Featured Artist at the e.Gallery: Gustav Caillebotte

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 19th Century artist of the Impressionist movement, Gustav Caillebotte [French, 1848-1894] Link: https://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Caillebotte_Gustav
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Featured Artist at the e.Gallery: David Smith


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Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 20th Century artist of the Expressionist movement, David Smith [American, 1906-1965] Link: https://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Smith_David

David Smith was born in 1906 in Decatur, Indiana. After briefly attending college at Ohio University, the University of Notre Dame, and George Washington University, he moved to New York in 1926, where he studied painting full time at the Art Students League. During the 1930s he began to focus on sculpture, creating welded constructions by using found objects and forged metal. Smith moved permanently to Bolton Landing, in upstate New York, in 1940. Smith died in a car accident near Bennington, Vermont, in 1965. Major exhibitions of his sculptures, paintings and drawings have been presented worldwide since the 1950s, including recent retrospectives at the Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo (1994); MNCA, Reina Sofía, Madrid (1996); and Storm King Art Center, New York (1997-1999). A centennial retrospective organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2006) traveled to the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Tate Modern, London (2006–2007).


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Voltri VII

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Featured Artist at the e.Gallery: Il Tedesco


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Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 17th Century artist of the Baroque movement, Il Tedesco [German, 1578-1610] Link: https://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Elsheimer_Adam

Adam Elsheimer (1578–1610), was a German painter, etcher, and draughtsman, active mainly in Italy. Although he died young and his output was small he played a key role in the development of 17th-century landscape painting.

He was born in Frankfurt, where he absorbed the Coninxloo tradition, and moved to Italy in 1598. In Venice he worked with his countryman Rottenhammer, then settled in Rome in 1600. His early Mannerist style gave way to a more direct manner in which he showed great sensitivity to effects of light; his nocturnal scenes are particularly original, bringing out the best in his lyrical temperament, and he is credited with being the first artist to represent the constellations of the night sky accurately (The Flight into Egypt, Alte Pinakothek, Munich, 1609). He painted a few pictures in which figures predominate, but generally they are fused into a harmonious unity with their landscape settings. They are invariably on a small scale and on copper (the only exception is a self-portrait in the Uffizi, Florence, of doubtful attribution), but although exquisitely executed they have a grandeur out of all proportion to their size.

Elsheimer achieved fame during his lifetime and there are numerous contemporary copies of his works. His paintings were engraved by his pupil and patron, the Dutch amateur artist Count Hendrick Goudt (1573–1648), and Elsheimer himself made a number of etchings. In spite of his popularity he was personally unsuccessful and died in poverty. Sandrart says he suffered from melancholia and was often unable to work; apparently he was imprisoned for debt. Rubens was a friend of Elsheimer and after his death lamented his ‘sin of sloth, by which he has deprived the world of the most beautiful things;’ he also wrote ‘I have never seen his equal in the realm of small figures, of landscapes, and of so many other subjects.;’

Both Rubens (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Kassel) and Rembrandt (National Gallery, Dublin) made paintings of The Flight into Egypt inspired by Elsheimer’s masterpiece, and his influence is apparent in the work of many other 17th-century artists.


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St. Christopher

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The Flight into Egypt

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Featured Artist at the e.Gallery: Artemisia Gentileschi


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Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 17th Century artist of the Baroque movement, Artemisia Gentileschi [Italian, 1590-?1642] Link: https://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Gentileschi_Artemisia

Artemisia Gentileschi (July 8, 1593–c.1654) was an Italian Baroque painter, today considered one of the most accomplished painters in the generation after Caravaggio. In an era when women painters were not easily accepted by the artistic community or patrons, she was the first female painter to become a member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence.

She painted many pictures of strong and suffering women from myth and the Bible – victims, suicides, warriors — and made a specialty of the Judith story. Her best-known image, Judith Beheading Holofernes shows the decapitation of Holofernes, a scene of “horrific struggle and blood-letting.” That she was a woman painting in the 17th century and that she was raped herself and participated in prosecuting the rapist long overshadowed her achievements as an artist. For many years she was regarded as a curiosity. Today she is regarded as one of the most progressive and expressionist painters of her generation, a major artist in her own right.


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Self-Portrait as a Martyr Saint

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Susanna and the Elders

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St Cecilia Playing a Lute

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Judith Beheading Holofernes

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