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Johann Georg Rosenberg (1739-1808)
Initially employed as a set painter at the Berlin opera house, Johann Georg Rosenberg first rose to fame on account of his design for the triumphal arch erected on the occasion of King Frederick II’s (1712-1786) return from the Seven Years’ War at the end of March 1763. Journeys to the Netherlands and Paris ensued, where he was accepted into the Académie Royale in 1765. Following brief engagements at the theatres in Hamburg, Danzig and K?nigsberg, Rosenberg permanently returned to his home town of Berlin in 1773. Soon afterwards he commenced work on what was to become an extensive series of copperplate engravings featuring views of Berlin. Still in its early days as the seat of the Kingdom of Prussia, in those days the city was home to some 150,000 people.
Works:Collection of the Most Beautiful and Most Interesting Vistas of Berlin
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Bernardo Bellotto, called Canaletto (1721/22-1780)
Bernardo Bellotto was a pupil and nephew of Giovanni Antonio Canal, known as Canaletto (1697-1768), the famous Venetian veduta painter. Inspired by his uncle, Bellotto also assumed the pseudonym of Canaletto. Like many Italian artists, architects, singers and musicians, Bellotto was invited to the Saxon capital by Augustus III (1696-1763). He arrived in 1747 and was appointed court painter the following year. In the period leading up to his relocation to Warsaw in 1766, he painted seventeen large-format vistas of Dresden. In addition, he produced eleven vedutas of Pirna, a small town located nearby, and five of the Knigstein fortress. Thus Bellotto’s paintings are very much ambassadors of the Augustan era.
Works:View of Dresden from the Left Shore of the Elbe River, up from the Bridgehead of the Historical City Centre
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Anna Dorothea Therbusch (1721-1782)
After being trained by her father, Prussian court painter Georg Lisiewski (1674-1750), Anna Dorothea Therbusch went on to become one of the most successful artists of the eighteenth century. She produced portraits for the Duke of Württemberg and the Prince-Elector of Palatinate-Sulzbach, the Prussian royal family and the court of the Russian tsar, and was accepted into the art academies of Stuttgart, Paris and Vienna.
In 1763 Therbusch was called to the court of Mannheim where in 1764, in recognition of her portrait of Charles Theodore (1724-1799), she was given the title of Electoral Palatine court painter.
Works:Prince-Elector Charles Theodore, Count Palatine and Duke of Bavaria
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Antoine Pesne (1683-1757)
Antoine Pesne was born in Paris and trained as a painter in his father’s workshop. He was awarded the Prix de Rome scholarship by the Académie Royale in 1703 and returned to Italy several times in the following years. In 1710 he eventually relocated to Prussia, where he spent the rest of his life as a successful court painter and significantly contributed towards the culture of Frederician Rococo.
Works:Lute Player with Party at a Park
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Georg Desmarées (1697-1776)
Georges Desmarées is an illustrious exponent of the European Rococo style. He was born into a French family in Sweden, where he became a pupil of Martin van Meytens the Elder (1648-1736). During the 1720s he studied in Amsterdam, Nuremberg, Rome and Venice. There he became adept at the Venetian technique of colouring, so popular at the European courts of the early eighteenth century, which combined sensuousness and light-heartedness with a sophisticated materiality. From 1730 onwards, he worked in Munich as a court painter for Bavaria’s Prince-Elector Charles Albert (1697-1745).
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Johann Jakob Dorner the Elder (1741-1813)
Following his appointment as court painter to the Bavarian prince-elector, Maximilian III Joseph (1727-1777), in 1765, Johann Jakob Dorner the Elder promoted the arts in Munich in manifold ways: Dorner compiled and published a catalogue of the picture gallery located in the summer palace in Schlei.heim in 1775, helped in 1783 to set up the Hofgartengalerie, the public art gallery nearby the Munich Residenz, also becoming its vice-director; he restored paintings, taught art students how to copy old masters and in 1796 organised drawing lessons at Bavarian schools.
Works:The Peep-Show Box
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Angelica Kauffmann (1741-1807)
Even in her early years she was considered to be one of the most talented painters, which is manifest in her admittance to Rome’s Accademia di San Lucca and her appointment as one of the founding members of the London Royal Academy in 1768, a time when such honours were seldom accorded to women.
Works:Portrait of Johann Joachim Winckelmann
Portrait of a Lady as a Vestal Virgin
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Georg Friedrich Eberhard Wchter (1762-1852)
The Stuttgart-born artist Eberhard Wchter first studied in Paris where he entered into the circle of the great French Classicist Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825). Later moving to Rome, he associated with Joseph-Anton Koch (1768-1839) and Asmus Jakob Carstens (1754-1798), adopting their preference for three-dimensional compositions.
Works:The Return of Telemachus
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Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714-1789)
As of the 1750s, Claude-Joseph Vernet’s marine paintings began to bring him considerable acclaim at the various Salon exhibitions in France. The crowning moment of this much-fêted body of work came with a commission issued by King Louis XV of France (1710-1774). The king requested a series of twenty-four paintings by the artist depicting France’s most important seaports.
Works:The Seaport
Shipwreck in a Thunderstorm
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Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840)
Born in Greifswald, which was Swedish at the time, Friedrich studied the art of drawing at the Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. As of 1798, he settled permanently in Dresden. With Caspar David Friedrich came the birth of Romantic painting. He was one of the main protagonists of this style stemming from the reaction against the Enlightenment and neoclassicism.
Works:Megalithic Tomb in Snow
View into the Elbe Valley