History painting is a genre in painting defined by its subject matter rather than any artistic style or specific period. History paintings depict a moment in a narrative story, most often Greek and Roman mythology and Bible stories, opposed to a specific and static subject, as in portrait, still life, and landscape painting. The term is derived from the wider senses of the word historia in Latin and histoire in French, meaning "story" or "narrative", and essentially means "story painting". Most history paintings are not of scenes from history, especially paintings from before about 1850.
The Place de la Concorde is one of the major public squares in Paris, France. Measuring 7.6 ha in area, it is the largest square in the French capital. It is located in the city's eighth arrondissement, at the eastern end of the Champs-Élysées.
Academic art, academicism, or academism, is a style of painting and sculpture produced under the influence of European academies of art, usually used of work produced in the 19th century, after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. In this period the standards of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts were very influential, combining elements of Neoclassicism and Romanticism, with Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres a key figure in the formation of the style in painting. Later painters who tried to continue the synthesis included William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Thomas Couture, and Hans Makart among many others. In this context it is often called "academism", "academicism", "art pompier" (pejoratively), and "eclecticism", and sometimes linked with "historicism" and "syncretism." Academic art is closely related to Beaux-Arts architecture, which developed in the same place and holds to a similar classicizing ideal.
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. He finished 822 known paintings, but the whereabouts of many are still unknown.
Jean-Baptiste Santerre was a French painter and draughtsman of the Style Louis XIV, known for his history paintings, portraits, and portrait-like genre subjects. Considerably influenced by Italian masters of the Bolognese school as well as his French contemporaries, Santerre nonetheless made an original contribution in his art, being among the first French painters to bring Netherlandish influences.
For centuries, firefighters have worn helmets to protect them from heat, cinders and falling objects. Although the shape of most fire helmets has changed little over the years, their composition has evolved from traditional leather to metals, to composite helmets constructed of lightweight polymers and other plastics.
Michel Laclotte was a French art historian and museum director, specialising in 14th and 15th century Italian and French painting.
Pierre Henri Révoil was a French painter in the troubadour style.
Henri-Pierre Picou was a French painter. His oeuvre began with portraits and classical historical subject matter but he later moved on to allegorical and mythological themes.
Laurent Cars was a French designer and engraver.
Nicolas-Henri Tardieu, called the "Tardieu the elder", was a prominent French engraver, known for his sensitive reproductions of Antoine Watteau's paintings. He was appointed graveur du roi to King Louis XV of France. His second wife, Marie-Anne Horthemels, came from a family that included engravers and painters. She is known as an engraver in her own right. Nicolas-Henri and Marie-Anne Tardieu had many descendants who were noted artists, most of them engravers.
Marie-Anne-Hyacinthe Horthemels was a French engraver, wife of the King's engraver Nicolas-Henri Tardieu.
Diana and Apollo Killing Niobe's Children is a 1772 oil-on-canvas painting by the french artist Jacques-Louis David, now in the Dallas Museum of Art. He produced it to compete for the Prix de Rome. In the Rococo style which marked his early period, it was emblematic of the conflict between David and the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture jury, which refused him the prize following a pre-arranged vote.
Iakovos Rizos or Iacovos Rizos, also known as Jacques Rizo, was a Greek painter who worked primarily in Paris.
Angélique Mezzara, born Marie Angélique Foulon, was a French portrait painter and miniaturist, who frequently worked in pastels. During a time when few women were painters, she exhibited regularly for nearly 30 years at the Paris Salon, the major art event of the time. Two of her sons became sculptors, and a daughter exhibited with her at the Paris exhibition as a painter.
Louis Rivier was a Swiss painter, writer, and stained glass artist.
Eugène Henri Alexandre Chigot was a post impressionist French painter. A pupil of his father, the military painter Alphonse Chigot, in 1881 he entered the internationally renowned École des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he was exposed to the ideas of the realist movement of the Barbizon School and to Impressionism. He settled in Étaples in the Pas-de-Calais in an artists’ colony, later returning to Paris where he became a founder of the Salon d’Automne. An official military painter he painted a series of canvases in Calais and Nieuwpoort recording the destruction caused by the First World War. Chigot's reputation was built on his maritime and landscape paintings that arose from his affinity to Flanders and the Pas-de-Calais. He recorded the lives of the people of Flanders placing them within a landscape of soft opalescent light. Later his paintings show traces of expressionism and a more vibrant pallette. He was also a skilled nocturne painter who travelled extensively within France, Italy and Spain.
The Robber of the Sparrow's Nest is an oil painting by the French Rococo artist Antoine Watteau, now in the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. Variously dated between 1709 and 1716, the painting is a pastoral scene that is one of a few extant arabesques in Watteau's art; it shows a young couple with a dog, sitting at a sparrow's nest; it has been thought to be influenced by Flemish Baroque painting, exactly by Peter Paul Rubens' painting from the Marie de' Medici cycle.
Maurice Paul Jean Asselin was a French painter, watercolourist, printmaker, lithographer, engraver and illustrator, associated with the School of Paris. He is best known for still lifes and nudes. Other recurring themes in his work are motherhood, and the landscapes and seascapes of Brittany. He also worked as a book illustrator, particularly in the 1920s. His personal style was characterised by subdued colours, sensitive brushwork and a strong sense of composition and design.
