Posts in Category: September 5
Maurice Quentin de La Tour
Maurice Quentin de La Tour, September 5, 1704 – February 17, 1788, was a French pastellist and portrait painter, born and died in Saint-Quentin. He attended the college at Saint-Quentin, moved to Paris in 1724, and studied with the Flemish artist Jacques Spoëde; accounts also identify training with the engraver Tardieu and the painter Jean Restout.
La Tour was agréé by the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in 1737 and became an academician in 1746. He exhibited at the Salon from 1740 to 1760 and worked in Paris and Saint-Quentin. His sitters included members of the French court, writers, philosophers, and other public figures. Adélaïde Labille-Guiard received instruction from him in pastel.
In 1778, La Tour founded a drawing school in Saint-Quentin. His works are held by the Louvre Museum, Musée des beaux-arts Antoine Lécuyer, Musée de Picardie, MAH Museum of Art and History, National Galleries of Scotland, Alte Pinakothek, Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art.
Caspar David Friedrich
Caspar David Friedrich, September 5, 1774 – May 7, 1840, was a German Romantic landscape painter.
He studied at the Copenhagen Academy and later settled in Dresden, where he became associated with the central figures of German Romanticism. His paintings often combine carefully observed landscapes with solitary figures, ruins, crosses, graves, moonlight, fog and winter scenery.
Friedrich’s best-known works include Monk by the Sea, Abbey among Oak Trees, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Chalk Cliffs on Rügen and The Sea of Ice. His reputation declined late in his life but was substantially revived in the twentieth century.
