The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (163 page)

(1607–56).
Neapolitan painter. He was one of the most prominent artists in Naples in the generation before the plague of 1656 (in which he died), and did religious paintings, some in fresco, for several churches in the city. His only complete surviving fresco cycle, however, is the
History of Moses
in the Villa Roomer at Barra, and he is now remembered mainly as the first specialist in battle pieces, a genre that won him an international reputation and in which he inspired his pupil Salvator
Rosa
. Falcone was also an outstanding draughtsman.

 
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(1716–91).
French sculptor and writer on art, a pupil of J. B.
Lemoyne
. Falconet was perhaps the most quintessentially
Rococo
of all French sculptors, his forté being gently erotic figures such as the celebrated
Bather
(1757) in the Louvre. Like many other of his works, this was reproduced in porcelain by the Sèvres factory, of which he was Director from 1757 to 1766, a position that he gained through the influence of his patron Mme de Pompadour. Falconet had other sides to his talent, however, and his masterpiece—the equestrian statue of Peter the Great in St Petersburg—is in a completely different vein. He went to Russia in 1766, recommended to Catherine II by
Diderot
, and left in 1778, the statue being unveiled in 1782. The huge horse is represented with its forelegs raised and unsupported—a daring technical feat—and the heroic vigour of the statue gives it a place among the greatest examples of the type. Falconet suffered a stroke in 1783 and thereafter produced no more sculpture, devoting himself to writing. A six-volume edition of his writings had already appeared in 1781 and in 1761 he had published his best-known literary work,
Réflexions sur la sculpture
. In this he was one of the first to argue that the modern artists were superior to those of the ancient world (it is significant that unlike most of his distinguished contemporaries he never saw the need to visit Italy).

 
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fancy picture
.

A term applied in the 18th cent. to a type of sentimental rural
genre
picture. Scenes in which idealized peasants behave rather more as if they were in the studio than the countryside are ‘fancy pictures’, and
Gainsborough's
paintings of this type were so called in his own day. The term is elusive and cannot be defined with precision.

 
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Fantastic Realism
.

A movement in painting that developed in Vienna in the late 1940s and came to be regarded as typical of post-war Austrian painting. The artists involved combined minute realism with a fairy-tale world of fantasy and imagination. Though very different in their ways of painting and in the quality of their work, they had in common an interest in the art of the past, notably that of Pieter
Bruegel
(supremely well-represented in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna) and in the literary and anecdotal character of painting. The best-known representative of Fantastic Realism is Ernst Fuchs (1930– ), who like several other artists involved in the movement was a pupil of Albert Paris Gütersloh (1887–1973), who was a renowned teacher at the Vienna Academy.

 
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(1836–1904).
French painter and lithographer. He is best known for his luxurious flower pieces, but he also painted several group portraits that are important historical documents and show his friendship with leading avant-garde artists.
Homage to Delacroix
(Musée d'Orsay, Paris, 1864) shows Fantin-Latour himself, with
Baudelaire
,
Manet
,
Whistler
, and others grouped round a portrait of
Delacroix
; and
A Studio at Batignolles
(sometimes called
Homage to Manet
) (Musée d'Orsay, 1870) shows
Monet
,
Renoir
, and others in Manet's studio. In spite of his associations with such progressive artists, Fantin-Latour was a traditionalist, and his portraits particularly are in a precise, detailed style. Much of his later career was devoted to
lithography
; he greatly admired Richard Wagner and did imaginative lithographs illustrating his music and that of other
Romantic
composers.

 
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