Giuseppe Abbati was an Italian artist who belonged to the group known as the Macchiaioli. He was born in Naples and received early training in painting from his brother Vincenzo. He participated in Garibaldi's 1860 campaign, suffering the loss of his right eye. Afterwards he moved to Florence where, at the Caffè Michelangiolo, he met Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega, and the rest of the artists who would soon be dubbed the Macchiaioli.

While his early paintings were interiors, he quickly became attracted to the practice of painting landscapes en plein air. His activity as a painter was interrupted during 1866 when he enlisted again in the army for the Third Independence War, during which he was captured by the Austrians.m

Returning to civilian life at the end of the year, he moved to Castelnuovo della Misericordia and spent the final year of his life painting in the countryside. Abbati died at the age of thirty-two in Florence after his own dog bit him, infecting him with rabies.

Tags:   giuseppe abbati abbati painter 19th century italian oxen and cart realism animals ox oxen macchiaioli

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Jankel Adler was a Polish painter and printmaker. Adler was strongly influenced by Picasso and Léger. He enjoyed experimenting with materials, for example sand admixtures. He often painted Jewish subjects, and painted some few abstract compositions.

He was born as the seventh of ten children in Tuszyn, a suburb of Łódź. In 1912 he began training as an engraver with his uncle in Belgrade. He moved in 1914 to Germany where he lived for a time with his sister in Barmen. There he studied at the college of arts and crafts with professor Gustav Wiethücher.

From 1918-1919 he went back to Łódź, where he was joint founder of "Jung Jidysz", a group of avant-garde artists. In 1920 he returned briefly to Berlin; in 1921 he returned to Barmen, and in 1922 he moved to Düsseldorf. There he became a teacher at the Academy of Arts, and became acquainted with Paul Klee, who influenced his work. A painting by Adler received a gold medal at the exhibition “German art Düsseldorf” in 1928.

In 1929 and 1930 he went on study trips in Mallorca and other places in Spain. During the election campaign of July 1932 he published with a group of leftist artists and intellectuals an urgent appeal against the policy of the National Socialists and for communism. As a modern artist, and especially as a Jew, he faced persecution under Hitler's regime which took power in 1933. In that year, two of his pictures were displayed by the Nazis at the Mannheimer Arts Center as examples of degenerate art, and Adler left Germany, staying in Paris where he regarded his exile consciously as political resistance against the fascist regime in Germany. In the years that followed, he made numerous journeys to Poland, Italy, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Romania and the Soviet Union. In 1937, twenty-five of his works were seized from public collections by the Nazis and four were shown in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich.

With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, he volunteered for the Polish army that had been reconstituted in France; in 1941 he was discharged for health reasons and lived thereafter in Kirkcudbright in Scotland. In 1943 he moved to London. Died in Whitley Cottage near Aldbourne on April 25, 1949 at the age of 53 years and with the bitter knowledge that none of his nine brothers and sisters had survived the Holocaust.

Tags:   jankel adler adler painter 20th century german polish 1925 1920s cleron the cat breeder expressionism portrait figure animal cat hat weimar degenerate

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Tags:   pieter aersten aersten painter 16th century dutch 1551 1550s buthcher's stall realism still life genre

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Agar and her husband had spent their summer holiday near Toulon on the Mediterranean coast. Agar had been an avid beachcomber since 1930, composing works from the flotsam and jetsam washed up on the shore. The collage features a real starfish, pinned on with a thumbtack, together with collaged and drawn elements. The starfish is the pivot of the composition, its shape providing the perfect link between the geometric and organic elements of the collage.

Tags:   eileen agar agar painter female 20th century english 1939 1930s fish circus surrealism collage animal fish

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Oil on canvas; 123 x 154 cm

English painter of Swiss birth. Born into a wealthy and politically influential Huguenot family, Agasse spent his early childhood at the country estate of Crévin, where he developed the interest in animals and natural history that was to guide his later career as an artist. Agasse trained first at the Ecole du Colibri in Geneva and subsequently in Paris under Jacques-Louis David (beginning in 1787) and possibly under Horace Vernet. His early artistic output consisted chiefly of unpretentious silhouette ‘cut-outs’ in the style of Jean-Daniel Huber. At this time he also undertook a serious study of dissection and veterinary science.

Nagler says that he was one of the most celebrated animal painters at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. In Meusel's Neue Miscellaneen (viii. 1052 et seq.), he compares Agasse and Wouvermans, wholly in favour of the former. In that partial article much is said of his extreme devotion to art, of his marvelous knowledge of anatomy, of his special fondness for the English racehorses, and his excellence in depicting them. He appears first in the Academy catalogues in 1801 as the exhibitor of the 'Portrait of a Horse', and continued to exhibit more or less until 1845 .

Tags:   jacques laurent agasse agasse painter 19th century swiss 1805 1800s rolla and portia animals dogs neo-classicism

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