The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (291 page)

(d. 1419).
Netherlandish painter. He is documented in Paris in 1396 and from 1397 to 1415 he was court painter to the Dukes of Burgundy. No documented works by him survive, but he has been suggested as the painter of several works, including part of the
Martyrdom of St Denis
(completed by
Bellechose
), and a
tondo
of the
Trinity
, both in the Louvre, Paris. They have all the refinement of French court art combined with a strength of modelling and a realistic naturalism derived from Flanders.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

Malton , Thomas
.

See
TURNER
.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1616–93).
Italian painter, art historian, and antiquarian. His
Felsina pittrice: vite dei pittori bolognesi
(1678) is the most important source for knowledge of the great period of the Bolognese School that began with the
Carracci
(Felsina was the Etruscan name for Bologna). His guide to the paintings of Bologna (1686) was one of the first books of its kind.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1548–1606).
Netherlandish painter and writer on art, born in Flanders and active mainly in Haarlem. He is sometimes known as the ‘Dutch
Vasari
’, for his fame rests primarily on his work as a biographer of artists, published in
Het Schilder Boeck
(
The Book of Painters
) in 1604. The most important part of the book is made up of about 175 biographies of Netherlandish and German artists from
van Eyck
to van Mander's own younger contemporaries. This is the first systematic account of the lives of northern European artists, and our only source of information about some of them. The book also contains the lives of Italian artists from
Cimabue
up to his own time. Most of this material is a condensed translation into Dutch of Vasari, but it also has valuable information collected by van Mander himself when he was in Italy in 1573–7 or from friends and correspondents: he was sufficiently up to date to mention
Caravaggio
, ‘who is doing extraordinary things in Rome’. Another part of the book is a long poem that gives practical advice to artists and sums up much of the theory and practice of 16th-cent. Netherlandish art. Van Mander's own pictures, which were mainly religious and allegorical, adopted the elongated forms of the
Mannerists
, but his later works showed a tendency towards
naturalism
. With
Cornelis van Haarlem
and Hendrick
Goltzius
, van Mander is said to have founded an academy in Haarlem. Frans
Hals
was probably his pupil.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1911– ).
French painter, lithographer, and designer of tapestries and stained glass, a pupil of
Bissière
. During the 1930s his work was influenced by
Cubism
and
Surrealism
, but after staying at a Trappist monastery in 1943 he became deeply committed to religion and turned to expressing spiritual meaning through abstract art, Characteristically his paintings feature rich colours within a loose linear grid, creating an effect reminiscent of stained glass (a medium in which he has done some of his best work). He is regarded as one of the leading exponents of expressive abstraction in the postwar School of
Paris
and has won numerous awards, notably the main painting prize at the 1962 Venice
Biennale
.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1832–83).
French painter and graphic artist. He was the son of a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Justice and inherited considerable wealth when his father (who disapproved of his choice of career) died in 1862. His upper middle-class background was important, for although he was cast as an artistic rebel, he always sought traditional honours and success and he cut an impeccable figure as a man-about-town. He entered the studio of
Couture
in 1850 and remained a pupil there for six years. His own painting style was, however, based mainly on a study of the Old Masters at the
Louvre
, and particularly Spanish painters such as
Velázquez
(his greatest artistic hero) and
Ribera
. During the 1850s he visited museums in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and Italy and it is one of the ironies of Manet's career that a painter with such reverence for the art of the past should be so much attacked for his modernity. His first taste of official disfavour came when his first submission to the
Salon
—
The Absinthe Drinker
(Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek, Copenhagen, 1859)—was rejected. He had two paintings accepted in 1861, but then in 1863 his
Déjeuner sur l'herbe
(Musée d'Orsay, Paris) caused a scandal. It was turned down by the Salon and was shown instead at the
Salon
des Refusés, set up specially for such rejected paintings. Its hostile reception was based on moral as well as aesthetic grounds, for nudity was considered acceptable only if it was sufficiently remote in time or place and this showed a naked woman having a picnic with two contemporary, clothed men. Manet caused even greater outrage two years later when his
Olympia
(Musée d'Orsay, 1863) was exhibited at the Salon. The reclining nude figure was based on
Titian's
Venus of Urbino
(which Manet had copied in Florence 10 years earlier), but her blatant sexuality was thought an affront to accepted standards of decorum, and one critic wrote ‘Art sunk so low does not even deserve reproach.’ Manet was denounced also for his bold technique, in which he eliminated the fine tonal gradations of academic practice and created vivid contrasts of light and shade: ‘The shadows are indicated by more or less large smears of blacking’, wrote another critic, ‘The least beautiful woman has bones, muscles, skin, and some sort of colour. Here there is nothing.’ From this time, Manet reluctantly found himself acquiring a reputation as a leader of the avant-garde. He was a respected and admired member of the group of young
Impressionists
, including
Monet
,
Renoir
,
Bazille
,
Sisley
, and
Cézanne
, who met at the Café Guerbois and elsewhere. But despite their admiration for him, Manet stood somewhat aloof from the group (although he enjoyed going to the races with
Degas
, who was also from the upper middle class) and did not participate in the Impressionist exhibitions. He did, however, adopt the Impressionist technique of painting out of doors (persuaded by Berthe
Morisot
, who became his sister-in-law in 1874), and his work became freer and lighter in the 1870s under their influence. In the late 1870s Manet became ill with a disease diagnosed as locomotor ataxia (associated with the late stages of syphilis), which caused him bouts of great pain and extreme tiredness. Increasingly he preferred to work in pastels, which were less physically demanding than oils, but in his last great painting,
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère
(Courtauld Inst. Galleries, London, 1882), Manet rose to heights of painterly brilliance that no other 19th-cent. artist surpassed. He died in appalling pain a week after having a gangrenous leg amputated. The official honours he had craved—in the form of a second-class medal at the Salon and membership of the Legion of Honour—came too late (1881) to be enjoyed.
Manet was a varied and complex artist. He painted a great variety of subjects (he was also a skilled etcher and lithographer) and rarely repeated himself. His approach was completely undogmatic and he was reluctant to theorize; his friend Émile Zola wrote of him ‘In beginning a picture, he could never say how it would come-out.’ In spite of the fact that his work often has a feeling of complete freshness and spontaneity, he would often repaint and rework pictures or even cut them into fragments. His greatest strength was with modern-life subjects (he sketched constantly in the boulevards and cafés of Paris), but although he is accused by some critics of having no imagination, of being able to paint something only if he had it in front of him, his pictures are anything but straight transcriptions of nature. They are, indeed, sometimes enigmatic and elusive, as with
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère
, and seem to be more concerned with the act of painting than with the ostensible subject. It is partly in this freedom from the traditional literary, anecdotal, or moralistic associations of painting that he is seen as one of the founders of ‘modern’ art, and it is significant that the official title of the first
Post-Impressionist
Exhibition, organized by Roger
Fry
in 1910–11, was
Manet and the Post-Impressionists
.