|
|
|
|
Author's biography |
Dutch painter, etcher, and writer on art. Born in Liège, he settled in Amsterdam in 1665, and moved to The Hague in 1684. He was the leading decorative painter in Holland in the second half of the 17th century, working in an academic classical style that inspired his over-enthusiastic contemporaries to call him 'the Dutch Raphael' and 'the Dutch Poussin'. In about 1690, however, he went blind and thereafter devoted himself to art theory. His lectures were collected in two books: Foundation of Drawing (1701) and the Great Painting Book (1707) - which were translated and much reprinted during the 18th century. Lairesee's writings reveal the same academic approach as his paintings he somewhat naïvely confessed that he had a preference for Rembrandt until he learned 'the infallible rules of art'. Rembrandt had painted a portrait of the young Lairesse in 1665 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), sympathetically showing his disease-disfigured face. |
|
|
|
|
|