The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (249 page)

BOOK: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists
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Kettle , Tilly
(1735–86).
English portrait painter. After working in the Midlands and London, he became one of the first British painters to risk a long visit to India, where he spent the years 1769–76 and made a fortune painting nabobs and princes. He died on his way out a second time, having found it much harder to achieve success in England. Kettle's style was derivative from that of
Reynolds
,
Cotes
, and
Romney
.
Key
.
Family of Netherlandish painters best known for their portraiture.
Willem Key
(
c.
1515–68) was a pupil of Lambert
Lombard
c.
1540 in Liège. In 1542 he was made a master of the Antwerp Guild, where he spent the rest of his working life. His nephew,
Adriaen Thomasz. Key
(
c.
1544–after 1589), was probably his pupil. The latter became a master of the Antwerp Guild in 1568. Both artists were highly regarded in their day and did assured and solid portraits of famous people. Their religious works are less well known, and many of Willem's are known to have perished at the hands of iconoclasts.
Keyser , Hendrick de
(1565–1621).
The outstanding Dutch sculptor and one of the leading Dutch architects of his period. Most of his career was spent in Amsterdam, where he was appointed municipal sculptor and architect in 1594. His most important buildings are the Zuiderkerk (South Church, 1606–14), Holland's first large Protestant Church, and the Westerkerk (West Church, 1620–38), which broke free from the
Mannerist
tradition, looking forward to the
classicism
of Jacob van
Campen
. The splendid towers of these two churches are still among Amsterdam's chief landmarks. As a sculptor, de Keyser excelled particularly as a portraitist in a soberly realistic style (
Unknown Man
, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 1608), but his best-known work is the tomb of William the Silent (begun 1614) in the Niewe Kerk at Delft.
Thomas de Keyser
(1596/7–1667), Hendrick's son and pupil, was municipal architect to the City of Amsterdam from 1662 until his death (he added the cupola to van Campen's Town Hall), but he is better known as a portrait painter. He was, indeed, Amsterdam's leading portraitist before being overtaken in popularity by
Rembrandt
in the 1630s. His life-size portraits look stiff compared with Rembrandt's and he is more attractive and original on a small scale.
Constantin Huygens and His Clerk
(NG, London, 1627) is an excellent example of one of his small portraits of full-length figures in an interior, forerunners of the
conversation pieces
. His small equestrian portraits were also a new type (
Pieter Schout
, Rijksmuseum, 1660). Two other sons of Hendrick,
Pieter
(1595–1676) and
Willem
(1603-after 1678), were sculptors. Willem worked for some years in England, probably with Nicholas
Stone
, Hendrick's son-in-law and former pupil.
Kiefer , Anselm
.
Kienholz , Edward
(1927–93).
American sculptor, who specialized in life-size three dimensional tableaux. He belonged to the California school of
Funk art
, using the bizarre and shoddy detritus of contemporary life to create horrific and brutal images of murder, sex, death, and decay. A typical example of his work is
The State Hospital
(Moderna Mus., Stockholm, 1964–6), showing a mental patient strapped to his bed, with his own self-image in a thought bubble strapped to the bunk above. Both figures are modelled with revolting realism but have glass bowls for heads.

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