The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (141 page)

(1611–46).
English portrait painter. He is regarded as the most accomplished English painter before
Hogarth
, and was described by John Aubrey in his
Brief Lives
(
c.
1690) as ‘the most excellent painter that England hath yet bred’. Some sixty paintings by him are known, all from the years 1642–6, when he was painter to the wartime court at Oxford. He is thought to have returned to London after the surrender of Oxford in 1646. Said to have been ‘somewhat loose and irregular in his way of living’, he was thrown into prison for debt, and his early death followed shortly after his release. His style is superficially similar to van
Dyck's
, but his colouring is richer and his paint texture rougher, very much in the Venetian tradition. He also had an uncompromisingly direct way of presenting character (as in his most celebrated work—
Endymion Porter
, Tate, London) that is considered quintessentially English. Various paintings by Dobson other than portraits are mentioned by early writers, but only two survive:
The Executioner with the Baptist's Head
(Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool); and an allegory,
The Civil Wars of France
(Rousham House, Oxfordshire).

 
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(1883–1931).
Dutch painter, architect, and writer on art. His early work was influenced variously by
Impressionism
,
Fauvism
, and
Expressionism
, but in 1915 he met
Mondrian
and rapidly underwent a transition to complete abstraction. In 1917 he founded the association of artists called De
Stijl
and the periodical of the same name, and for the remainder of his life the propagation of the ideas of the group and its austerely geometrical style was his dominant interest. He went on an extended lecture tour outside the Netherlands in 1921 and his ideas made a considerable impression at the
Bauhaus
, where he taught irregularly from 1922 to 1924. In 1930 he moved to Paris and built himself a studio at Meudon that became a new focus of the De Stijl movement. The movement collapsed with his death in 1931, but its influence survived in many fields. His writings include several books and many articles in
De Stijl
. See also
CONCRETE ART
and
ELEMENTARISM
.

 
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(1616–86).
Florentine painter, active in his native city for virtually his whole career. He was intensely devout and most of his paintings are of religious subjects, done in a cloyingly sweet and meticulously smooth style. They were enormously popular in his lifetime (his reputation spread to England and elsewhere), but have appealed much less to 20th-cent. taste. His portraits, on the other hand, are now much admired for their sober objectivity (
Sir Thomas Baines
, Fitzwilliam, Cambridge,
c.
1665–70).

 
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(1581–1641).
Bolognese painter. He was Annibale
Carracci's
favourite pupil and one of the most important upholders of the tradition of Bolognese
classicism
. After studying with
Calvaert
and Ludovico Carracci he went to Rome (1602) and joined the colony of artists working under Annibale Carracci at the Palazzo
Farnese
. His only undisputed work there is the
Maiden with the Unicorn
, a charming, gentle fresco over the entrance of the Gallery. By the second decade of the century he was established as Rome's leading painter and had a succession of major decorative commissions, among them scenes from the life of St Cecilia in S. Luigi dei Francesi (1613–14). The dignified frieze-like composition of the figures reflects his study of
Raphael's
tapestries, and in turn influenced
Poussin
. The frescos in the pendentives and apse of S. Andrea della Valle (1624–8), his chief work of the 1620s, show a move away from this strict classicism towards an ampler
Baroque
style; but compared with his rival
Lanfranco
(who at this time was overtaking him in popularity) Domenichino never abandoned the principles of clear, firm drawing for the sake of more painterly effects. In 1631 Domenichino moved to Naples, and in his ceiling frescos of the S. Gennaro chapel in the cathedral he made even greater concessions to the fashionable Baroque. He met with considerable hostility in Naples from jealous local artists and was forced to flee precipitately in 1634. He later returned, but died before completing his work in the cathedral.
Domenichino was important in fields other than monumental fresco decoration, particularly as an exponent of
ideal landscape
, in which he formed the link between Annibale Carracci and
Claude
(four of his landscapes are in the Louvre). He was one of the finest draughtsmen of his generation (the Royal Library at Windsor Castle has a superb collection of his drawings) and also an excellent portraitist (
Monsignor Agucchi
, City Art Gallery, York,
c.
1610). In the 18th cent. his reputation was enormous—his
Last Communion of St Jerome
(Vatican, 1614) was generally regarded as one of the greatest pictures ever painted—but he fell from grace in the 19th cent. along with other Bolognese painters under the scathing attacks of
Ruskin
.

 
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(d. 1461).
Italian painter. His name indicates that he came from Venice, but he was active mainly in Florence.
Vasari
credits him with introducing
oil painting
into Tuscany. Although this is incorrect, it seems to be true that he was responsible for introducing a new interest in colour and texture to a tradition in which draughtsmanship normally ruled supreme. His fresco cycle
Scenes from the Life of the Virgin
(1439–45) in S. Egidio , Florence, on which
Piero della Francesca
was one of his assistants, has disappeared, and only two fully authenticated works have survived. These are three much-damaged and repainted fragments from a frescoed street tabernacle (NG, London,
c.
1440) and the celebrated
St Lucy Altarpiece
of
c.
1445 (the central panel is in the Uffizi, Florence, and the
predellas
dispersed in Cambridge (Fitzwilliam), Washington (NG), and Berlin (Staatliche Mus.)). The delicate beauty of its colouring, mastery of light, and airy lucidity of spatial construction are reflected in the work of his assistant Piero, and also, for example, in that of
Baldovinetti
.