The Battle of Grunwald is a painting by the Polish painter Jan Matejko. It portrays the Battle of Grunwald, a battle between Poland, Lithuania and the Teutonic Knights.
During World War II, it was one of two paintings placed on the “most wanted” list by the Nazis. Joseph Goebbels posted a bounty for it of 10 million marks.
There is a story that Dante visited Giotto while he was painting the Scrovegni Chapel and, seeing the artist’s children underfoot asked how a man who painted such beautiful pictures could create such plain children, to which Giotto, who according to Vasari was always a wit, replied “I made them in the dark.”
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was a French landscape painter. At the age of 21, he apprenticed to a draper and, despite his hate for business, he stayed in this position until he was 26. When he quit his job, he told his father that “ business and I were simply incompatible, and that I was getting a divorce,” and began his art training.
Jean-Antoine Watteau was a French painter who died at the age of 36. He spent the last days of his life on the estate of his patron, Abbé Haranger, who recalled that Watteau, during his final days, wassemi-conscious and mute, clutching a paint brush and painting imaginary paintings in the air.
The family of John William Godward disapproved decision to become an artist; when he moved to Italy in 1912 with one of his models, the family cut all ties with him. They even went so far as to cut him out of all the family pictures. Today, no known images of Godward exist.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art offers special guided tours for blind visitors which allow them to experiences the pieces through touch.
“When Louis XIV was absent from court, the portrait was brought into the chamber as his representative. As such, it was to be treated with the same respect accorded the living king. Rules of etiquette applied equally to both. So, for instance, one would no more turn his or her back on the portrait of the king than on the king himself.”
Source: (Art through time)
In a group portrait by Johann Zoffany, “The Academicians of the Royal Academy” (1771-2), members are shown gathered around a nude male model at a time when women were excluded from such training in order to protect their modesty. So that the two female members, Mary Moser and Angelica Kauffman could be included, Zoffany added them as portraits hanging on the wall.
Joseph Csaky was a Hungarian sculptor and a pioneer of modern sculpture. To earn a living, he worked odd jobs around Hungary, until one day, attracted by its reputation, he decided to move to Paris. And he did so with only forty francs to his name and mostly by foot, walking fifty or sixty kilometers per day.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English painter and translator and one of the main founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was also a huge animal lover, with a particular love for wombats.
According to the National Library of Australia:
”Earlier, in 1862, Rossetti had moved to Tudor House, at 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Spacious, with plenty of room for family and friends including George Meredith and the deeply unattractive poet and semi-professional sadomasochist Algernon Charles Swinburne—who liked to slide naked down the banisters—the house had four-fifths of an acre of garden, with lime trees and a big mulberry. As soon as he arrived, Rossetti began to fill the garden with exotic birds and animals. There were owls, including a barn owl called Jessie, two or more armadillos, rabbits, dormice and a racoon that hibernated in a chest of drawers. There were peacocks, parakeets, and kangaroos and wallabies, about which we know frustratingly little. There was a Canadian marmot or woodchuck, a Pomeranian puppy called Punch, an Irish deerhound called Wolf, a Japanese salamander and two laughing jackasses. We know the neighbours were tolerant up to a point but Thomas Carlyle, for one, was driven mad by the noise. At length there was a small Brahmin bull that had to go when it chased Rossetti around the garden, and, in September 1869, a long-awaited wombat.”
Source: (NLA)
