Hyacinthe Collin de Vermont | Allegories of the Four Seasons

Hyacinthe Collin de Vermont | Autumn from Allegories of the Four Seasons

Hyacinthe Collin de Vermont (19 January 1693, Versailles - 16 February 1761, Paris) was a French painter🎨.

He was born into a prosperous family: his father was a teacher and engineer, and his brother François Collin de Blamont (1690-1760) was Surintendant de la Musique de la Chambre.

Collin de Vermont was a pupil of Jean Jouvenet and Hyacinthe Rigaud.

In 1715 Collin came second in the Prix de Rome competition with the Gratitude of the People towards Judith (untraced).

Edwin Austin Abbey | Pre-Raphaelite painter / Illustrator

Edwin Austin Abbey, American painter🎨 and one of the foremost illustrators of his day.

While working as an illustrator for the publishing house of Harper and Brothers, New York City, Abbey began to create illustrations for the poems of Robert Herrick in 1874.

He went on to create illustrations for some of the works of Oliver Goldsmith and William Shakespeare🎨.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905)

William-Adolphe Bouguereau was a French academic painter.

In his realistic genre paintings he used mythological themes, making modern interpretations of classical subjects, with an emphasis on the female human body.

During his life he enjoyed significant popularity in France and the United States, was given numerous official honors, and received top prices for his work.

As the quintessential salon painter of his generation, he was reviled by the Impressionist avant-garde. By the early twentieth century, Bouguereau and his art fell out of favor with the public, due in part to changing tastes.

In the 1980s, a revival of interest in figure painting led to a rediscovery of Bouguereau and his work.

Throughout the course of his life, Bouguereau executed 822 known finished paintings, although the whereabouts of many are still unknown.

Edgar Degas: "People call me the painter of dancing girls.."

• "Do it again, ten times, a hundred times. Nothing in art must seem to be an accident, not even movement".

• "Bisogna rifare dieci volte, cento volte lo stesso soggetto. Niente, in arte, deve sembrare dovuto al caso".

Pierre-Auguste Renoir: "I grandi uomini sono modesti”!

• "Shall I tell you what I think are the two qualities of a work of art? First, it must be indescribable, and, second, it must be inimitable".

• "Vuoi sapere quali sono le due qualità di un'opera d'arte? In primo luogo, deve essere indescrivibile e, in secondo luogo, deve essere inimitabile".

• "I grandi uomini sono modesti".

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Pietro Perugino (1450-1523) | Raphael's master

Perugino🎨, byname of Pietro di Cristoforo Vannucci, Italian Renaissance painter🎨 of the Umbria school and the teacher of Raphael🎨.

His work (e.g., Giving of the Keys to St. Peter🎨, 1481-82, a fresco in the Sistine Chapel in Rome) anticipated High Renaissance ideals in its compositional clarity, sense of spaciousness, and economy of formal elements.

Perugino | The Sistine Chapel frescoes

The wall paintings of the Sistine Chapel🎨 are among the most important examples of the type of painting developed in Florence in the later fifteenth century.

The five artists brought to Rome to execute them came from various different art centres: Botticelli🎨, Ghirlandaio and Rosselli from Florence, Perugino from Umbria🎨, Signorelli from Cortona.

Perugino | Early Renaissance painter

Pietro Perugino (1450-1523), was born Pietro di Cristoforo Vannucci.

Contemporaries regarded Perugino as one of the leading painters in Florence in the 1480s and as the "best master in Italy" in 1500, but soon afterward his reputation suffered a decline from which it has only partly recovered.

The grounds for this criticism, then as now, is the formulaic quality of his work, in particular his tendency to repeat figure types or even whole compositions again and again.