The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (520 page)

 
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(1566–1638)
. Dutch figure painter. After travelling in Italy and France
c.
1588–92, he settled in his native Utrecht, where he became one of the leading Dutch exponents of
Mannerism
. His highly distinctive, charmingly artificial style, which remained untouched by the naturalistic developments happening around him, was characterized by acidic colours and elegant figures in wilfully distorted poses. The best collection of his work, including a self-portrait (1601), is in the Central Museum, Utrecht.

 
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(1917– )
. American painter, son and pupil of a well-known muralist and illustrator of children's books,
Newell Convers Wyeth
(1882–1944). Wyeth's work consists almost entirely of depictions of the people and places of the two areas he knows best—the Brandywine Valley around his native Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and the area near Cushing, Maine, where he has his summer home. He usually paints in watercolour or
tempera
with a precise and detailed technique, and often he conveys a sense of loneliness or nostalgia (trappings of the modern world, such as motor cars, rarely appear in his work). He became famous with
Christina's World
(1948), which was bought by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1948 and has became one of the best-known images in American art. It depicts a friend of the artist, Christina Olson , who had been so badly crippled by polio that she moved by dragging herself with her arms. She is shown in a field on her farm in Maine, ‘pulling herself slowly back towards the house’. Building on the picture's fame, Wyeth has gone on to have an enormously successful career. There is great disparity of critical opinion about him, however: J. Carter Brown , Director of the National Gallery in Washington, has called him ‘a great master’, whereas Professor Sam Hunter, one of the leading authorities on 20th-cent. American art, has written ‘What most appeals to the public, one must conclude, apart from Wyeth's conspicuous virtuosity, is the artist's banality of imagination and lack of pictorial ambition. He comfortably fits the commonsense ethos and non-heroic mood of today's popular culture, despite his occasional lapses into gloomy introspection.’

 
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(active 1506–26). Spanish painter.
He is first documented in 1506 in Valencia, where in 1507–10 he collaborated with Fernando de los Llanos (active 1506–25) in painting twelve panels of the
Life of the Virgin
for the main altarpiece of the cathedral. From the style of these paintings it is inferred that the ‘Fernando spagnuolo’ who in 1505 was working with
Leonardo da Vinci
on the
Battle of Anghiari
was either Yáñez or Llanos. Yáñez is credited with being the more gifted artist and one of the most important influences in introducing the High
Renaissance
style to Spain. Examples of his work are in the museum at Valencia and the Prado in Madrid.

 
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(1835–1918). British painter.
He specialized in scenes from British history, particularly of the Tudor and Stuart periods, treated in an anecdotal and often melodramatic way that looks forward to Hollywood ‘costume’ movies. Most of his work has been forgotten, but one of his pictures has achieved enduring fame as an archetypal image of Victorian sentimentality, the Cromwellian tear-jerker
‘And When Did You Last See Your Father?’
(Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 1878).

 
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(1871–1957).
The best-known Irish painter of the 20th cent., son of
John Butler Yeats
(1839–1922), a barrister who became a successful portrait painter, and brother of the poet William Butler Yeats. He initially worked mainly as an illustrator and did not work regularly in oils until about 1905. His early work as a painter was influenced by French
Impressionism
, but he then developed a more personal
Expressionistic
style characterized by vivid colour and extremely loose brushwork (there is some similarily to the work of
Kokoshka
, who became a great friend in the last decade of Yeats's life). He painted scenes of Celtic myth and everyday Irish life, contributing to the upsurge of nationalist feeling in the arts that accompanied the movement for Irish independence. Yeats was a writer as well as a painter—the author of several plays, novels, and volumes of poetry, as well as
Life in the West of Ireland
(1912) and
Sligo
(1930).