William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. What he called his "prophetic works" were said by 20th-century critic Northrop Frye to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". While he lived in London his entire life, except for three years spent in Felpham, he produced a diverse and symbolically rich collection of works, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God", or "human existence itself".
Thomas Stothard was a British painter, illustrator and engraver. His son, Robert T. Stothard was a painter : he painted the proclamation outside York Minster of Queen Victoria's accession to the throne in June 1837.
The Prado Museum, officially known as Museo Nacional del Prado, is the main Spanish national art museum, located in central Madrid. It houses collections of European art, dating from the 12th century to the early 20th century, based on the former Spanish royal collection, and the single best collection of Spanish art. Founded as a museum of paintings and sculpture in 1819, it also contains important collections of other types of works. The numerous works by Francisco Goya, the single most extensively represented artist, as well as by Hieronymus Bosch, El Greco, Peter Paul Rubens, Titian, and Diego Velázquez, are some of the highlights of the collection. Velázquez and his keen eye and sensibility were also responsible for bringing much of the museum's fine collection of Italian masters to Spain, now one of the largest outside of Italy.
The Fitzwilliam Museum is the art and antiquities museum of the University of Cambridge. It is located on Trumpington Street opposite Fitzwilliam Street in central Cambridge. It was founded in 1816 under the will of Richard FitzWilliam, 7th Viscount FitzWilliam (1745–1816), and comprises one of the best collections of antiquities and modern art in western Europe. With over half a million objects and artworks in its collections, the displays in the museum explore world history and art from antiquity to the present. The treasures of the museum include artworks by Monet, Picasso, Rubens, Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt, Cézanne, Van Dyck, and Canaletto, as well as a winged bas-relief from Nimrud. Admission to the public is always free.
Rembrandt Peale was an American artist and museum keeper. A prolific portrait painter, he was especially acclaimed for his likenesses of presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Peale's style was influenced by French neoclassicism after a stay in Paris in his early thirties.
The Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden, Germany, displays around 750 paintings from the 15th to the 18th centuries. It includes major Italian Renaissance works as well as Dutch and Flemish paintings. Outstanding works by German, French, and Spanish painters of the period are also among the gallery's attractions.
Robert Hartley Cromek (1770–1812) was an English engraver, editor, art dealer and entrepreneur who was most active in the early nineteenth century. He is best known for having allegedly cheated William Blake out of the potential profits of his engraving depicting Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims.
James Heath was a British engraver. He enjoyed the patronage of George III and successive monarchs.
Diana and Actaeon is a painting by the Italian Renaissance master Titian, finished in 1556–1559, and is considered amongst Titian's greatest works. It portrays the moment in which the hunter Actaeon bursts in where the goddess Diana and her nymphs are bathing. Diana is furious, and will turn Actaeon into a stag, who is then pursued and killed by his own hounds, a scene Titian later painted in his The Death of Actaeon.
The Angerstein Collection comprises 38 paintings that were bought by the British government from the collection of John Julius Angerstein after his death in 1823. They became the first works held by the National Gallery, London, on its foundation in 1824, including the works now catalogued in its collection as NG1, NG2 and NG3, and others up to NG122. They were initially displayed at Angerstein's townhouse at 100 Pall Mall. Other early works acquired by the National Gallery include 16 paintings donated by Sir George Beaumont in 1826, and a bequest of 35 paintings by the Reverend William Holwell Carr by 1831.
The Orleans Collection was a very important collection of over 500 paintings formed by Philippe d'Orléans, Duke of Orléans, mostly acquired between about 1700 and his death in 1723. Apart from the great royal-become-national collections of Europe it is arguably the greatest private collection of Western art, especially Italian, ever assembled, and probably the most famous, helped by the fact that most of the collection has been accessible to the public since it was formed, whether in Paris, or subsequently in London, Edinburgh and elsewhere.
A Vision of the Last Judgement is a painting by William Blake that was designed in 1808 before becoming a lost artwork. The painting was to be shown in an 1810 exhibition with a detailed analysis added to a second edition of his Descriptive Catalogue. This plan was dropped after the exhibition was cancelled, and the painting disappeared. Blake's notes for the Descriptive Catalogue describe various aspects of the work in a detailed manner, which allow the aspects of the painting to be known. Additionally, earlier designs that reveal similar Blake depiction of the Last Judgement have survived, and these date back to an 1805 precursor design created for Robert Blair's The Grave. In addition to Blake's notes on the painting, a letter written to Ozias Humphrey provides a description of the various images within an earlier design of the Last Judgement.
The Life of William Blake, "Pictor Ignotus." With selections from his poems and other writings is a two-volume work on the English painter and poet William Blake, first published in 1863. The first volume is a biography and the second a compilation of Blake's poetry, prose, artwork and illustrated manuscript.
The Musée Bonnat-Helleu is an art museum in Bayonne, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France. The museum was created in 1901 when Bayonne-born painter Léon Bonnat gave his extensive personal collections of art – notably an exceptional drawing collection – as well as many of his paintings to the City of Bayonne. Subsequent donors enriched the collections of the Bonnat Museum with major gifts in 1936, 1989, 1997 and 2010, making its holdings one of the largest collections of art in southern France.
Doggett's Repository of Arts was an art gallery in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, located at 16 Market Street. Its proprietor, John Doggett, was a gilder and framer with a retail shop near the gallery. The gallery exhibited originals and copies of works by European masters such as Titian, Rembrandt, Watteau, and David, and a few American artists, such as Thomas Sully, Gilbert Stuart, Samuel F.B. Morse, Rembrandt Peale, and William Dunlap. By July 1825, the gallery was converted into retail space for Doggett's frame, mirror and carpet business.
Robert Hunt was an English writer. His infamous reviews of the works of William Blake are amongst the earliest criticism of the poet and painter.
William Paulet Carey was an Irish art critic and publicist, known also as an engraver and dealer. In 1792 he joined the Society of United Irishmen in Dublin, but feeling unsupported as he himself faced charges of sedition, in 1794 he testified in the government case against the United Irishman William Drennan. In England, he spent half a century promoting British art, most of his writings being distributed gratuitously.
"The Grave" is a blank verse poem by the Scottish poet Robert Blair. It is the work for which he is primarily renowned. According to Blair, in a letter he wrote to Philip Doddridge, the greater part of the poem was composed before he became a minister. Edinburgh editor and publisher John Johnstone stated that it was composed whilst Blair was still a student, although "probably corrected and amplified by his more matured judgement." The poem, 767 lines long, is an exemplar of what became known as the school of graveyard poetry.
The Notebook of William Blake was used by William Blake as a commonplace book from c. 1787 to 1818.
Franciszek Pfanhauser was a Polish painter, teacher, art collector and restorer; known mostly for his portraits.
