The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (361 page)

 
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patina
.

Incrustation, usually green, on the surface of a metal (typically bronze) object, caused by oxidation. Such discoloration occurs naturally with age through exposure to the atmosphere and can be accelerated or modified when an object is buried in the sea or soil, where the particular substances present will cause various chemical reactions. Patination can produce an attractive, mellowing effect, and since the
Renaissance
bronze statues have often been artificially patinated, usually by treatment with acid. By extension, the term ‘patina’ can be applied to any form of surface discoloration or mellowing, for example dirty varnish on a painting.

 
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(1821–1901).
Scottish painter. A friend of
Millais
(a fellow student at the
Royal Academy
), he had a kinship with the
Pre-Raphaelites
early in his career. He painted mythological and historical scenes and later gained great success with his rather portentous and sentimental religious pictures, which went on tour and were much reproduced. His brother,
Waller Hugh Paton
(1828–95), was also a painter, mainly of landscapes in watercolour.

 
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(2nd cent. AD).
Greek traveller and geographer, the author of a
Description of Greece
in ten books that is the single most important literary source for the history of Greek art (painting and sculpture as well as architecture). It is a guidebook written for tourists—simple, unpretentious, detailed, and in the main reliable, as is frequently attested by the remains of the monuments he describes. Occasionally he has lapses. He saw several statues said to have been sculpted by the legendary Daedalus and accepted that he really existed. Sir James Frazer , who produced one of the many English translations of the work (6 volumes, 1898), said of Pausanias: ‘without him the ruins of Greece would for the most part be a labyrinth without a clue, a riddle without an answer.’

 
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(1911–68).
British writer and illustrator, born in China, the son of medical missionaries. He is now best known as a novelist, but he studied at the
Royal Academy
Schools and spent much of his career teaching drawing in London art schools. His reputation rests mainly on his trilogy of novels
Titus Groan
(1946),
Gormenghast
(1950), and
Titus Alone
(1959), a work of grotesque Gothic fantasy to which his vividly imaginative drawing style was well matched (originally, however, the books were published without his accompanying illustrations). Peake also illustrated numerous other books, including Stevenson's
Treasure Island
(1949) and several by himself (among them an instructional manual,
The Craft of the Lead Pencil
, 1946). In 1946 he was commissioned by the Ministry of Information to make drawings of people liberated from Belsen concentration camp—an experience that left him emotionally scarred. In the last decade of his life he was gradually incapacitated by Parkinsons' disease. Peake is described in
The Dictionary of National Biography
as ‘Tall, thin, dark, and haggard…gentle, gracious, unworldly, and unpractical’.

 
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(1741–1827).
American painter, inventor, naturalist, and patriot, the founder and most distinguished member of a family of artists. A highly versatile craftsman, Peale was a saddler, watchmaker, silversmith, and upholsterer before working briefly in
Copley's
studio in Boston. He then spent two years in London (1767–9), where he studied under Benjamin
West
. In 1775 he settled in Philadelphia, where he became the most fashionable portraitist in the Colonies, Copley having left for England in 1774. He fought as a colonel of the militia in the War of Independence and became a Democratic member of the Pennsylvania Assembly. In 1782 he opened an exhibition gallery next to his studio, the first art gallery in the United States, and there displayed his own portraits of leading personalities of the Revolutionary War (he painted George Washington several times). This expanded into a natural history museum, which attained a vast size and included as its star exhibit the first mastodon skeleton to be exhumed in America. Two of his most famous paintings celebrate his scientific interests—
The Exhumation of the Mastodon
(1806) in the Peale Museum, Baltimore, and
The Artist in his Museum
(1822) in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, an institution he helped to found in 1805. His inventions included new types of spectacles and false teeth. As a painter, Peale generally worked in a solid, dignified style, but his most celebrated work is a witty piece of
trompe-l'œil
. This is
The Staircase Group
(Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1795), a life-size portrait of two of his sons mounting a staircase, with a real step at the bottom and a real door jamb as a frame; George Washington is said to have been deceived into doffing his hat to the boys' images. Peale married three times and had seventeen children, of whom several became artists. The most important were
Raphaelle
(1774–1825), one of America's most distinguished still-life painters,
Rembrandt
(1778–1860), a gifted though uneven portraitist, and
Titian Ramsay II
(1799–1885), who continued his father's tradition as an artist-naturalist. Apart from his portraits, Rembrandt won fame with his huge picture
The Court of Death
(Detroit Inst. of Arts, 1821), which toured the country with success for over half a century. Charles Willson's brother
James
(1749–1831) was also a painter and his son and four daughters carried on the family tradition. The Peales were largely responsible for establishing Philadelphia as one of the country's leading cultural centres.