This document provides biographical information about two artists: Melchior d'Hondecoeter and Franz Marc. Melchior d'Hondecoeter was a 17th century Dutch painter known for his paintings of birds in landscapes. He came from a family of artists and painted exotic birds throughout his career. Franz Marc was a 20th century German painter and was one of the founders of the Der Blaue Reiter art movement. He incorporated vivid colors and spiritual themes in his paintings of animals. Tragically, Franz Marc died in World War I at the age of 36, but not before creating influential Expressionist works.

1. 1
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3. 2
George Stubbs (25 August 1724 – 10 July 1806) was an English
painter, best known for his paintings of horses.
Stubbs was born in Liverpool, the son of a currier and leather
merchant. Information on his life up to age thirty-five is sparse, relying
almost entirely on notes made by fellow artist Ozias
Humphry towards the end of Stubbs's life. Stubbs worked at his
father's trade until he was 15 or 16.
After his father's death in 1741, Stubbs was briefly apprenticed to a
Lancashire painter andengraver named Hamlet Winstanley, but he
soon left as he objected to the work of copying to which he was set.
Thereafter as an artist he was self-taught. In the 1740s he worked as
a portrait painter in the North of England and from about 1745 to
1751 he studied human anatomy at York County Hospital. He had
had a passion for anatomy from his childhood, and one of his earliest
surviving works is a set of illustrations for a textbook
on midwifery which was published in 1751.
A Lion Attacking a Horse, oil on canvas, 1770, by Stubbs. Yale University Art
Gallery

4. In 1754 Stubbs visited Italy.[1]
Forty years later he told Ozias Humphry
that his motive for going to Italy was, "to convince himself that nature
was and is always superior to art whether Greek or Roman, and
having renewed this conviction he immediately resolved upon
returning home". In 1756 he rented a farmhouse in the village
ofHorkstow, Lincolnshire, and spent 18 months dissecting horses,
assisted by his common-law wife, Mary Spencer.[2]
He moved to
London in about 1759 and in 1766 published The anatomy of the
Horse. The original drawings are now in the collection of the Royal
Academy.
Even before his book was published, Stubbs's drawings were seen
by leading aristocratic patrons, who recognised that his work was
more accurate than that of earlier horse painters such as James
Seymour, Peter Tillemans and John Wootton. In 1759 the 3rd Duke
of Richmond commissioned three large pictures from him, and his
career was soon secure. By 1763 he had produced works for several
more dukes and other lords and was able to buy a house
in Marylebone, a fashionable part of London, where he lived for the
rest of his life.

5. Whistlejacket. National Gallery, London.
His most famous work is probably Whistlejacket, a painting of a
prancing horse commissioned by the2nd Marquess of Rockingham,
which is now in theNational Gallery in London. This and two other
paintings carried out for Rockingham break with convention in having
plain backgrounds. Throughout the 1760s he produced a wide range
of individual and group portraits of horses, sometimes accompanied
by hounds. He often painted horses with their grooms, whom he
always painted as individuals. Meanwhile he also continued to accept
commissions for portraits of people, including some group portraits.
From 1761 to 1776 he exhibited at the Society of Artists of Great
Britain, but in 1775 he switched his allegiance to the recently founded
but already more prestigious Royal Academy of Arts. Stubbs also
painted more exotic animals including lions, tigers, giraffes, monkeys,
and rhinoceroses, which he was able to observe in private
menageries.
Painting of a kangaroo, 1772

6. His painting of a kangaroo was the first glimpse of this animal for
many 18th-century Britons.[3]
He became preoccupied with the theme
of a wild horse threatened by a lion and produced several variations
on this theme. These and other works became well known at the time
through engravings of Stubbs's work, which appeared in increasing
numbers in the 1770s and 1780s.
Stubbs also painted historical pictures, but these are much less well
regarded. From the late 1760s he produced some work on enamel. In
the 1770s Josiah Wedgwood developed a new and larger type of
enamel panel at Stubbs's request. Stubbs hoped to achieve
commercial success with his paintings in enamel, but the venture left
him in debt.[4]
Also in the 1770s he painted single portraits of dogs for
the first time, while also receiving an increasing number of
commissions to paint hunts with their packs of hounds. He remained
active into his old age. In the 1780s he produced a pastoral series
called Haymakers and Reapers, and in the early 1790s he enjoyed
the patronage of the Prince of Wales, whom he painted on horseback
in 1791. His last project, begun in 1795, was A comparative
anatomical exposition of the structure of the human body with that of
a tiger and a common fowl, fifteen engravings from which appeared
between 1804 and 1806. The project was left unfinished upon
Stubbs's death at the age of 81 on 10 July 1806, in London.
Stubbs's son George Townly Stubbs was an engraver and
printmaker.
The record price for a Stubbs painting was set by the sale at auction
of Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath, with a Trainer, a Stable-Lad, and
a Jockey (1765) at Christie's in London in July 2011 for £22.4 million.

7. It was sold by the British Woolavington Collection of sporting art; the
buyer was unidentified. [5]
The British Royal Collection holds 16 paintings by Stubbs.[6]
Two paintings by Stubbs were bought by the National Maritime
Museum in Greenwich, London after a public appeal to raise the
£1.5 million required.[7]
The two paintings, The Kongouro from New
Holland and Portrait of a Large Dog were both painted in 1772.
[7]
Depicting a kangaroo and a dingo respectively, they are the first
depictions of Australian animals in Western art.

8. 3
Franz Marc was born on February 8, 1880, in Munich,
Germany. He studied at the Munich Art Academy and traveled
to Paris several times where he saw the work of Gauguin, Van
Gogh, and the Impressionists. With Kandinsky, he founded the
almanac "Der Blaue Reiter" in 1911 and organized exhibitions
with this name. He was a principal member of the First
German Salon d'Automne in 1913. At the beginning of World
War I, he volunteered for military service and he died near
Verdun, France, on March 4, 1916.
Franz Marc was a pioneer in the birth of abstract art at the
beginning of the twentieth-century The Blaue Reiter group put
forth a new program for art based on exuberant color and on
profoundly felt emotional and spiritual states. It was Marc's
particular contribution to introduce paradisiacal imagery that
had as its dramatis personae a collection of animals, most
notably a group of heroic horses.
Tragically, Marc was killed in World War I at the age of thirty-
six, but not before he had created some of the most exciting
and touching paintings of the Expressionist movement.
Dog Lying in the Snow
1910-11 (160 Kb); Oil on canvas, 62.5 x 105 cm; Stadelsches
Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt
The Yellow Cow
1911 (100 Kb); Oil on canvas, 140.5 x 189.2 cm; Solomon R.

9. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Deer in the Woods II
1912 (170 Kb); Oil on canvas, 110.5 x 80.5 cm; Stadtische
Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich
Tiger
1912 (140 Kb); Oil on canvas, 111 x 111.5 cm; Stadtische
Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich
The fate of the animals
1913 (130 Kb); Oil on canvas, 196 x 266 cm; Kunstmuseum,
Basle
Foxes
1913 (140 Kb); Oil on canvas, 87 x 65 cm; Kunstmuseum,
Dusseldorf

10. The Lamb
1913-14; Museum Boymans-van-Beuningen, Rotterdam
Fighting Forms
1914 (150 Kb); Oil on canvas, 91 x 131 cm; Staatsgalerie
moderner Kunst, Munich

11. 4
Dutch animalier painter, was born in Utrecht and died in Amsterdam.
After the start of his career, he painted virtually exclusively bird
subjects, usually exotic or game, in park-like landscapes.
Hondecoeter’s paintings featured geese (brent goose, Egyptian brent
and red-breasted brent), fieldfares, partridges, pigeons, ducks,
magpies and peacocks, but also African grey crowned cranes,
Asian sarus cranes, Indonesian Yellow-crested Cockatoos, an
IndonesianPurple-naped Lory and Grey-headed
Lovebirds fromMadagascar.
Being the grandson of the painter Gillis d'Hondecoeter and the son
of Gijsbert d'Hondecoeter, whose sister Josina marriedJan Baptist
Weenix, he was brought up in an artistic milieu.[1]
Melchior's
cousin Jan Weenixtold Arnold Houbraken that in his youth Melchior
was extremely religious, praying very loud, so that his mother and
uncle doubted if they would have him trained as a painter or
aminister.
In 1659 he was working in the Hague and became a member of the
painters' academy there. In 1663 Hondecoeter married Susanne
Tradel in Amsterdam. She is said to have been captious, and she had
her sisters living in their house, and so Hondecoeter spent much time
in his garden or drinking in the tavern in the Jordaan. On the
Lauriergracht, where he lived for a time, he was surrounded by art
dealers and various painters. Later he moved to a house
on Prinsengracht (near Anne Frank House). In 1686 he bought a
small countryhouse in Vreeland along the Vecht (Utrecht).
Hondecoeter died in the house of his daughter Isabel
in Warmoesstraatbut was buried in Westerkerk. His inventory lists a
small gallows, to keep birds in the right position, and several
paintings of Frans Snyders.

12. Hondecoeter began his career with a different speciality from that by
which he is usually known. Mr de Stuers affirms that he produced
sea-pieces. One of his earliest works is Tub with Fish, dated 1655, in
the gallery of Brunswick. But Hondecoeter soon abandoned fish for
fowl. He acquired celebrity as a painter of birds only, which he
represented not exclusively, likeJohannes Fyt, as the gamekeeper's
perquisite after a day's shooting, or stock of a poulterer's shop, but as
living beings with passions, joys, fears and quarrels, to which
naturalists will tell us that birds are subject. Without the brilliant tone
and high finish of Fyt, his Dutch rival's birds are full of action; and, as
Burger truly says, "Hondecoeter displays the maternity of the hen
with as much tenderness and feeling as Raphael the maternity of
Madonnas."
But Fyt was at home in depicting the coat of deer and dons as well as
plumage. Hondecoeter cultivates a narrower field, and seldom goes
beyond a cock-fight or a display of mere bird life. Very few of his
pictures are dated, though more are signed. Amongst the former we
should note the Jackdaw deprived of his Borrowed Plumes (1671), at
the Hague, of whichEarl Cadogan has a variety; or Game and
Poultry and A Spaniel hunting a Partridge (1672), in the gallery of
Brussels; or A Park with Poultry (1686) at the Hermitage of St
Petersburg.
William III employed Hondecoeter, in great favour with the magnates
of the Netherlands, to paint his menagerie at Het Loo, and the
picture, now at the Hague museum, shows that he could at a pinch
overcome the difficulty of representing India's cattle, elephants and
gazelles. But he is better in homelier works, with which he adorned
the royal castles of Bensberg andOranienstein at different periods of

13. his life. His earliest works are more conscientious, lighter and more
transparent than his later ones. At all times he is bold of touch and
sure of eye, giving the motion of birds with great spirit and accuracy.
His masterpieces are at the Hague, Soestdijk and at Amsterdam. But
there are fine examples in the Wallace Collection and Belton
House in England, and in the public galleries of Berlin, Caen,
Karlsruhe, Kassel, Cologne, Copenhagen, Dresden, Dublin, Florence,
Glasgow, Hannover, London, Lyons, Lille, Montpellier, Munich, Paris,
Rotterdam, Rouen, St Petersburg, Stuttgart, Schwerin and Vienna.
The largest Hondecoeter exhibition to date was held in Berlin in 2010,
where 18 of his works were shown at the Neue Nationalgalerie as
part of Willem de Rooij's installation 'Intolerance'.[2]

14. 5
Paulus Potter (20 November 1625 (baptised) – 17 January 1654
(buried)) was a Dutch painterwho specialized in animals within
landscapes, usually with a low vantage point.
Before Potter died of tuberculosis at the age of 28 he succeeded in
producing about 100 paintings, working continuously.
Few details are known of Potter's life. He was born inEnkhuizen. In
1628 his family moved to Leiden, and in 1631 to Amsterdam, where
young Paulus studied painting with his father, Pieter Symonsz Potter.
[1]
After his mother died, his father started an affair with the wife
of Pieter Codde, also living in the fancy Sint Antoniesbreestraat. For
some time his father was a manufacturer of gilded leather hangings
outside the city walls.
Potter became a member of the Guild of Saint Luke in Delft, but by
1649, Paulus moved toThe Hague, next to Jan van Goyen. Potter
married in the Hague and his father-in-law, who was the leading
building contractor in the Hague, introduced him to the Dutch elite.
[1]
Amalia of Solms-Braunfels, a member of the stadholder's family
and an art-lover, bought a painting with a pissing cow,[2]
but some
court ladies seemed to have advised against it. By May 1652, after a
case about delivering a new painting, he returned to Amsterdam.
Potter was invited byNicolaes Tulp, who was impressed by his
civilized behavior and politeness. Potter painted his son Dirck Tulp,
but only changed the face on an earlier work he was not able to sell.
Potter died in Amsterdam.
Paulus painted a self-portrait which was at Hackwood Park,
Hampshire until 1998. It is now at Elibank House, Buckinghamshire.

15. Paintings[edit]
His most famous painting not to be confused with his work "The Bull"
is The Young Bull (circa 1647), that is now in Mauritshuis in The
Hague, composed after drawings Potter made in nature. Though this
painting was criticized, it was greatly admired during the 19th century
as an early example of Romanticism. The Young Bull features as the
canvas being studied inMark Tansey's 1981 monochromatic oil on
canvas The Innocent Eye Test.
• Paulus Potter's paintings
•
The Bull, 1647
•
Punishment of a Hunter, ca. 1647

16. •
Two horses in a meadow, 1649
•
Figures with Horses by a Stable
•
Cattle in a Meadow, 1652

17. •
Four Bulls
References[edit]
1. ^ Jump up to:a b
Liedtke, Walter A., Michiel Plomp, and Axel
Rüger. 2001. Vermeer and the Delft school. New York: Metropolitan
Museum of Art. ISBN 0-87099-973-7 p. 332.
2. Jump up^ "Paulus Potter (1625-1654) Painter of landscape
and animal pieces. Born in Enkhuizen, in the Delft Guild from 1646-
1649". Xs4all.nl. Retrieved 2014-04-10.
External links[edit]
Wikimedia Commons has
media related to Paulus
Potter.
Wikisource has original
text related to this article:
an essay about Paulus
Potter and his work.
Wikisource has the text of
the1911 Encyclopædia
Britannica article Potter,
Paul.
• Artcyclopedia; Paulus Potter
• Works and literature at PubHist

18. • Vermeer and The Delft School, an exhibition catalog from The
Metropolitan Museum of Art (fully available online as PDF), which
contains material on Paulus Potter
• Dutch and Flemish paintings from the Hermitage, an exhibition
catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art (available online as
PDF), which contains material on Paulus Potter