary people in domestic and daily life pursuits, showing them with comical expressions illustrating their greed, stupidity etc. Dendy Sadler was best known for his pictures of monks — his reputation was established with a picture of monks fishing, Steady Brother, Steady (1875), and his best-known paintings are Thursday also showing monks fishing, and Friday, where they are consuming their catch the next day. The monks are characterized as good natured but foolish looking fellows. The combination of realism with whimsicality follows an English tradition of almost slapstick humour, which seems to work better as black and white illustration in the pages of Punch or in light-hearted articles by artists such as Harry Furniss. Another slightly whimsical picture is End of the Skein.
      Perhaps more to modern taste are Sadler's less blatant pictures, as For Fifty Years (1894), showing an old gentleman happily offering his arm to his blank-faced bored wife — for him 50 years of domestic bliss, for her half a century of increasing dullness. In pictures like this, or An Offer of Marriage (1895), Sadler also gives some of the best studies of Victorian interiors. He was criticized for this background detail, as it detracted from the subjects of his pictures, but it seems fair to me for a whimsical painting to provide encouragement for the eye to wander around the scene rather than being pushed too hard towards the 'point'. Another painting worthy of note is A Summer's Day.

London to York - Time's Up Gentlemen (147x193cm) — Plaintiff and Defendant (131x171cm)
The Monk's Repast (41x51cm) — A Good Story (1881, 62x82cm)
Sweethearts (1892, 86x62cm) interior with a young couple talking to an older woman seated in a chair.
Thursday (1880, 86x141cm) _ Sadler was well known for his humorous scenes of religious life. In this picture, which is also known as Tomorrow will be Friday, he shows a group of Franciscans fishing. These friars, as all Catholics at the time, were forbidden to eat meat on Fridays, in commemoration of the day when Christ was crucified. In Thursday, Sadler wrote, 'The background was made up from studies I had painted in Germany, with the help of some foreground studies made in the previous summer at Hurley on the Thames'. A pendant to this picture in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, called 'Friday', shows the friars enjoying their catch. The 1897 guide to the Tate noted that this picture 'was one of three that commenced Sir Henry Tate's collection'.
^ Died on 12 May 1897: Willem Roelofs, Dutch painter born on 10 Mar 1822.
— He is said to have made his first sketches at the age of four; at fifteen he completed his first landscape painting. Many of these early works are in the print rooms of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. In c. 1837–8 he was apprenticed to the amateur painter Abraham Hendrik de Winter [1800–1861] in Utrecht, where the Roelofs family had moved in 1826.
      In 1838 he entered his first paintings in the Exhibition of Living Masters in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. In the late summer of 1840 Roelofs became a pupil of the landscape and animal painter Hendrik van de Sande Bakhuyzen [1795–1860], with whom he made a study trip to Germany in 1841. Roelofs took a special interest in nature: he applied himself energetically both to painting and drawing, almost always selecting landscape subjects. He also studied entomology and accumulated a large collection of insects. After his training he returned to his parents in Utrecht.
— H. W. Mesdag and Carel Nicolaas Storm van ’s Gravesande were students of Roelofs.
Photo of Reolofs
LINKS
An Approaching Storm (1850, 90x140cm) — A Sunlit River Landscape With Cows WateringFran Utrecht (66x80cm)
^ Born on 12 May 1828: Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, English Pre-Raphaelite poet, painter, draftsman, and photographer, who died on 09 April 1882.
      Rossetti's father was an Italian patriot exiled to England. The family's household became a center of liberal politics and lively conversation and produced several talented children, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his sister, poet Christina Rossetti, and his brother, art critic and editor William Rossetti.
      Dante Rossetti, put off by his father's passionate politics, came to believe that art and literature should pursue beauty for beauty's sake and not try to be moral, instructive, or politically useful. Rossetti was already writing poetry and translating Italian verse by the time he was 20. He studied art and became a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an art group embracing art for art's sake.
      Rossetti contributed poems to the group's magazine, The Germ, and published a translation called Early Italian Poems, which brought him modest recognition and success. In 1860, Rossetti married a beautiful model named Elizabeth Siddal. Two years later, she died from an accidental overdose of laudanum. Rossetti, devastated, buried the only complete manuscript of his poetry with her. The manuscript was later unearthed and published during his lifetime. His Ballads and Sonnets (1881) included his sonnet sequence The House of Life.
— Eccentric, egotistical, yet extremely sensitive, Rossetti was a force to be reckoned with. Early on, he alternated between painting and poetry, but he is best known for founding the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood along with John Everett Millais.
      Rebelling against English academic painting's soft forms and what appeared to be a lax morality, the Brotherhood aspired to a crisp, emotional style embracing the purity and simplicity of Italian art before Raphael. Using minute detail and elaborate symbolism, they painted from nature. Rossetti expanded the group's aims by linking poetry, painting, and social idealism and by interpreting the term Pre-Raphaelite as synonymous with a romanticized medieval past. In the second phase of the movement in the mid-1850s, Rossetti gained a powerful but exacting patron in the art critic John Ruskin.
      Throughout the 1850s and 1860s, Rossetti painted and drew mostly languid and sensuous female portraits, using his lover Elizabeth Siddal almost exclusively as a model. These paintings later influenced the Symbolists and also proved popular with collectors: Rossetti grew affluent enough to employ studio assistants to make copies.
      Rossetti published his complete poems in 1870, after exhuming them from Siddal's grave. Following a physical and mental collapse and a suicide attempt, he recovered enough to continue painting and writing but only as a semi-invalid and recluse.
—    Rossetti decided to become an artist before he had any actual experience of painting. He enrolled in the Royal Academy Schools, but did not stay long. He then studied for a short time with Ford Madox Brown [16 April 1821 – 11 Oct 1893], before transferring his allegiance to William Holman Hunt [02 Apr 1827 – 07 Sep 1910]. His friendship with Hunt and subsequent meeting with John Millais [08 Jun 1829 – 13 Aug 1896] were the major factors in the creation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
     During the late 1850s he took to painting in watercolors, in which he felt that his shortcomings of technique were less apparent. Many of his pictures at this time, concerned his lifelong fascination with Dante.
click for Beata Beatrix      In the early 1850s Rossetti met Elizabeth Siddal, the model for Millais famous picture Ophelia. She became his lover, and after an on-off relationship he married her in 1860, when she was already very ill, probably with tuberculosis. Rossetti made many pencil drawings of Lizzie (such as this one, of 06 Feb 1855), which are extremely beautiful and sensitive. In 1862, after the still birth of their child, Lizzie committed suicide by taking an overdose of laudanum. The grief-stricken Rossetti, had a manuscript version of his poems buried with his wife. In 1862 he produced the famous picture Beata Beatrix [< click image for version 1] nominally a Dantesque picture, but in reality a tribute to his dead wife, who was quite obviously the model for Beatrix. Following this trauma, he moved to a house in Cheyne Walk, where he lived for the most of the rest of his life. He lived in a curious fashion, with a menagerie of wild animals in his garden. His main companion was Fanny Cornforth [1862 portrait 25x10cm — 1868 drawing 50x34cm], a basic cockney girl, and your archetypal “tart with a heart.” In the late 1860s, Rossetti had his wife's body exhumed, to recover his poems. From this unhappy and bizarre event, the mental problems, which ultimately destroyed him, are most likely to have come.
      Rossetti became increasingly burdened with an obsession for Jane Morris, née Burden [1860 drawing — 1868 portrait “Aurea Catena” 77x63cm], the wife of his friend William Morris [1834-1896]. For most of the last twenty years of his life, his pictures were of lone women, sumptuously colored, in luxurious, but often claustrophobic surroundings. Most of these pictures had as their model, a stylized Jane Morris. In the 1870s Rossetti became addicted to chloral ( a narcotic) and alcohol. Jane Morris broke with him, as he started to lose his reason. His health broken, he died at Birchington-on-Sea at Easter 1882. His younger brother, William Michael Rossetti [1829-1919] was an art critic, and the main chronicler of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He married the daughter of Ford Madox Brown.
—     Rossetti was a poet, painter and translator. He was born to the family of an Italian political immigrant to England, Gabriel Rossetti, poet, scholar and revolutionary. There were three more children in the family: Maria [1827-1876] who became an Anglican nun and author of a literary commentary A Shadow of Dante; William Michael [1829-1919], critic, civil servant and Pre-Raphaelite historian, and Christina Georgina [1830-1894], English poet. The household was artistic and more Italian than English.
       Rossetti began his training in 1841 in Sass’s Drawing School; in 1846 he was accepted by the Royal Academy Antique School in London. Then he persuaded Ford Madox Brown to tutor him, but this was short-lived. In 1848, he became a co-founder (with William Holman Hunt and John Millais) of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the painters of the trend turned away from neo-classicism and its models of Greco-Roman antiquity and the High Renaissance, and revived interest in the Middle Ages, especially in Gothic art.
       Most of Rossetti’s work was produced in the spirit of this movement, despite his leaving it at an early date. Many of his themes were taken from the Old and New Testament, Dante, or the medieval legends about the King Arthur and his knights, Malory's Morte d’Arthur in particular, and treated with strong overtones of symbolism.
       In 1850, he met Elisabeth Siddal, who sat for many of his pictures: The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice: Dante Drawing the Angel (1853), Dante's Vision of Rachel and Leah (1855), Beata Beatrix (1870) and for some by Hunt and Millais’s Ophelia, and whom he married in 1860 after a fraught and prolonged courtship. Already an invalid, she died in 1862 from an overdose of laudanum. Although it was an accident, the thought that his wife had committed suicide haunted Rossetti for the rest of his life.
       He met Ruskin in 1854. Largely because of Ruskin, Rossetti was gaining a reputation as the ‘leader’ of the Pre-Raphaelites. He turned more and more in the direction of poetic painting, which he emphasized by attaching sonnets to the frames of his pictures. In 1861, The Early Italian Poets was published, translations from 60 poets such as Dante and Cavalcanti. Rossetti's Poems appeared in 1870. His wife’s death, however affected him deeply and his work took a taint of pessimism and morbidity. Dante's Dream at the Time of the Death of Beatrice (1871), Proserpine (1874). He fell into depression and attempted suicide in 1872. Nevertheless, Ballads and Sonnets with the sonnet sequence The House of Life and The King’s Tragedy appeared in 1881. In his later years Rossetti concentrated on studies of single, allegorical female figures: Monna Vanna (1866), Mariana (1870), La Ghirlandata (1873, The Day Dream (1880).
      At odds with Victorian morality, his work is lush, erotic and medieval, romantic in spirit, and of abiding interest and fascination.
       Rossetti died on Easter Sunday, 09 April 1882, of glomerulonephritis (a diffuse inflammation of the kidneys' glomeruli usually brought on by immunological processes; it is also known as Bright’s disease after Dr. Richard Bright [28 Sep 1789 – 16 Dec 1858]).

— ROSSETTI ONLINE:
The Rossetti Archive
//— writings:
Selected Works and Criticism.The Blessed DamozelThe House of Life Jenny Poems (first edition; 1870) (illustrated) — translator of Bürger's Lenore
//— artwork:
LINKS
How Sir Galahad, Sir Bors, and Sir Percival were Fed with the Sanc Grael; but Sir Percival's Sister Died by the Way (1864, 29x42cm)
Sybilla Palmifera
(1870, 94x83cm)
Venus Verticordia
(1868, 98x70cm)
Elizabeth Siddal (02 June 1854) — Elizabeth Siddal (1865) A red-haired beauty, Siddal began sitting for Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood artists in 1849, when she was about fifteen. By 1852 she was working exclusively for painter-poet Rossetti and became his lover and his student before she became his wife. She was then forced to play the role of an unattainable goddess while Rossetti associated with prostitutes in private. His love for Elizabeth was genuine enough, but it was rooted in a form of high romanticism which had little to do with everyday living. When he confessed to her that the intense love he felt for her would become even stronger if she were to die, she took him at his word. Trapped in an unreal world of romantic passion, she made her escape by taking an overdose of laudanum. She was only 31. Then the intensity that marked so much of Rossetti's work disappeared, and he became a somewhat mechanical painter, although he was still highly successful. Besides paintings, Rossetti made more than sixty intimate drawings of her in the 1850s, in which she usually appeared in some type of repose, e.g. Portrait of Elizabeth Siddal Resting, Holding a Parasol (10.5x10.2cm)
The Day Dream (1880, 158x93cm) — La Donna della Finestra (1879, 101x74cm) — Pandora (1879) — A Vision of Fiammetta (1878, 146x89cm) — A Sea Spell (1877, 107x89cm) — Astarte Syriaca (1877, 183x107cm) — La Bella Mano (1875, 158x117cm) — The Blessed Damozel (1878, 174x84cm)
— Proserpine (1874, 126x61cm; 1633x689pixels) _  Proserpine (1877, 117x56cm; 1084x520pixels) _  Proserpine (1882, 79x39cm; 3040x1813pixels framed, 2309x1093pixels painting alone) _ the three paintings differ only in size, hue and intensity of colors and amount of cropping (perhaps only in these images), and minute details.
— Sancta Lilias (1874, 48x46cm) — La Ghirlandata (1873, 116x88cm) — Veronica Veronese (1872, 109x89cm)
— Dante's Dream at the Time of the Death of Beatrice (1871, 211x318cm) _ [detail] — The Bower Meadow (1872, 85x67cm) — La Donna della Fiamma (1870, 101x75cm) — La Pia de' Tolomei (1880, 105x121cm) — Lady Lilith (1868, 95x81cm) — Monna Vanna (1866, 89x86cm) — Regina Cordium (1866, 60x50cm) — The Beloved (aka The Bride, 1866, 83x76cm) click for full painting— Il Ramoscello (1865, 48x39cm)
— Beata Beatrix (1870, 87x69cm) _ Painted as a memorial to Rossetti's wife, Elizabeth Siddal, who died in 1862. Rossetti had in fact begun the picture many years before, but took it up again in 1864 and completed it by 1870. It is one of his most intensely visionary, Symbolist pictures, and marks a new direction in his art. The painting represents the death of Beatrice in Dante's Vita Nuova. Beatrice sits in a death-like trance, while a bird, the messenger of Death, drops a poppy into her hands. In the background the figures of Love and Dante gaze at each other, with the Ponte Vecchio and the Duomo of Florence silhouetted behind them.
— Beata Beatrix (1882, 87x68cm) [< click image for this version] — Morning Music (1864, 30x28cm) — Aurelia (1873, 43x38cm) — Girl at a Lattice (1862, 29x26cm) — Saint George and the Princess Sabra (1862, 52x31cm) — Bocca Baciata (1859, 32x27cm) — Dantis Amore(1860, 75x81cm) — The Salutation of Beatrice (1859, 75x160cm) — Before the Battle(1858, 42x28cm) — The Seed of David (1858, 229x277cm) — The Tune of the Seven Towers (1857, 31x36cm) — The Blue Closet (1856, 34x25cm) — Found (1854, 91x80cm) — The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice(1854, 42x61cm) — Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1850, 73x42cm) — The Childhood of Mary Virgin (1849, 83x65cm) — [Memories?]The Day Dream
^Old Man of Madras Born on 12 May 1812: Edward Lear, England, landscape painter, writer of nonsense verse, who died on 29 January 1888.
     Here is an example of his limericks:
There was an Old Man of Madras,
Who rode on a cream-colored ass;
But the length of its ears,
So promoted his fears,
That it killed that Old Man of Madras.

     Lear was an English landscape painter who is more widely known as the writer of an original kind of nonsense verse and as the popularizer of the limerick. His true genius is apparent in his nonsense poems, which portray a world of fantastic creatures in nonsense words and show a Tennysonian feeling for word color, variety of rhythm, and often a deep underlying sense of melancholy. Their quality is matched, especially in the limericks, by that of his engaging pen-and-ink drawings [here is one which I colored >].

ILLUSTRATED WRITINGS BY LEAR ONLINE: A Book of NonsenseLaughable Lyrics: A Fourth Book of Nonsense Poems, Songs, Botany, Music, Etc.More Nonsense, Pictures, Rhymes, Botany, Etc. — Queery Leary Nonsense: A Lear Nonsense Book. — not illustrated: A Book of Nonsense

ARTWORK BY LEAR ONLINE: LINKS
The Pyramids Road, GhizehCivita Castellana Masada
^ Born on 10 May 1885: Mario Sironi, Italian painter, illustrator, sculptor, stage designer, and architect, who died in 1961.
— He was brought up in Rome where his family moved in 1886. In 1902 Sironi enrolled in the Engineering Faculty of the University of Rome, but after a long illness abandoned his studies to devote himself to painting. In 1903 he attended the Scuola Libera del Nudo at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome and frequented the studio of Giacomo Balla. Following a short spell in Milan in 1905–6, he travelled to Paris in 1906 and shared a room with his close friend Umberto Boccioni. Several family and self-portraits painted in a divisionist technique date from this period. Sironi also visited Germany several times between 1908 and 1911, where he was exposed to contemporary Expressionist currents. He lived in Rome from 1909 until he moved to Milan in late 1914 or early 1915.
— Born in Sassari, but lived from 1886 in Rome. Spent a year studying civil engineering at Rome University, then decided in 1903 to devote himself to painting. Attended life classes at the Academy in Rome and became friendly with Balla, Boccioni and Severini. Moved to Milan in 1914 and joined the Futurist movement. After war service, returned to Milan, became a member of the Fascist Party and contributed from 1922 to Il Popolo d'Italia and other papers, first as draughtsman and art editor, later as art critic. Painted several mannequin figures influenced by Metaphysical painting; then was one of the founders of the Novecento movement. Encouraged the revival of mural painting, admired the grandeur of ancient Rome, Byzantine mosaics, etc., but drew many of his subjects from the urban landscapes of modern Italy. First one-man exhibition at the 1926 Venice Biennale. Collaborated with the architect Giovanni Muzio in the planning and arrangement of the Italian pavilions at the Cologne (1928) and Barcelona (1929) international exhibitions, and in the years 1932-42 executed various commissions for frescoes, mosaics and low-reliefs. From 1943 worked mainly as an easel painter. Died in Milan.
— Trascorre la prima giovinezza a Roma dove, abbandonati gli studi di ingegneria, nel 1903 decide di dedicarsi completamente alla pittura e si iscrive all'Accademia di Belli Arti: frequenta lo studio di Giacomo Balla, dove conosce Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini, Roberto Melli e Vincenzo Costantini, che diventerà suo cognato. Nel 1905 si trasferisce a Milano: da qui intraprende un primo soggiorno a Parigi (1906-1907) e poi in Germania a Erfurt, nel 1908, presso lo scultore Tannenbaum. E' di questi anni L'autoritratto con paglietta, che rivela le suggestioni divisioniste che condivideva con Boccioni, Balla, Carrà. Amicizie che verso i primi anni Dieci orientano le sue ricerche in direzione futurista, non solo in senso dinamico, ma con grande sensibilità nei confronti dei rapporti compositivi di spazio e volume. Dal 1909 al 1914 è ancora a Roma. Nel maggio del 1914 partecipa con sedici opere all'Esposizione Libera Futurista, presso la Galleria Sprovieri di Roma. L'anno seguente avvia la sua collaborazione come illustratore di riviste e quotidiani (Noi e il mondo, La tribuna Illustrata, Gli avvenimenti, Ardita), un'attività che lo porterà a collaborare nel 1922 col Popolo d'Italia.
     Nel 1914 è tra i membri della direzione del movimento futurista e firma con Marinetti, Boccioni, Russolo, Sant'Elia e Piatti il manifesto L'orgoglio italiano a favore dell'interventismo. Nel 1915 si arruola nel battaglione lombardo ciclisti e automobilistici, insieme a Boccioni, Sant'Elia, Martinetti, Russolo, Erba, Funi, combattendo nella zona del Montello. Alla fine della guerra rientra a Milano e si sposa. Nel 1919 espone con una sua prima mostra personale alla Galleria Bragaglia, in Via Condotti a Roma. Nel 1920, firma con Dudreville, Funi e Russolo il manifesto Contro tutti i ritorni in pittura che contiene alcune delle tesi che saranno poi fondamentali per la costruzione del gruppo novecentista e si schiera, insieme a Garbari e Dudreville, con gli artisti dissidenti dell'esposizione di Ca' Pesaro a Venezia, che protestano per l'esclusione alla mostra degli artisti non veneti. Non partecipa alla loro esposizione alla Galleria Geri Boralevi, mentre tra la fine del 1920 e il gennaio 1921 è a Ginevra, all'Exposition Internationale d'Art Moderne organizzata dalla Section d'Or. In questi anni Sironi frequenta a Milano e a Como il salotto della Sarfatti, con la quale condivide la necessità di riunire intorno ad alcuni artisti la nuova idea d'arte italiana.
     Dal 1922 entra a fa parte del Gruppo dei Sette Pittori Moderni, costituito da Leonardo Dudreville, Achile Funi, Gian Emilio Malerba, Piero Marussig, Ubaldo Oppi, Anselmo Bucci, che si presentano al pubblico nella mostra organizzata dalla galleria di Lino Pesaro, a Milano, nello stesso anno, sostenendo programmaticamente di voler "fare dell'arte italiana ispirandosi alle sue purissime fonti, sottraendola a tutti gli ismi d'importazione". Con i pittori del "Novecento"(così ribattezzato da Bucci, dopo il 1925) Sironi partecipa nel 1924 alla XIV Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte della città di Venezia, presentandovi due opere, L'allieva e L'architetto, opere destinate a diventare delle vere e proprie icone della poetica novecentista. Successivamente Sironi parteciperà anche alle Biennali del 1928, del 1930 e 1932, mentre negherà la propria presenza all'edizione del 1952.
     Nei dipinti di questi anni avvia le tematiche delle periferie e dei paesaggi urbani dove tra desolati e cupi caseggiati transitano camion, tram e solitari ciclisti. Dopo alcune mostre personali di successo, è fra i promotori, nel 1926, dell'esposizione, inaugurata da Mussolini nel Palazzo della Permanente di Milano e che verrà ripetuta nel 1929. Il suo impegno di organizzatore lo porta nel 1927 a contribuire attivamente alla costituzione dell'organizzazione sindacale degli intellettuali e artisti lombardi. A conferma del suo crescente successo, nel 1930 Scheiwiller gli dedica una piccola ma preziosa monografia, nella prestigiosa collana di U. Hoepli. In questi anni inizia a interessarsi di scenografia e di architettura, interessi che lo orientano verso un'impostazione unitaria dei valori dell'architettura e delle arti figurative, intesa come recupero e rivalutazione dei valori della tradizione pittorica italiana. Nel Manifesto della pittura murale, pubblicato nel dicembre 1933, Sironi affida alla pittura murale il superameno di quella da cavalletto che serve solo - dice "per la soddisfazione del proprietario, per l'intimità dal salotto e il gelido e marmoreo silenzio delle pinacoteche".
     Nel 1935 esegue l'affresco L'Italia fra le arti e le scienze destinato all'Aula Magna della Nuova Università di Roma, progettata da Piacentini (1935); l'anno successivo, il mosaico L'Italia corporativa, che viene esposto a Parigi, all'Esposizione Universale del 1937 dove era presente anche Guernica di Picasso. Nello stesso anno è impegnato anche nell'impresa decorativa del Palazzo di Giustizia di Milano con il mosaico La forza, la giustizia, la legge, la verità e il grande pannello per l'Università di Venezia (L'Italia, Venezia e gli studi). Dopo la vetrata dell'Annunciazione per la Cappella dell'Ospedale Maggiore di Milano (1937) e i due grandi dipinti, L'agricoltura e l'architettura per il Palazzo delle Poste di Bergamo (1938), ora Ministero delle Poste e Telecomunicazioni di Roma, fino al 1942 è impegnato nei lavori di ornamentazione della sede del Popolo d'Italia, in collaborazione con l'architetto Muzio. Nel 1943 ritorna alla pittura da cavalletto, per mezzo della quale riconverte la passata esperienza muralistica architettonica e scenografica in composizioni a scomparti che egli chiama moltiplicazioni. Nel 1962, l'anno seguente la sua morte, viene allestita un'ampia e rigorosa retrospettiva a Venezia, alla XXXI Biennale.
LINKS
Composition (203x135cm) [Storage corner in a sculptor's studio?] — Il gasometro (1943, 38x52cm) — Natura morta con tazza blu (1926, 50x60cm) — Dinamismo di una figura (1914, 16x19cm) [scribbles]
^ Born on 12 May 1662: Jan Frans van Bloemen (or Blommen) “Orizonte”, Flemish painter who died on 13 June 1749. Born in Antwerp, van Bloemen settled in Rome in 1688 where he was patronized by aristocratic Roman families. Schooled in the Flemish landscape tradition, he was inspired by classicism, the beauty of Rome and it’s surrounding countryside.
— He was the brother of Pieter van Bloemen [17 Jan 1657 bapt. – <06 Mar 1720], who was his first art teacher, and of Norbert van Bloemen [10 Feb 1670 – 1746]. Jan Frans also studied under Antoine Goubau.
     In 1684–1685 Jan Frans was in Paris, until he was summoned by his brother Pieter to Lyon. There Jan Frans apparently worked with van der Cabel. The two brothers were not happy in Lyon, however, and went to Rome. They traveled via Turin, staying there for some time. From 1686 to 1687 they were in Rome, where they were both members of the Schildersbent, the confraternity of Dutch and Flemish artists active in Rome. Jan Frans’s facility for producing panoramic landscapes earned him the nickname Orizzonte, which had previously been applied to Claude Lorrain. Jan Frans did not leave Rome again, apart from an eight-month journey to Naples, Sicily and Malta, from which he returned with a large number of drawings.
     Jan Frans was married in Rome in 1693, and the Dutch artist Caspar van Wittel, known as Vanvitelli, was godfather to the couple’s first child, baptized in 1694. Although patronized by aristocratic Roman families, Orizzonte’s artistic career was marred by his prolonged confrontation with the Accademia di S Luca. The precise reasons for the difficulties are unknown, but he was only finally accepted by the Accademia at the age of 80, after his third application for membership.

Landscape 2527 (with 3 persons half-dressed, waterfall, and mountain) (36x48cm)
Landscape 2646 (with 2 hikers resting, woman carrying basket on head, 3 castles on hills) (48x63cm)
Landscape with an Abbey and a Ruined Doric Temple with Arcadian Figures (87x132cm)
Paesaggio con Tobiolo e l'angelo (160x222cm) _ The angel Raphael, disguised as a mortal accompanies Tobias on his journey from Assyria. The journey is a dramatic parable in which the angel advises Tobias through his trials. In Italy the subject of the guardian angel was often used to commemorate the travels of a son in whose likeness Tobias would be depicted.
The Obelisk (etching 24x17cm) — a different The Obelisk (etching 24x17cm)
11 prints at FAMSF
^
Died on a 12 May:


1970 Henri Léopold Hayden, Polish French painter born on 24 (25?) December 1883. He began a course in engineering at Warsaw Polytechnic in 1902 but also enrolled as a student at the School of Fine Arts, and in 1905 he gave up engineering to devote himself entirely to painting. In 1907 he arrived in Paris, intending to stay for only a year, but lived in France until his death. He attended the Académie La Palette for several months and in 1909 visited Brittany, in particular Le Pouldu and Pont-Aven, where he went to work for a number of summers, and where he met and became friendly with the Polish painter Wladyslaw Slewinski, who had been a member of Paul Gauguin’s circle. — Paysage Beka (1968 lithograph 50x66cm)

1911 Constant Mayer, French artist born on 04 October 1832.

1829 Maximilien Joseph Wagenbaur, French artist born on 28 July 1774. — [Shoudn't his name be Wagenbauer, or rather Charretier?]

1833 Philippe-Auguste Hennequin, French artist painter born on 20 April 1762. — [Sure it's not Henequen? Did he have a cousin named Mary-Jane? Was his nickname Hemp?] — He was precociously talented and by the age of 15 had been Donat Nonnotte’s pupil at the Académie des Beaux-Arts at Lyon and had arrived in Paris. There he worked for a time in Jacques-Louis David’s studio, from which he was expelled after being accused of theft. He completed his studies at the Académie Royale de Peinture in 1784 and visited Rome at the expense of an English patron named Mills. Because of masonic connections he was forced to flee in 1789, returning to Lyon. His politics tended towards Jacobinism, and during the Revolution he was appointed to a commission entrusted with saving works of art. After the fall of Robespierre [06 May 1758 – 28 Jul 1794] on 27 July 1794 (9 thermidor an II) Hennequin fled to Paris, where he suffered imprisonment and narrowly avoided the guillotine [if he had been opposed to Robespierre, Hennequin would certainly have been narrowly guillotined before Thermidor]. — Louis Gallait was a student of Hennequin. —

1615 Cornelis Floris III de Vriendt, Flemish artist born in 1516. — [Lived past the age of 98 and never produced anything worth showing on the internet?!?] — Related? to sculptor Cornelis Floris [1514-1575]?

^
Born on a 12 May:


1886 Albert Saverys (or Saverijs), Belgian artist who died on 29 April 1964.

1868 Harry (or Ary, Herman) Roseland, US artist who died in 1950. — [When a patron who had commissioned a landscape complained about the absence of flowers in it, did the artist reply: “I never promised you a rose garden, I promised you a Roseland!”?]

1865 Alexis Vollon, French artist who died in 1945. — Relative? of Antoine Vollon [1833-1900]?

1835 Luc Raphaël Ponson, French artist who died on 31 January 1904. — [De son temps il y avait au Jardin des Plantes une giraffe, à elle pensons: Raphaël Ponson pond son tableau, pense-t-il dédier son paraphe à elle? — Pas Raphaël!]

1753 Agustín Esteve y Marques, Spanish painter who died in 1809 or after 1820 [was he given a choice?]. He may have been the son of a Valencian sculptor of the same name, Agustín Esteve, documented between 1764 and 1767. He attended the school of the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Carlos, Valencia, and in 1772 went to Madrid to the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, where he won a prize, although he was not to have an important academic career. He established himself in Madrid, where the ducal houses of Osuna and Alba were the first to give him commissions. One of these was for the portrait of Doña Joaquina Tellez-Giron (1784), daughter of the 9th Duque de Osuna, painted when she was 13. For more than 25 years Esteve y Marques painted portraits, mainly for aristocratic circles, among whom his simple, flattering and uncritical style was well accepted.

1737 Hendrick Meyer II, Dutch painter who died in 1793. — Rustic Watermill in a Gothic Ruin (1778, 30x40cm)

1630 Wilhelm Schubert van Ehrenberg (or Hardenberg), Flemish painter who died in 1676. — LINKSChurch Interior (1665)

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