Georges Croegaert -princess Sissi In The Roman Countryside - 1870 Oil

Georges Croegaert - Princess Sissi in the Roman countryside - 1870 oil Dedicated to Madame Pollak, probably wife of an Austrian painter present during a dinner in the salon in Rome on December 20, 1870. Georges Croegaert was born in Antwerp. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. He moved to Paris in 1876 where he remained active as an artist for the rest of his life. He had a successful career as a portrait painter and genre painter. His paintings have received critical acclaim and have been sought after by British and American collectors. He exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon between 1882 and 1914 and in Vienna in 1888. He died in Paris in 1923 after a long and successful career. Croegaert initially painted highly detailed still lifes, subjects of birds and flowers, and occasionally outdoor genre scenes. She has built a career with her salon portraits of charming young women dressed in sumptuous fabrics in luxurious bedrooms. He also gained a reputation as a leading artist in the genre of "cardinal paintings", humorous depictions of cardinals engaged in various social activities in a luxurious setting. His works are very narrative and the objects in the background support the history of the painting. His paintings are characterized by a high degree of finish and a rich palette. Company portraits Most of Croegaert's portraits of elegant young women are distinguished by their lavish details. The influence of his relationship, Jan Jacob Croegaert-Van Bree, is suspected in the elegance and realism of his style. Upon his arrival in Paris, portraits depicting the lifestyle of contemporary and fashionable citizens had become popular. The trend began in Paris in the late 1850s by the Belgian painter Alfred Stevens and was later adopted by other Belgian painters working in Paris such as Charles Baugniet and Gustave Léonard de Jonghe and the French Auguste Toulmouche. By the end of the 1860s there was a market ready for genre scenes with bourgeois characters, usually charming young women, portrayed in lavish surroundings. With the start of the Belle Epoque in 1870, this type of painting depicting fashionable women in an interior became popular at the Paris Salon. Croegaert's very realistic depictions of women in society usually have a slightly ironic undertone. This is clear in her nod to contemporary fashions of Japanese and Orientalism in her paintings of Young Woman Reading in a Japanese Interior and Dreams of the East, where the women depicted seem overwhelmed by their infatuation with art. Japanese. and oriental In the last decades of the 19th century, Croegaert painted a series of small portraits of women rendered in a very realistic way. Women are depicted at bust length and appear to blend in with the pale, unadorned backgrounds. These portraits have generic titles like A Blonde (Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth) or Portrait of an Auburn-Haired Woman (Haworth Art Gallery). Perhaps in search of a profitable niche in the market, Croegaert began to paint "cardinal pictures", sometimes also called "anticlerical art". These paintings depict Roman Catholic cardinals in a lavish setting usually engaged in some mundane activities. Georges Croegaert is not the only Parisian artist to practice this genre. Others who have made a name for themselves in the genre include the Italian Andrea Landini and the French Jehan Georges Vibert, Charles Edouard Delort and Marcel Brunery. [7] Describing cardinals participating in activities such as "approving the artist's nude model", card games, excessively or lavishly eating and drinking, and indulgent hobbies like stamp collecting and painting, these painters teased the excessive and sometimes dissolute lifestyles of the upper echelons of the Catholic clergy. There was clearly a high demand for these paintings, as evidenced by the fact that so many artists were working in this genre. The tone of Croegaert's cardinal paintings was humorous and slightly mocking rather than overtly anticlerical. Croegaert's highly detailed technique was ideally suited to this genre as it allowed him to depict the excesses of the Cardinals' lifestyle in an environment of ornate furniture, tapestries, glass and silverware rendered with realistic detail. He was particularly good at capturing the vivid reds and purples of cardinals' robes and the characterization and humor of the faces of his somewhat pathetic subjects.