19thC Portrait Artist

[2gbmum]

Can anyone suggest an outstanding/innovative portrait artist circa 1750-1850 or thereabouts?

Am looking at drawn/painted faces through history and need someone with a distinctive technique/method/style around this time to highlight.

Any suggestions welcome. Can be any nationality - its the time period that important.

Thanks

[jno]

Goya?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Goya

[horseshoes]

Dante Gabriel Rosetti? I love his faces.

http://www.google.co....QwAA&biw=1280&bih=574

[2gbmum]

Thanks jno. He's definitely great and obvious choice. Was hoping for someone lesser known - a bit unusual perhaps! I don't know, the time period doesn't really give me much scope for work out of the established lines, I suppose.

Thanks again though

[jno]

there wasn't a lot of innovation in portraiture in that period as far as I know. You might just squeeze in the Pre-Raphaelites as horseshoes suggests (their portraits are very distinctive) but they were just getting started around 1850.

[swedeheart]

Well if you want obscure I'll throw a Swede in;-) Alexander Roslin. Don't know that he was outstanding but he was extremely successful in his day and age and a handful of his portraits were fantastic - look at painting No. 52 here, Catherine the Great, look how he lets her put Lady Gaga to shame - no wonder she was desperate for him to come work for her permanently (but he said no) http://www.museumsynd...p?artist=929&start=50

This portrait of Jean-François Marmontel is so vivid http://i51.tinypic.com/14xmh5z.jpg , as is this one of Carl Linnaeus http://commons.wikime...%C3%A9.jpg?uselang=sv and this one of a Moldavian princess http://i55.tinypic.com/2n6y89g.jpg The guy could obviously paint. And yet I get the feeling he must have sold out to the good life somewhere along the way cos many of his portraits are frankly... not good. But perhaps that kind of unfortunate scope doesn't make him any less interesting...?

But was he innovative? Nah... I'm just showing him to you in case you don't find anyone else and if you want somebody less heard of.

http://www.artknowled...Alexander_Roslin.html

[craft1948]

Have a look at Theodore Gericault.........very distinctive style.

[decarabas]

Of French portraitists between 1750-1850 the most technically accomplished, and the best creators of 'speaking likenesses' were (in my view) Jacques-Louis David and Ingres. David had a long and productive career in which portraiture was only one of his styles. Of course he is well known for his paintings of Napoleon, but look at his portrait of the lovely Mme. Recamier (and compare it to the equally accomplished likeness of her by Francois Gérard) or his picture of Mme. Sériziat with her toddler son, and you'll see he could show us more than mere likenesses.
Ingres, at least as technically accomplished as David, has something chilly in the perfection of his portraits, in my opinion.

Among British portraitists I think Joshua Reynolds a bit overrated and Gainsborough leaves me cold. The most talented portraitist of your range of years was Thomas Lawrence, and when he admired or was interested in his sitter he was as good as anyone in his era. But he could be slapdash when painting porky businessmen and their social-climbing wives, so his output is uneven.

I'm not a fan of Goya, by the way. Of course he had the misfortune to have to paint, again and again, some of the most unattractive royals ever to occupy a European palace. Even courtly tact couldn't make that sorry bunch look attractive.

[NazNomad]

Hogarth painted some good portraits (IMO) and he just falls in your timeframe.