A lifelong resident of Turin, the Italian painter Marco Calderini exhibited throughout Europe between 1870 and 1910. He studied at the Accademia Albertina in Turin with Andrea Gastaldi and Antonio Fontanesi and, in the early 1870s, began to work as a painter and as a French teacher. By 1875, he was able to give up teaching French to paint full time. His paintings won awards in Paris, Venice, Nice, and Barcelona. Calderini was one of a group of artists chosen to represent Italy at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
Unlike many artists in this collection, we do not know where Calderini studied or who his closest colleagues were. We know little about his career. What we do know is that his Rainy Day in Spring follows the conventions of the Barbizon School: a relatively small canvas showing a peaceful, understated outdoor scene. His realist vision is often softened by muted colors and a balanced composition.
William Mason Brown was born in Troy, New York. We know little of his childhood circumstances except that he studied with the portraitist Abel Buell Moore and began his career as a portrait painter himself. In his early twenties, Brown moved to Newark, New Jersey, and took up landscape painting. Eight years later, he settled in Brooklyn, where he remained for the rest of his life.
Brown belongs to the second generation of Hudson River School painters. His landscapes showcase finely detailed foregrounds, low horizons, and large skies. The eye for detail that Brown lent to his foregrounds he soon lent as well to the painting of still lifes. Many of Brown’s still lifes were copied to lithographs and sold in large quantities.
Brown was active in the artistic life of Brooklyn. He was one of the founders, in 1859, of what became the Brooklyn Art Association. In 1866, he worked with fellow artist William Hart to found the Brooklyn Academy of Design.
Born in New Hampshire, Alfred Thompson Bricher grew up outside Boston and studied painting at the Lowell Institute, as well as with marine artists Charles Temple Dix and William Stanley Haseltine during their summer sketching trips to New England. Bricher opened a studio in Boston in 1858. Influenced by Hudson River School artists, Bricher earned a reputation for autumnal landscapes. He painted scenes for reproduction as chromolithographs in illustrated magazines such as Harper’s Monthly. In 1868, Bricher moved to New York City. That year, he exhibited his work for the first time at the National Academy of Design; he would continue to exhibit there until his death in 1908.
Bricher made many summer trips to the coast, exploring from the New Jersey Shore up into northern Maine. During his lifetime, Bricher exhibited at the Brooklyn Art Association, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. His canvases focused on the relationship between land, water, and light.
After closing his failing clothing store business, Bradford turned to what had been his hobby: drawing and painting ships. Though he had no formal instruction, Bradford sold enough paintings to New Bedford whaling merchants to support himself and his family. Bradford went to New York in 1854 where he studied and worked with the Dutch marine painter Albert van Beest. Van Beest and Bradford soon returned to New Bedford together and set up a studio. Once Bradford became more established in galleries, he moved to his own studio in Boston and then, in 1864, to a space in New York’s 10th Street Studio Building which he kept until 1877.
In the early 1860s, Bradford began going on a series of expeditions to Labrador and Newfoundland. These trips provided material for his best-known works and launched his career. Bradford and his family traveled to San Francisco in 1875 and remained there until 1881. He then returned to New York where he continued to paint and to lecture on his expeditions to the Arctic.
Bouguereau was born in the northwestern port city of La Rochelle. He studied first in Bordeaux at the Ecole Municipale de Dessin et de Peinture; in 1846, he enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, studying under François-Edouard Picot. He quickly became a star student and, in 1850, won the Prix de Rome.
Bouguereau debuted at the 1854 Salon with a painting of Saint Cecilia’s body being taken to the catacombs. Elements of this painting—the classical setting, the religious topic, the female form—would preoccupy Bouguereau for much of his studio life. His work often straddled realism and a romantic idealism, with carefully painted realistic forms set against romantic, idealized locales, often telling a sentimental story.
Bouguereau was awarded the Legion of Honor in 1859. State commissions to decorate government buildings followed, as did private commissions for paintings of churches. Bouguereau joined the faculty of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1888, and began teaching around that time at the Académie Julian as well.
French artist Rosa Bonheur was well respected and considered to be one of the most famous female painters of the 19th century. Bonheur drew inspiration from her father, Raimond, who was a landscape painter, political radical and supporter of women’s rights. Raimond encouraged Bonheur’s desire to become an artist and taught her how to draw and paint which laid the foundation for her future success. French academics barred women from taking most art classes, so Bonheur visited unconventional places to study the anatomy of animals, and in order to fit in amongst the men, Bonheur applied to the police for permission to wear trousers.
The 1841 Salon committee accepted two paintings by the 19-year-old Bonheur. In the next decade, her career saw tremendous success. She became a national selling artist. Bonheur moved to the Château de By in 1861, where she would remain for the rest of her life. At 43 Bonheur was the first woman to receive the insignia of the Legion of Honor.
Blakelock was born in New York City in 1847. In 1866 he dropped out of school to begin painting full time. The following year he began exhibiting at the National Academy of Design. Travelling alone, Blakelock set out for the American West. This exposure to the West echoed throughout his works.
Blakelock returned to New York in the early 1870s, he set up a studio and began painting. While struggling to sell artwork, he suffered a breakdown in 1890 and was hospitalized for several months. Collectors began to actively purchase his work in the 1890s, and Blakelock continued to paint. In 1899, he was again admitted to a mental hospital and would remain hospitalized for almost the rest of his life.
At the 1916 sale of Catholina Lambert’s collection, Blakelock’s Brook by Moonlight sold for $20,000—the largest amount ever paid at that time for a work by an American artist. More paintings sold, and sold well. The National Academy of Design, where Blakelock had exhibited for many years, extended membership to him.
Bierstadt emigrated to America from Germany with his family in 1832. By age 18, he was offering art lessons, and held his first exhibition in Boston. He went on to study landscape painting in Germany, and worked alongside American artists Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze. Traveling west with surveying teams, Bierstadt discovered the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains, a subject that would later make him famous and wealthy.
Later Bierstadt visited the Pacific Coast and Yosemite Valley. He was active in the burgeoning San Fransisco art scene, and joined the SF Art Institute and Bohemian Club, where he connected with artists and collectors. Bierstadt was among the earliest waves of visitors to Yosemite. He would visit Yosemite and create on-site sketches, collect examples of wildlife, Indian artifacts, and take photographs to use as references later in his studio. Bierstadt’s large-scale depictions of Yosemite Valley were the first to be shown to the Eastern public, and established it as a serious landscape subject.
In the 1890s, Béraud departed (like so many artists and writers at this time) from his earlier naturalism in favor of more symbolic content, as if discontented with mere surface appearances. He did not totally renounce street scenes, but he experimented with new subjects, such as his contemporized versions of biblical stories and costume pieces like Harlequine, in which a single figure is the sole focus of the painting.
This conventionally pretty woman is dressed for costume ball as the female counterpart of the stock figure Harlequin. Her costume adopts elements of the traditional commedia dell’arte character: the diamond pattern, the bicorne hat, the stage sword whose harmlessness is coquettishly demonstrated by the model. But Béraud discards the half-mask so that her porcelain-smooth profile is fully visible. The traditional multicolored costume is exchanged for stylish pink and black.
Elegant she may be, but she is also a vivacious cocotte. Béraud emphasizes her desirability through her coy behavior and exposed legs. Her painfully tight corset, which achieves the fashionable 18-inch waist, adds to her seductive charms.
On at least three occasions, Béraud painted contemporary women in the same harlequin costume seen in the Haggin painting. One appeared on the cover of the April 1890 Figaro illustre, suggesting at least a beginning date for the series. According to one source, a work entitled L’Arlequine was exhibited at the Salon de la Societe nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1891.
Béraud was born in Saint Petersburg but brought up in Paris after his father died in 1853. After he served in the Franco-Prussian war, he studied with the portrait painter Léon Bonnat for two years. Although his earliest works are portraits, Béraud soon took up the subject that would occupy him for the next two decades: the painting of modern life. Critics praised Béraud for his observations of the subject of contemporary life.
From 1876 Béraud exhibited in the annual Paris Salon. He won medals at the Salons of 1882 and 1883, a gold medal at the Universal Exposition of 1889, and the Legion of Honor in 1887 and 1894.
Béraud was as active socially as he was artistically. He was friends with artists and writers from Edouard Manet, Jules Worms (1832-1924), and Léon-Augustin Lhermitte (1844-1925) to Guy de Maupassant, and acted as a second for Marcel Proust in an 1897 duel. His paintings stand today as records of the cosmopolitan life of Paris at the end of the 1800s.
