Pierre Bonnard

Pierre Bonnard (Oct 3, 1867 - Jan 23, 1947) was a French painter and printmaker, as well as a founding member of the Post-Impressionist group of avant-garde painters Les Nabis. Bonnard preferred to work from memory, using drawings as a reference, and his paintings are often characterized by a dreamlike quality. The intimate domestic scenes, for which he is perhaps best known, often include his wife Marthe de Meligny.

Bonnard has been described as "the most thoroughly idiosyncratic of all the great twentieth- century painters", and the unusual vantage points of his compositions rely less on traditional modes of pictorial structure than voluptuous color, poetic allusions and visual wit. Identified as a late practitioner of Impressionism in the early 20th century, Bonnard has since been recognized for his unique use of color and his complex imagery. "It’s not just the colors that radiate in a Bonnard", writes Roberta Smith, "there’s also the heat of mixed emotions, rubbed into smoothness, shrouded in chromatic veils and intensified by unexpected spatial conundrums and by elusive, uneasy figures."

Bonnard was born in Fontenay-aux-Roses, Hauts-de-Seine on 3 October 1867. He led a happy and carefree youth as the son of a prominent official of the French Ministry of War. He studied classics during his baccalaureate. At the insistence of his father, Bonnard studied law, graduating and briefly practicing as a barrister in 1888. However, he had also attended art classes at Ecole des Beaux-Arts and Académie Julian, and soon decided to become an artist.

His earlier work such as Woman in Checkered Dress (1890) shows the influence of Japanese prints. In 1891, he met Toulouse-Lautrec and began showing his work at the annual exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants. In the same year Bonnard also began an association with La Revue Blanche, for which he and Édouard Vuillard designed frontispieces. Bonnard's talent was appreciated early in his career, Claude Roger-Marx remarked in 1893 that he "catches fleeting poses, steals unconscious gestures, crystallises the most transient expressions". His first show was at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1896.

In his twenties Bonnard was a part of Les Nabis, a group of young artists committed to creating work of symbolic and spiritual nature. Other Nabis include Vuillard and Maurice Denis. In addition to his paintings, he also became known for his posters and book illustrations, as well as for his prints and theater set designs. He left Paris in 1910 for the south of France.

Bonnard was described, by his own friend and historians, as a man of "quiet temperament" and one who was unobtrusively independent. His life was relatively free from "the tensions and reversals of untoward circumstance". It has been suggested that: "Like Daumier, whose life knew little serenity, Bonnard produced a work during his sixty years' activity that follows an even line of development."

Bonnard is known for his intense use of color, especially via areas built with small brush marks and close values. His often complex compositions—typically of sunlit interiors and gardens populated with friends and family members—are both narrative and autobiographical. Bonnard's fondness for depicting intimate scenes of everyday life, has led to him being called an "Intimist"; his wife Marthe was an ever-present subject over the course of several decades. She is seen seated at the kitchen table, with the remnants of a meal; or nude, as in a series of paintings where she reclines in the bathtub. He also painted several self-portraits, landscapes, street scenes, and many still lifes, which usually depicted flowers and fruit.

Bonnard did not paint from life but rather drew his subject—sometimes photographing it as well—and made notes on the colors. He then painted the canvas in his studio from his notes. "I have all my subjects to hand", he said, "I go back and look at them. I take notes. Then I go home. And before I start painting I reflect, I dream."

He worked on numerous canvases simultaneously, which he tacked onto the walls of his small studio. In this way he could more freely determine the shape of a painting; "It would bother me if my canvases were stretched onto a frame. I never know in advance what dimensions I am going to choose."

In 1938 there was a major exhibition of his work along with Vuillard's at the Art Institute of Chicago. He finished his last painting, The Almond Tree in Blossom, a week before his death in his cottage on La Route de Serra Capeou near Le Cannet, on the French Riviera, in 1947. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City organized a posthumous retrospective of Bonnard's work in 1948, although originally it was meant to be a celebration of the artist's 80th birthday.

Although Bonnard avoided public attention, his work sold well during his life. At the time of his death his reputation had already been eclipsed by subsequent avant-garde developments in the art world; reviewing a retrospective of Bonnard's work in Paris in 1947, Christian Zervos assessed the artist in terms of his relationship to Impressionism, and found him wanting. "In Bonnard's work," he wrote, "Impressionism becomes insipid and falls into decline." In response Henri Matisse wrote "I maintain that Bonnard is a great artist for our time and, naturally, for posterity."

Two major exhibitions of Bonnard's work took place in 1998: February through May at the Tate Gallery in London, and from June through October at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

In 2009 the exhibition "Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors" was shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Reviewing the exhibition for the magazine The New Republic, Jed Perl wrote:

"Bonnard is the most thoroughly idiosyncratic of all the great twentieth-century painters. What sustains him is not traditional ideas of pictorial structure and order, but rather some unique combination of visual taste, psychological insight, and poetic feeling. He also has a quality that might be characterized as perceptual wit—an instinct for what will work in a painting. Almost invariably he recognizes the precise point where his voluptuousness may be getting out of hand, where he needs to introduce an ironic note. Bonnard's wit has everything to do with the eccentric nature of his compositions. He finds it funny to sneak a figure into a corner, or have a cat staring out at the viewer. His metaphoric caprices have a comic edge, as when he turns a figure into a pattern in the wallpaper. And when he imagines a basket of fruit as a heap of emeralds and rubies and diamonds, he does so with the panache of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat."

In 2016 the Legion of Honor in San Francisco hosted an exhibit "Pierre Bonnard: Painting Arcadia", featuring more than 70 works that span the artist’s entire career.

Bonnard's record price in a public sale was for Terrasse à Vernon, sold by Christie's in 2011 for €8,485,287 (£7,014,200).

In 2014 the painting La femme aux Deux Fauteuils (Woman with Two Armchairs), with an estimated value of around €600,000 (£497,000), which had been stolen in London in 1970, was discovered in Italy. The painting, together with a work by Paul Gauguin known as Fruit on a Table with a Small Dog had been bought by a Fiat employee in 1975, at a railway lost-property sale, for 45,000 lira (about £32).
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Ren Bonian

Rèn Yí (Chinese: 任頤; 1840–1896), also known as Ren Bonian, was a painter and son of a rice merchant who supplemented his income by doing portraits. He was born in Zhejiang, but after the death of his father in 1855 he lived in Shanghai. This move placed him in a more urban world that was exposed to Western thinking. In Shanghai he became a member of the Shanghai School which fused popular and traditional styles. He is also sometimes referred to as one of the "Four Rens."

He was noted for his bold brushstrokes and use of color. In his earlier career the Song Dynasty painters influenced him, but later on he favored a freer style influenced by the works of Zhu Da.
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Rosa Bonheur

Rosa Bonheur (Mar 16, 1822 - May 25, 1899), born Marie-Rosalie Bonheur, was a French animalière, realist artist, and sculptor. As a painter she became famous primarily for two chief works: Ploughing in the Nivernais, which was first exhibited at the Salon of 1848, and is now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, depicts a team of oxen ploughing a field while attended by peasants set against a vast pastoral landscape; and The Horse Fair, which was exhibited at the Salon of 1853 and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City. Bonheur is widely considered to have been the most famous female painter of the nineteenth century.

Bonheur was born on 16 March 1822 in Bordeaux, Gironde, the oldest child in a family of artists. Her mother was Sophie Bonheur (née Marquis), a piano teacher; she died when Rosa Bonheur was eleven. Her father was Oscar-Raymond Bonheur, a landscape and portrait painter. The Bonheur family adhered to Saint-Simonianism, a Christian-socialist sect that promoted the education of women alongside men. Bonheur's siblings included the animal painters Auguste Bonheur and Juliette Bonheur and the animal sculptor Isidore Jules Bonheur. Francis Galton used the Bonheurs as an example of "Hereditary Genius" in his 1869 essay of the same title.

Bonheur moved to Paris in 1828 at the age of six with her mother and siblings, her father having gone ahead of them to establish a residence and income. By family accounts, she had been an unruly child and had a difficult time learning to read, though even before she could talk she would sketch for hours at a time with pencil and paper. Her mother taught her to read and write by asking her to choose and draw a different animal for each letter of the alphabet. The artist credits her love of drawing animals to these reading lessons with her mother.

At school she was often disruptive, and she was expelled from numerous schools.[9] After a failed apprenticeship with a seamstress at the age of twelve, her father undertook to train her as a painter.

Following the traditional art school curriculum of the period, Bonheur began her training by copying images from drawing books and by sketching plaster models. As her training progressed, she made studies of domesticated animals, including horses, sheep, cows, goats, rabbits and other animals in the pastures on the perimeter of Paris, the open fields of Villiers near Levallois-Perret, and the still-wild Bois de Boulogne. At fourteen, she began to copy paintings at the Louvre. Among her favorite painters were Nicholas Poussin and Peter Paul Rubens, but she also copied the paintings of Paulus Potter, Frans Pourbus the Younger, Louis Léopold Robert, Salvatore Rosa and Karel Dujardin.

She studied animal anatomy and osteology in the abattoirs of Paris and by dissecting animals at the École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort, the National Veterinary Institute in Paris. There she prepared detailed studies that she later used as references for her paintings and sculptures. During this period, she befriended father-and-son comparative anatomists and zoologists, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.

A French government commission led to Bonheur's first great success, Ploughing in the Nivernais, exhibited in 1849. Her most famous work, the monumental Horse Fair, measured eight feet high by sixteen feet wide, and was completed in 1855. It depicts the horse market held in Paris, on the tree-lined boulevard de l’Hôpital, near the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, which is visible in the painting's background. This work led to international fame and recognition; that same year she traveled to Scotland and met Queen Victoria en route, who admired Bonheur's work. In Scotland, she completed sketches for later works including Highland Shepherd, completed in 1859, and A Scottish Raid, completed in 1860. These pieces depicted a way of life in the Scottish highlands that had disappeared a century earlier, and they had enormous appeal to Victorian sensibilities.[citation needed] Though she was more popular in England than in her native France, she was decorated with the French Legion of Honour by the Empress Eugénie in 1865, and was promoted to Officer of the order in 1894.

Art dealer Ernest Gambart (1814–1902) represented her; he brought Bonheur to the United Kingdom in 1855, and he purchased the reproduction rights to her work. Many engravings of Bonheur's work were created from reproductions by Charles George Lewis (1808–1880), one of the finest engravers of the day.
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Félix Bonfils

Félix Bonfils (Mar 8, 1831 - 1885) was a French photographer and writer who was active in the Middle East.

He was born in Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort and died in Alès. Félix worked as a bookbinder but in 1860 he joined General d'Hautpoul's expedition to the Levant. Soon after returning from Lebanon he became a photographer. When his son Adrien fell ill, Félix remembered the green hills around Beirut and sent him there to recover, being accompanied by Marie-Lydie Cabanis Bonfils, Félix's wife. The family moved to Beirut in 1867 where they opened a photographic studio called "Maison Bonfils".

Maison Bonfils produced thousands of photographs of the Middle East. They photographed posed scenes, dressed up in Middle Eastern regalia, and also stories from the Bible. Their studio became "F. Bonfils et Cie" in 1878. Bonfils took photographs in Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Greece and Constantinople.

In 1872 he published the album Architecture Antique after presenting some of his pictures to the Société française de photographie. His work became well known for the tourists that travelled to those countries because they bought their photos as souvenirs. He later opened another studio in Alès.
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Henry Bone

Henry Bone (Feb 6, 1755 - Dec 17, 1834) was an English enamel painter who was officially employed in that capacity by three successive monarchs, George III, George IV and William IV. In his early career he worked as a porcelain and jewelry painter. He was elected a Royal Academician and produced the largest enamel paintings ever seen up to that time.

Henry Bone was born in Truro, Cornwall. His father was a cabinet maker and carver of unusual skill. In 1767, Bone's family moved to Plymouth in neighbouring Devon, where Henry was apprenticed, in 1771, to William Cookworthy, the founder of the Plymouth porcelain works, and the first manufacturer of Hard-paste porcelain in England. In 1772, Bone moved, with his master, to the Bristol china works, where he remained for six years, working from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., and studying drawing at night. His china decoration is of high merit, and is said to have been marked with the figure "1" in addition to the factory-mark, a small cross.

On the failure of the Bristol works in 1778, Bone came to London with one guinea of his own in his pocket, and five pounds borrowed from a friend. He first found employment enameling watches and fans, and afterwards in making enamel and watercolour portraits. He became a friend of John Wolcot, and, on his advice, made professional tours in Cornwall. On 24 January 1780, he married Elizabeth Vandermeulen, a descendant of the distinguished battle-painter Adam Frans van der Meulen. The couple went on to have twelve children, ten of whom survived. In the same year he exhibited his first picture at the Royal Academy, a portrait of his wife, an unusually large enamel for the period. He then gave himself up entirely to enamel-painting, and continued frequently to exhibit at the Academy, initialing most of his works.

In 1789, he exhibited "A Muse and Cupid", the largest enamel painting ever executed up to that time. In 1800 he was appointed enamel painter to the Prince of Wales; in 1801 he was made an associate of the Royal Academy (ARA) and enamel painter to George III, continuing to hold the appointment during the reigns of George IV and William IV. On 15 April 1811 he was elected a royal academician (RA), and shortly afterwards produced a still larger enamel (eighteen inches by sixteen), after Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne. More than 4000 people saw the work at Bone's house. The picture was sold to Mr. G. Bowles of Cavendish Square for 2,200 guineas, the sum of which was paid (either wholly or partly) by a cheque drawn on Fauntleroy's Bank. Bone cashed the cheque on his way home, just in time, as the next day financial difficulties caused the bank to suspend payments!

In the preparation and firing of his large plates, he was assisted by Edward Wedlake Brayley, who was by then already a distinguished antiquary, but had trained as an enameller.

Bone's next great works were a series of historical portraits from the time of Elizabeth I, a series of "Cavaliers distinguished in the Civil War", and a series of portraits of the Russell family. The Elizabethan series did not prove a financial success; they were exhibited at his house at 15 Berners Street. In 1831 his eyesight failed, and after having lived successively at Spa Fields, 195 High Holborn, Little Russell Street, Hanover Street, and Berners Street, he moved in that year to Somers Town, and reluctantly received the Royal Academy pension.

He died on 17 December 1834, not without complaining of the neglect with which he had latterly been treated. He is said to have been "a man of unaffected modesty and generosity; friendship and integrity adorned his private life". Francis Chantrey carved a bust of him, and John Opie, John Jackson, and George Harlow all painted his portrait.[1] Richard Dagley was a friend.

Legacy: Some time before his death Bone offered his collections, which had been valued at £10,000, to the nation for £4,000, but the offer was declined, and on 22 April 1836 they were sold by auction at Christie's, and so dispersed. Other major sales of his works took place in 1846, 1850, 1854, and 1856.

Bone has been called the "Prince of Enamelers". J. Jope Rogers published a large catalogue of 1,063 works of the Bone family in the Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, No. XXII, for March 1880 - half of which was taken up by works by Henry Bone.
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Bond

Bond graffiti masters from Germany made a collaborative piece in Hauz Khas Village.

The St+art India foundation is a not-for-profit organization that works on art projects in public spaces. The aim of the foundation is to make art accessible to a wider audience by taking it out of the conventional gallery space and embedding it within the cities we live in - making art truly democratic and for everyone.
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Giuseppe Bonati

Giuseppe Bonati (1635 - Mar 12, 1681) was an Italian painter of the Baroque period, active in Rome and Ferrara.

He is also known as Giovannino del Pio or Giovanni Bonatti. He initially trained as a pupil of Francesco Costanzo Cattaneo and Leonello Bononi. Under the patronage of cardinal Carlo Pio, in 1658 he was sent to Bologna to train with Guercino. In 1662, he travels to Rome to work in the studio of Pier Francesco Mola. Bonati attempts to establish a studio to rival Carlo Maratta. Along with his patrons, he traveled through Italy, including Venice, returning in 1665 to Rome where he worked in many churches, including Santa Croce in Gerusalemme and Santa Maria in Vallicella. In the Museo Capitolino are paintings of Rinaldo and Armida as well as Sisera and Jael. He painted for Queen Christina of Sweden.
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Giulio Bonasone

Giulio Bonasone (1498 - 1574) was an Italian painter and engraver. He was born at Bologna, where he worked from 1521 to 1574. He studied painting under Lorenzo Sabbatini. He painted a Purgatory for the church of San Stefano. He is better known as an engraver, training with Marcantonio Franceschini.

Among his portraits are those of the following:
Cardinal Pietro Bembo after Titian.
Pope Marcellus II
Philippus Hispaniarum princeps, Caroli V.
Raphael d'Urbino and Michelangelo Buonarroti
Francisca Flori Antwerpiani inter Belgos pictoris
Cardinal Niccolò Ardinghelli.
Among his engravings on devotional and mythologic topics are:
Adam & Eve, Adam tilling & Eve spinning, Holy Family, Nativity, and Resurrection based on his own designs.
The Passion; entitled Passio Donini inri Jesu Christi based on his own designs.
Life of the Virgin based on his own designs.
Adam & Eve driven from Paradise; after Amico Aspertini.
St. George, Holy family, and Nativity, and after Giulio Romano.
Solomon, David, and Jesse; Last Judgement, Creation of Eve from the Sistine Chapel
Judith with her Servant coming out of the Tent of Holofernes
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Agostino Bonalumi

Agostino Bonalumi (Jul 10, 1935 - Sep 18, 2013) was an Italian painter, draughtsman and sculptor.

Bonalumi studied technical and mechanical drawing, and exhibited his first works at the “Premio Nazionale Città di Vimercate” in 1948, when he was just thirteen years old.

He held his first solo show at the Galleria Totti, Milan, in 1956. In 1958 he began working with Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni, holding a group exhibition at the Galleria Pater, Milan, which was followed by further shows in Rome, Milan and Lausanne, the foundation of Azimuth magazine and his participation in exhibitions at the Azimut gallery.

He started developing the idea of what he would call “pittura – oggetto”, following the idea to go beyond the canvas started by their mentor Lucio Fontana. In 1959 he held his first solo show outside Italy in Rotterdam. In 1960 he was one of the founders of the international Nouvelle École Européenne movement in Lausanne and his solo exhibition “Agostino Bonalumi. Recent Paintings, Sculptures and Drawings” opened at the New Vision Centre Gallery in London.

Arturo Schwarz began collecting his works and, in February 1965, organised a Bonalumi exhibition in his gallery in Milan.

He also had assiduous contacts and links with the international Zero movement (both in the Netherlands and Germany), documented by major exhibitions such as “Zero” in London, 1964, and the touring exhibition “ZERO Avantgarde”, which began in Lucio Fontana’s studio in Milan in 1965. 1965 marked the start of a long period of collaboration with Renato Cardazzo, director of the Galleria del Cavallino in Venice and the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan. He was Bonalumi’s sole agent for many years and, in 1973, supervised the publication of a lengthy monograph on the artist by Edizioni del Naviglio, written by Gillo Dorfles.

In 1966 he was invited to take part in the 33rd Venice Biennale, where he exhibited a selection of his works in the same room as Paolo Scheggi, while in 1970 he had his own personal room at the 35th Venice Biennale (and a feature written on him in the catalogue by Luciano Caramel), in which he also installed some large environmental sculptures.

In 1967 he was invited to the São Paulo Biennial and the Biennial of Young Artists in Paris. This was followed by a period of study and work in northern Africa and America, where he lived for a while in New York. It was here that he held his first solo show in the United States: “Agostino Bonalumi. Painting–Constructions”, presented at the Galeria Bonino in 1967.

During this period, Bonalumi embarked on his own particular course of painting and environmental sculpture, which unfolded over the decades in some fundamental stages: in 1967, Blu abitabile (Inhabitable Blue) created for “Lo spazio dell’immagine” exhibition in Foligno (and exhibited again in 1970 in the “Vitalità del negativo” show in Rome); in 1968, Grande Nero (Big Black) at the Museum am Ostwall in Dortmund; in 1979, as part of the “Pittura Ambiente” exhibition curated by Francesca Alinovi and Renato Barilli in the Palazzo Reale in Milan, Dal giallo al bianco e dal bianco al giallo (From Yellow to White and from White to Yellow). More recently, Ambiente bianco – Spazio trattenuto e spazio invaso (White Environment – Detained Space and Invaded Space), created in 2002 for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice as part of the “Temi e Variazioni” project conceived and curated by Luca Massimo Barbero.

In 1974, a retrospective of the artist’s work, curated by Giulio Carlo Argan, was held in the Palazzo dei Musei in Modena. In 1980, the Regione Lombardia sponsored an exhibition in the Palazzo Te, Mantua, curated by Flavio Caroli and Gillo Dorfles: an extensive review that illustrated his entire artistic career.

In 1981 he took part, together with Piero Dorazio, Mimmo Rotella and Giuseppe Santomaso, in the “Italian Art: Four Contemporary Directions” exhibition at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art in Florida. In 1986 he participated in the 11th Rome Quadriennale and the 42nd Venice Biennale. Between 1986 and 1997 Bonalumi was represented exclusively by the Galleria Blu in Milan, which presented solo shows of his work in 1980, 1989, 1991, 1995 (with a monograph published by Scheiwiller as part of the Arte Moderna Italiana series, including a piece written by Vanni Scheiwiller), 2002 and 2005. A monograph by Elena Pontiggia, which documented Bonalumi’s works on paper and made from paper, was also published in 1995, as part of La Scaletta editions, San Polo, Reggio Emilia.

In 1997 he began working with the Galleria Fumagalli in Bergamo, which, in 1998, held an exhibition of his works from 1957 to 1997, accompanied by a monograph by Alberto Fiz and Marco Meneguzzo.

In 1999 he was once again invited to the Rome Quadriennale and, in 2000, a solo exhibition of his opened in the Galleria Niccoli in Parma, which was accompanied by an important monograph by Luca Massimo Barbero.
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Andrea di Bonaiuto da Firenze

Andrea di Bonaiuto da Firenze (1346 - 1379) was an Italian painter. He was probably born in Florence where he was active from 1343. Andrea di Bonaiuto is known for his stained glass window of the Coronation of Mary in the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella, and his fresco decorations in the Spanish chapel of the chapter house there.

Andrea di Bonaiuto is known for his stained glass window of the Coronation of Mary in the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella, and his fresco decorations in the Spanish chapel (then called Cappellone degli Spagnoli) of the chapter house there. The central theme of the fresco's in the Spanish chapel is the glorification of the Dominican Order.

From mid 1366 to mid 1367 Andrea di Bonaiuto was one of the artists advising on the construction of the Florence Cathedral.

He died in Pisa while working on a fresco on the Legend of St Raneiro at the Camposanto Monumentale.

Although a follower of traditional models, Andrea di Bonaiuto brought innovation by softening details and contours with soft and blended shadows and emphasizing the two-dimensional aspect of the painted surface through painted and punched decorative effects.

He died in Pisa.
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Aldo Bonadei

Aldo Cláudio Felipe Bonadei (Jun 17, 1906 - Jan 16, 1974), also known as Aldo Bonadei was a Brazilian painter of Italian descent.

Between 1923 and 1928, Aldo studied with Brazilian academic painter Pedro Alexandrino and frequently visited the studio of Italian painters Antonio Rocco and Amadeo Scavone who also lived in São Paulo. During this period, he studied at the Liceu de Artes e Oficios de São Paulo, where he took courses on sketching and Fine Arts.

In the beginning of the 1930s, Aldo decided to move to Florence to attend the Florence Academy of Arts (Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze) where he trained as a painter with the Italian artists Felice Carena and Ennio Pozzi. When he returned from Italy, Aldo shared his studio with other fellow artists such as Francisco Rebollo, Alfredo Volpi, Mario Zanini, Manuel Martins and Fulvio Penacchi, forming group that later became known as Grupo Santa Helena.

In 1949, Aldo began to teach at what became the first school of Modern Art in São Paulo, Escola Livre de Artes Plásticas. His varied interests led him to work in poetry, fashion and theater. He was culturally important in the 1930s and 1940s, when modern art burgeoned in Brazil, becoming a pioneer of Brazilian abstract art.

At the end of the 1950s, Aldo worked as costume designer for Nydia Lícia & Sérgio Cardoso company, and in two films by Walter Hugo Khoury.
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BomK

BomK from Street Art 13, Paris, France

Itinerrance, established in 2004, is located in the 13th arrondissement of Paris close to the Seine and the National Library. Having become a key venue for street art, Itinerrance exhibits street artists.
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David Bomberg

David Garshen Bomberg (Dec 5, 1890 - Aug 19, 1957) was an English painter, and one of the Whitechapel Boys.

Bomberg was one of the most audacious of the exceptional generation of artists who studied at the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks, and which included Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, C.R.W. Nevinson and Dora Carrington. Bomberg painted a series of complex geometric compositions combining the influences of cubism and futurism in the years immediately preceding World War I; typically using a limited number of striking colours, turning humans into simple, angular shapes, and sometimes overlaying the whole painting a strong grid-work colouring scheme. He was expelled from the Slade School of Art in 1913, with agreement between the senior teachers Tonks, Frederick Brown and Philip Wilson Steer, because of the audacity of his breach from the conventional approach of that time.

Whether because his faith in the machine age had been shattered by his experiences as a private soldier in the trenches or because of the pervasive retrogressive attitude towards modernism in Britain Bomberg moved to a more figurative style in the 1920s and his work became increasingly dominated by portraits and landscapes drawn from nature. Gradually developing a more expressionist technique he travelled widely through the Middle East and Europe.

From 1945 to 1953, he worked as a teacher at Borough Polytechnic (now London South Bank University) in London, where his pupils included Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Philip Holmes, Cliff Holden, Dorothy Mead, Gustav Metzger, Dennis Creffield, Cecil Bailey and Miles Richmond. David Bomberg House, one of the student halls of residences at London South Bank University, is named in his honor.

Bomberg was born in the Lee Bank area of Birmingham on 5 December 1890. He was the seventh of eleven children of a Polish Jewish immigrant leatherworker, Abraham, and his wife Rebecca. He was Orthodox but she less so and supported David's painting ambitions. In 1895, his family moved to Whitechapel in the East End of London where he was to spend the rest of his childhood.

After studying art at City and Guilds, Bomberg returned to Birmingham to train as a lithographer but quit to study under Walter Sickert at Westminster School of Art from 1908 to 1910. Sickert's emphasis on the study of form and the representation of the "gross material facts" of urban life were an important early influence on Bomberg, alongside Roger Fry's 1910 exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists, where he first saw the work of Paul Cézanne.

Bomberg's artistic studies had involved considerable financial hardship but in 1911, with the help of John Singer Sargent and the Jewish Education Aid Society, he was able to attain a place at the Slade School of Art.

At Slade School of Fine Art Bomberg was one of the remarkable generation of artists described today as the school's "crisis of brilliance" that studied under Henry Tonks and included Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, Mark Gertler and Isaac Rosenberg. Bomberg and Rosenberg, from similar backgrounds, had met some years earlier and became close friends as a result of their mutual interests.

The emphasis in teaching at the Slade was on technique and draughtsmanship, to which Bomberg was well suited — winning the Tonks Prize for his drawing of fellow student Rosenberg in 1911. His own style was rapidly moving away from these traditional methods, however, particularly under the influence of the March 1912 London exhibition of Italian Futurists that exposed him to the dynamic abstraction of Francis Picabia and Gino Severini, and Fry's second Post Impressionist exhibition in October of the same year, which displayed the works of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and the Fauvists alongside those of Wyndham Lewis, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell.

Bomberg's response to this became clear in paintings such as Vision of Ezekiel (1912), in which he proved "he could absorb the most experimental European ideas, fuse these with Jewish influences and come up with a robust alternative of his own." His dynamic, angular representations of the human form, combining the geometrical abstraction of cubism with the energy of the Futurists, established his reputation as a forceful member of the avant-garde and the most audacious of his contemporaries; bringing him to the attention of Wyndham Lewis (who visited him in 1912) and Filippo Marinetti. In 1913, the year in which he was expelled from the Slade because of the radicalism of his approach, he travelled to France with Jacob Epstein, where among others he met Amedeo Modigliani, André Derain and Pablo Picasso.

Expelled from the Slade in the Summer of 1913, Bomberg formed a series of loose affiliations with several groups involved with the contemporary English avant-garde, embarking on a brief and acrimonious association with the Bloomsbury Group's Omega Workshops before exhibiting with the Camden Town Group in December 1913. His enthusiasm for the dynamism and aesthetics of the machine age gave him a natural affinity with Wyndham Lewis's emerging vorticist movement, and five of his works featured in the founding exhibition of the London Group in 1914. Still, Bomberg was staunchly independent and despite Lewis' attempts he never officially joined Vorticism. In July 1914 he refused involvement with the Vorticist literary magazine BLAST and in June of the following year his work featured only in the "Invited to show" section of the vorticist exhibition at London's Dore Gallery.

1914 saw the highpoint of his early career — a solo exhibition at the Chenil Gallery in Chelsea which attracted positive reviews from Roger Fry and T. E. Hulme and attracted favourable attention from experimental artists nationally and internationally. The exhibition featured several of Bomberg's early masterpieces, most notably The Mud Bath (1914), which was hung on an outside wall surrounded by Union Flags — causing "the horses drawing the 29 bus... to shy at it as they came round the corner of King's Road."

"I look upon Nature while I live in a steel city" he explained in the exhibition catalogue "I APPEAL to a Sense of Form ... My object is the construction of Pure Form. I reject everything in painting that is not Pure Form."

With the help of Augustus John, Bomberg sold two paintings from this exhibition to the influential American collector John Quinn.

Despite the success of his Chenil Gallery exhibition Bomberg continued to be dogged by financial problems. In 1915, he enlisted in the Royal Engineers, transferring in 1916 to the King's Royal Rifle Corps and in March of that year, shortly after marrying his first wife, being sent to the Western Front.

World War I was to bring a profound change to Bomberg's outlook. His experiences of its mechanized slaughter and the death of his brother in the trenches — as well as those of his friend Isaac Rosenberg and his supporter T. E. Hulme — permanently destroyed his faith in the aesthetics of the machine age. This can be seen most clearly in his commission for the Canadian War Memorials Fund, Sappers at Work (1918–1919): his first version of the painting was dismissed as a "futurist abortion" and was replaced by a second far more representational version.

The artist's book Russian Ballet, 1919, was the last work to use the pre-war vorticist idiom. Bomberg self-published this work whilst waiting for the Canadian Government's verdict on Sappers At Work; the next few years was to see him 'experimenting with ways of making his stark pre-war style more rounded and organic'.

In radical opposition to the prevailing currents in avant-garde art, stimulated as these were by the enthusiasm for mechanization in Constructivism in Russia following the Revolution, Bomberg went to paint and draw in Palestine between 1923 and 1927, with the assistance of the Zionist Organization. There he brought together the geometric energies of his pre-war work as an "English cubist" with the tradition of figurative observation of the English landscape school of Turner, Constable, Girtin and John Sell Cotman.

From there followed Bomberg's great period of painting and drawing in landscape, in Spain at Toledo (1928), Ronda (1934–35 and 1954–57) and Asturias (1935), in Cyprus (1948) and intermittently in Britain, perhaps most powerfully in Cornwall. A six-month stay at Odessa in the Soviet Union in the second half of 1933, following Hitler's seizure of power in Germany, led Bomberg on his return to London to immediate resignation from the Communist Party. During World War II, he painted Evening in the City of London (1944), showing the blitzed city viewed rising up to a triumphant, surviving St Paul's Cathedral on the horizon, since described as the "most moving of all paintings of wartime Britain" (Martin Harrison); a series of flower paintings saturated with turbulent feeling; and his single commission as a war artist, a series of "Bomb Store" paintings (1942) expressing Bomberg's expanded first-hand sense of the destructive powers of modern technology in warfare. These "Bomb Store" paintings convey a premonitory sense of the massive explosion that destroyed the underground store two years later, killing 68 people, and bear comparison with Piranesi's Carceri etchings.

Bomberg's superb draughtsmanship was expressed also in a lifelong series of portraits, from the early period of his Botticelli-like "Head of a Poet" (1913), a pencil portrait of his friend the poet Isaac Rosenberg for which he won the Henry Tonks Prize at the Slade, to his "Last Self-Portrait" (1956), painted at Ronda, a meditation also on Rembrandt.

Unable to get a teaching position after World War II in any of the most prestigious London art schools, Bomberg became the most exemplary teacher of the immediate post-war period in Britain, working part-time in a bakery school at the Borough Polytechnic (now London South Bank University) in the working-class borough of Southwark. Though his students received no grant and were awarded no diploma, he attracted devoted and highly energetic pupils, with whom he exhibited on an equal basis in London, Oxford, and Cambridge in two important artists' groupings in which he was the leading light, the Borough Group (1946–51) and the Borough Bottega (1953–55). He developed a deeply considered philosophy of art, set out in several pieces of writing, which he summed up in the phrase, "The Spirit in the Mass".

Following a collapse in Ronda, Bomberg died in London in 1957, his critical stock rising sharply thereafter. One of Bomberg's admirers, the painter Patrick Swift, unearthed and edited Bomberg’s pensées, and was later to publish them, along with images of Bomberg's work, as 'The Bomberg Papers' in his ‘X’ magazine (June 1960). After his early success before the First World War, he was in his lifetime the most brutally excluded artist in Britain. Having lived for years on the earnings of his second wife, fellow artist Lilian Holt and remittances from his sister Kitty, he died in absolute poverty.

Thirty years after his death, a major retrospective of Bomberg's work curated by Richard Cork was held at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1988.

In 2006, Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal, Cumbria, mounted the first major exhibition of Bomberg's paintings for nearly twenty years: David Bomberg: Spirit in the Mass (17 July – 28 October 2006). Prior to that, the exhibition David Bomberg en Ronda at the Museo Joaquin Peinado in Ronda in Andalusia (1–30 October 2004) showed work by Bomberg in the city and environment which he had celebrated in paintings and drawings in 1934-35 and 1954-57. Work from one of the best collections in private hands was shown on the fiftieth anniversary of his death in the exhibition In celebration of David Bomberg 1890-1957 at Daniel Katz Gallery, Old Bond Street, London (30 May – 13 July 2007).

London South Bank University, the site of Bomberg's teaching at the former Borough Polytechnic, received a gift of more than 150 paintings and drawings by Bomberg and his students in the Borough Group — principally Dorothy Mead, Cliff Holden, Miles Richmond, and Dennis Creffield — the David Bomberg Legacy. The gallery, formally launched on 14 June 2012, to display the artworks donated to the university by Sarah Rose has been made possible by the Heritage Lottery Fund. The collection is the work of Sarah Rose, who built her collection over thirty years.[19] The London South Bank University Borough Road Gallery will hold two exhibitions a year drawn from the Sarah Rose collection.

The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University held an exhibition entitled The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914-18 from 30 September 2010 through 2 January 2011. Tate Britain held an exhibition entitled The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World between 14 June and 4 September 2011. In the 2011 BBC series, British Masters, Bomberg was singled out as being one of the greatest painters of the 20th Century. He is one of the six artists included in Dulwich Picture Gallery's 2013 summer exhibition, "Nash, Nevinson, Spencer, Gertler, Carrington, Bomberg: A Crisis of Brilliance, 1908-1922"

In Restless, William Boyd's 2006 novel, there is a reference to a portrait by Bomberg of one of the book's major (fictional) characters. The painting is said to occupy a place in the National Portrait Gallery in London. In "A Palestine Affair", a 2003 novel by Jonathan Wilson, the character "Mike Bloomberg" is loosely based on Bomberg's life, as acknowledged by the author: "Richard Cork's 'David Bomberg' [was] ... of inestimable value to me in constructing this fiction". Glyn Hughes's novel, Roth (Simon & Schuster, London, 1992) — its leading a character a London Jewish painter, its cover carrying a reproduction of one of Bomberg's Cyprus landscapes — is also loosely based on the author's reflections on Bomberg.
http://hisour.com/artist/david-bomberg/

Hugh Bolton Jones

Hugh Bolton Jones (Oct 20, 1848 - Sep 24, 1927) was an American landscape painter. He grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, where he received his early training as an artist. While studying in New York he was strongly influenced by Frederic Edwin Church of the Hudson River School. After spending four years in Europe he settled in New York in 1881, where he shared a studio with his brother Francis Coates Jones for the rest of his long life. He was celebrated for his realistic depictions of calm rural scenes of the eastern United States at different times of the year, usually empty of people. He won prizes in several major exhibitions in the US and France. His paintings are held in public collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution.

Hugh Bolton Jones was born to a respected family in Baltimore, Maryland on 20 October 1848. His parents were Hugh Burgess Jones and Laura Eliza Bolton. His mother was descended from a family that had come to Pennsylvania with William Penn and later moved to Baltimore. His father was an officer in a local insurance company. Hugh attended the Quaker School for his secondary education. He went on to study at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore under David Acheson Woodward, the portrait painter.

Between 1865 and 1876 Jones spent a large part of his time in New York, while retaining Baltimore as his residence. In 1865 he took lessons in New York from the art designer Carey Smith (1837–1911). For a few months he studied under Horace Wolcott Robbins (1842–1904) before Robbins and Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) left for Jamaica. Church had a major influence on his style. Jones began to exhibit at the National Academy of Design in 1867. He became a close friend of the painter Thomas Hovenden (1840–1895) in New York. In 1868 Jones and Hovenden set up a shared studio in Baltimore.

In the summer of 1870 Jones spent four months in Europe with his family. He exhibited scenes from England and Ireland at the 1871 Baltimore Artists Sale. He had joined the Allston Association of artists and collectors in Baltimore by 1872. He spent the summer of 1873 sketching in Maryland and Virginia, traveling by railway. His 1874 painting Summer in the Blue Ridge was exhibited at the National Academy of Design and was highly praised.

In 1876 Jones and his younger brother Francis Coates Jones left for a four-year visit to travel and paint in Europe. They visited Edwin Austin Abbey in his home in London before moving to Pont-Aven, Brittany. H. Bolton Jones may have spent some time at the Académie Julian. He spent most of his time in the American artists' colony at Pont-Aven. There the brothers painted with Thomas Hovenden, Robert Wylie (1839–1877) and William Lamb Picknell (1853–1897). They lived cheaply at the Gloanec Pension, where Gauguin would stay in the late 1880s. He also sketched in Spain, England, Italy, and Morocco. He exhibited in London and in Paris at the Salon and the Exposition Universelle of 1878.

H. Bolton Jones returned to Baltimore in June 1880 and sold a set of his paintings in an auction. He then traveled in Spain and North Africa before returning to New York in 1881. In New York he shared a studio with his younger brother Francis. In 1881 Jones became a member of the Society of American Artists, and in 1883 he was elected an academician at the National Academy of Design. He joined the American Watercolor Society (1882), the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the National Arts Club. Jones was an enthusiastic woodcarver, and made his own frames. He also undertook most of the interior decoration of the showpiece studio that he eventually established at 33 West Sixty-Seventh Street in Manhattan.

Jones painted in Annisquam, Massachusetts between 1883 and 1889 with William Lamb Picknell and others from the former artists' colony of Pont-Aven. In 1888 the Jones brothers moved to the Clinton Studio Building with their sister Louise Chubb, who was widowed. Jones traveled to the western US around 1890 to obtain material for Our Italy, a book about western America by Charles Dudley Warner that was published in 1891. He bought a summer cottage in South Egremont, Massachusetts. From this base he painted the Berkshires, and made expeditions to Maryland and West Virginia. He won medals in various major exhibitions between 1893 and 1915.

In 1905 or 1906 the Jones brothers moved to the Atalier Building. H. Bolton Jones joined the Century Association and the Charcoal Club of Baltimore. His social life came to revolve around the Century Association. He was a trustee of the Baltimore Museum of Art from its foundation in 1914 until his death at age 78 from pernicious anemia on 24 September 1927 in New York City.

Jones is best known for his paintings of the flat country of New England and New Jersey. The influence of Frederic Edwin Church and the Hudson River School shows in his handling of light and the precision of his en plein air depictions of nature. He painted the varying landscapes of each season of the year, in peaceful harmony.

The Rahway River in Union County, New Jersey was one of his subjects according to Frank Townsend Lent in A Souvenir of Cranford New Jersey (1894).

His subtle Barbizon-style studies drew praise, but his insistence on accuracy in his representation of nature was also criticized. His earlier paintings are lit by a clear, bright light, and sharply detailed, while his later works were more muted and lyrical. In his last decades, Jones' work became increasingly stale, repeating the same subjects and compositions in an outdated style. Thomas B. Clarke (1848–1931) said of him in 1891,

A native painter of American landscape, who has never been touched by any fashions in art, is H. Bolton Jones. He paints Nature for herself and not for the sake of illustrating any theory as to how she might or should be painted. He studies her form, color and various characteristics, and gives us the result of his investigations in transcripts of familiar scenes that are rich in rural charms. His drawing is careful and correct, his color vivacious and his execution finished... It is by his American landscape that America knows and will remember him.

Jones exhibited at the National Academy of Design between 1867 and 1927. He exhibited at the Paris Salons (1877–81), Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Annual (1879–85, 1891–1902, 1917–18), Boston Art Club (1881–1909). In 1884 Jones exhibited with the first exhibition of the Society of Painters in Pastels. He also exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, Society of American Artists (1902) and the Corcoran Gallery of Art (1907–12). He won prizes for his submissions at the World's Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893), Exposition Universelle (Paris, 1889), Exposition Universelle (Paris, 1900), Louisiana Purchase Exposition (St. Louis, 1904) and Panama–Pacific International Exposition (San Francisco, 1915).

Jones' paintings are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Smithsonian Institution.
http://hisour.com/artist/hugh-bolton-jones/

Boetius à Bolswert

Boetius à Bolswert (1585 - 1633) was a renowned copper-plate engraving engraver of Friesland origin. In his time the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens called forth new endeavours by engravers to imitate or reproduce the breadth, density of mass and dynamic illumination of those works. Boetius Bolswert was an important figure in this movement, not least because he was the elder brother and instructor of the engraver Schelte à Bolswert, whose reproductions of Rubens's landscapes were most highly esteemed in their own right.

The birthplace of the Bolswerts at the little town of Bolsward, Friesland, was confirmed by Cornelis de Bie in his Het Gulden Cabinet. Boetius came early in life to Holland, where he appears around 1610; he was then dwelling in Amsterdam, and sometimes also in Utrecht.

In 1610 he produced his four scenes of the Horrors of the Spanish War, after designs by David Vinckboons. Reproductions of large landscapes by Vinckboons and Gillis van Coninxloo III were among his early successes, employing a dense and diffuse technique, in a genre to which he later made transforming contributions. In 1615 and 1616 he was licensed by the Dutch States-General to engrave from the portraits of Michiel Jansz van Mierevelt, such as the portraits of Elizabeth and Frederik of Bohemia. In 1618 he depicted the ceremonial funeral-bed of the newly deceased Philipp Wilhelm, Prince of Orange.

However Bolswert's most notable collaboration in this period was with Abraham Bloemaert, after whom he produced various series. It is thought they worked closely, for Bolswert carefully imitated aspects of his graphic style, and has been described as his pupil. His 1611 series Pastorals using Bloemaert models shows the early fruits of that influence. Their collaboration in various works from 1612 on the theme of Saints and Hermits culminated in 1619 in Antwerp in the Sylva Anachoretica Ægypti Et Palæstinæ (The Hermit Woodland of Egypt and Palestine), a quarto (230mm) volume depicting imaginary portraits of 25 male and 25 female hermits of antiquity, with facing descriptive Latin texts, printed by Hendrick Aertssens. Dutch and French editions were reprinted in the same year. This was apparently commissioned by the Jesuit Heribert van Rosweijde (1569–1629), (founder of the project for the Acta Sanctorum taken up by the Bollandists), rector of the Jesuit college at Antwerp. Rosweyde dedicated the Bolswert work to his benefactor, Abbot Antoine de Wynghe of Liessies Abbey, Département Nord, France. It was evidently a companion-book to Rosweyde's major Latin work Lives of the Fathers (biographies of early Church hermits) of 1615, a compilation from which was produced at Antwerp in 1619 by Jan van Gorcum.

At Antwerp between September 1620 and September 1621, Boetius Bolswert was admitted as free Master in the Guild of St Luke. Slightly before this, in January 1620, he became (as a good Roman Catholic and bachelor) a member of the Jesuit Sodality of Adult Bachelorhood; in September 1620 we find him in the office of Consultor within it, and in September 1622 as Assistant to the Prefects. Antwerp was then a leading centre of Counter-Reformation artistic and literary activity.

In 1624 he collaborated with the Brussels Jesuit Father Herman Hugo (1588–1629) in the production of 'the 17th century's most popular devotional book,' Pia Desideria – a work indicating three paths to salvation, through purification, illumination and union, an Emblem book which ran through many editions and versions. It consisted of a series of 45 emblems by Bolswert with accompanying verses by Hugo, subjects for meditation on the theme of spiritual love.Hugo had been teacher at the Jesuit College in Antwerp and rector of the Jesuit College in Brussels, and became army chaplain to Ambrogio Spinola in Spain. The 45 plates were reproduced in the last three volumes of the Emblems of Francis Quarles first published in 1635.

In 1627 Bolswert was in Brussels: from this city he gave, under the date of 1 May 1627 the dedication of his book, Duyfkens ende Willemynkens Pelgrimagie (Duyfkens and Willemynkens Pilgrimage). This little book (illustrated with his own engravings), which reveals him also to have been a writer, is seen in the later editions of 1631, 1638 and 1641, and in new (and re-cut) editions thereafter: it was a much-read Catholic devotional book and was translated into French. It described an allegorical voyage to Jerusalem by two sisters. Now some of the descriptions and narratives in it seem frankly ridiculous.

In 1639 Aertssens printed Bolswert's plates for the retelling of the mediaeval story of The Miracle of Amsterdam by Leonard Marius (Goesanus) (1588–1652), Roman Catholic priest at the Begijnhof. Some of the 16 full-page engraved plates are based on illustration designs attributed to Rubens.
http://hisour.com/artist/boetius-a-bolswert/

BOLETA

Daniel Medeiros (aka Boleta) was born in Sao Paulo in 1977. He learned to paint in his early teens, making pichacao and graffiti while bicycling with friends. Initially, Boleta saw his work more as fun than art. He used painting as an interactive way of exploring his city, tagging on buildings, illegal walls, trains and empty houses.

BOLETA from São Paulo Street Art, Brazil

The São Paulo Street Art collection for the Google Art Project presents a group of artworks displayed in the streets of Sao Paulo, Brazil.

This first set of photographed artworks was organized by Andre Deak, Eduardo Saretta, Eduardo Srur, Felipe Lavignatti and Haroldo Paranhos, and features 89 artists represented by 189 artworks spread along the expanded center of São Paulo city.
http://hisour.com/artist/boleta/

Niccolò Boldrini

Niccolò Boldrini was an Italian engraver of the Renaissance. He was frequently confused with Nicola Vicentino. Boldrini was an engraver on wood, born at Vicenza in the early 16th century, and who was still living in 1566. His prints are chiefly after Titian, who may have been his master. He engraved John Baron de Schwarzenburg after Dürer and the following prints after Titian:

The Wise Men's Offering
St. Jerome praying in landscape
Six Saints including Catharine & Sebastian
Mountainous landscape with woman milking cow
Venus seated on a bank holding Cupid
Squirrel on a branch
http://hisour.com/artist/niccolo-boldrini/

Giovanni Boldini

Giovanni Boldini (Dec 31, 1842 - Jul 11, 1931) was an Italian genre and portrait painter. According to a 1933 article in Time magazine, he was known as the "Master of Swish" because of his flowing style of painting.

Boldini was born in Ferrara, the son of a painter of religious subjects, and in 1862 went to Florence for six years to study and pursue painting. He only infrequently attended classes at the Academy of Fine Arts, but in Florence, met other realist painters known as the Macchiaioli, who were Italian precursors to Impressionism. Their influence is seen in Boldini's landscapes which show his spontaneous response to nature, although it is for his portraits that he became best known.

Moving to London, Boldini attained success as a portraitist. He completed portraits of premier members of society including Lady Holland and the Duchess of Westminster. From 1872 he lived in Paris, where he became a friend of Edgar Degas. He became the most fashionable portrait painter in Paris in the late 19th century, with a dashing style of painting which shows some Macchiaioli influence and a brio reminiscent of the work of younger artists, such as John Singer Sargent and Paul Helleu. He was nominated commissioner of the Italian section of the Paris Exposition in 1889, and received the Légion d'honneur for this appointment.

In 1897 he had a solo exhibition in New York. He participated in the Venice Biennale in 1895, 1903, 1905, and 1912. He died in Paris on 11 July 1931.

A Boldini portrait of his former muse Marthe de Florian, a French actress, was discovered in a Paris flat in late 2010, hidden away from view on the premises that were unvisited for 70 years. The portrait has never been listed, exhibited or published and the flat belonged to de Florian's granddaughter who went to live in the South of France at the outbreak of the Second World War and never returned. A love-note and a biographical reference to the work painted in 1888, when the actress was 24, cemented its authenticity. A full-length portrait of the lady in the same clothing and accessories, but less provocative, hangs in the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Giovanni Boldini is a character in the ballet Franca Florio, regina di Palermo, written in 2007 by the Italian composer Lorenzo Ferrero, which depicts the story of Donna Franca, a famous Sicilian aristocrat whose exceptional beauty inspired him and many other artists, musicians, poets and emperors during the Belle Époque.

The discovery of his painting in the 70-years-empty apartment forms the background to Michelle Gable's 2014 novel A Paris Apartment.
http://hisour.com/artist/giovanni-boldini/

Hans Bol

Hans Bol (Dec 16, 1534 - 1593), was a Flemish painter who migrated to the Dutch Republic. He is known for his landscapes, allegorical and biblical scenes, and genre paintings in a Northern Mannerist style.

After a successful career in Flanders, he left his home country for the Dutch Republic during the Siege of Antwerp. His landscape work had an important influence on the next generation of Dutch landscape painters. His prints after his own designs as well as those of Flemish masters such as Pieter Brueghel the Elder contributed to the spread of their themes in the Northern Netherlands.

Bol was born in Mechelen as the son of Simon Bol en Catherina van den Stock. He was a member of a family 'of good descent'. He received his first training in Mechelen from his two uncles Jacob Bol I and Jan Bol who were painters. He was apprenticed to a local canvas painter at the age of fourteen. He was trained in the local tradition of ‘water-verwers’ (water-painter) or ‘doekschilders’ (canvas painters). He travelled in Germany spending time in Heidelberg from 1550 to 1552. He returned to Mechelen in 1560 where he was admitted as a master of the Mechelen Guild of Saint Luke on 20 February 1560.

After the fall of Calvinist Mechelen to the Spanish in 1572, he left his hometown for Antwerp where he became a master in the local Guild of Saint Luke in 1574. In 1575 he became a poorter of Antwerp. When 10 years later Antwerp was besieged by the Spanish, Hans Bol left the Southern Netherlands in 1584 following in the footsteps of his brother Jacob, who had already left for Dordrecht in 1578. He travelled first to Bergen-op-Zoom where he had spent time before in 1578-1579. In 1586 he left for Dordrecht and then travelled via Delft to Amsterdam where he resided until his death. He died in 1593 of the plague.

His pupils included his stepson Frans Boels (who was the son of Hans Bol's wife with her first husband), Joris Hoefnagel, Jacob Savery (I) and Rommert van Beve. Gillis van Coninxloo and David Vinckboons are also believed to have been his pupils.

Hans Bol was a versatile painter who created oil paintings, watercolor paintings, illuminated manuscripts, drawings and engravings. He also created mythological, allegorical and biblical scenes and genre paintings.[5] Bol is mainly remembered for his landscape art but he also played an important role in the further development and spread of the visual models and themes of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. These themes included peasant scenes.

He started out as a painter of watercolour and tempera on canvas.Little of Bol's work in this perishable medium has survived.These works served at the time as a more affordable alternative for tapestries in the decoration of walls. Hans Bol achieved considerable success in this typical Mechelen specialty, which led to his designs becoming widely copied and even sold under his name. Bol therefore abandoned these large-scale works in favour of very small-sized works, which would be more difficult to copy by others. He built a reputation with his miniature drawings minutely finished in colours on parchment.

Bol is principally known for his extensive graphic oeuvre of both uncoloured drawings and prints. His earliest known drawing depicting a Landscape with trees and a watermill (signed and dated 1557, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen) shows the influence of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. In the drawing Bol distanced himself from the Flemish tradition of the world landscape with its imaginary mountain landscapes with jagged rocks in favor of a more realistic approach based on observation of nature. The drawing also points to Bol's possible familiarity with the work of the Master of the Small Landscapes, an unidentified artist from that time whose drawings for two series of prints show innovative, idealized rural scenes from around Antwerp in 1559 and in 1661. The Master of the Small Landscapes depicted real rather than imaginary landscapes, something which would be influential on future Flemish landscape artists, including Bol.

In the following years Bol designed several more series of the Four Seasons depicting the activities characteristic of each season. A complete series of designs for the Twelve Months (but missing the design of the frontispiece) is in the collection of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. It was later engraved by Adriaen Collaert and then published by the publisher Hans van Luyck in 1581. This allowed his designs to be circulated widely and to exert a great influence on contemporary artists.

Another set of drawings of the Twelve Months dated 1584-1585 was recently rediscovered and includes the design for the frontispiece for the later print publication (Auctioned at Christie's on 16 July 2014 and now in the collection of the King Baudouin Foundation in Brussels). The 13 drawings served as a design for 13 prints and both were mounted in an album. The book also contained a set of preparatory drawings for the Emblemata Evangelica: a series of prints designed by Hans Bol, engraved by Adriaen Collaert and published by Johannes Sadeler. Unlike the series of the months in the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, which represents each month by the human labours associated with it, the drawings in the series in Brussels combine representations from the New Testament – numerous parables – and lay scenes. The scenes representing the human labours have been moved to the background, giving prominence to the religious scenes. This was a really innovative iconographic concept for the period. Some of the drawings represent several parts of a story in a single composition.

In 1582 Hans Bol and his workshop illuminated the Book of Hours of the Duke of Alençon, who was proclaimed Duke of Brabant in that year.

Hans Bol also produced a number of topographical drawings with views of various cities such as A view of Antwerp harbor (Rockox House, Antwerp). Towards the end of his life produced several drawings of wooded landscapes.
http://hisour.com/artist/hans-bol/

Ferdinand Bol

Ferdinand Bol (Jun 24, 1616 - Aug 24, 1680) was a Dutch artist, etcher, and draftsman. Although his surviving work is rare, it displays Rembrandt's influence; like his master, Bol favored historical subjects, portraits, numerous self-portraits, and single figures in exotic finery.

The street Ferdinand Bolstraat in Amsterdam was named after Bol, just as the FEBO, which is a chain of Dutch walk-up restaurants.

Ferdinand was born in Dordrecht as the son of a surgeon, Balthasar Bol. Ferdinand Bol was first an apprentice of Jacob Cuyp in his hometown and/or of Abraham Bloemaert in Utrecht. After 1630 he studied with Rembrandt, living in his house in Sint Antoniesbreestraat, then a fashionable street and area for painters, jewellers, architects, and many Flemish and Jewish immigrants. In 1641 Bol started his own studio.

In 1652 he became a burgher of Amsterdam, and in 1653 he married Elisabeth Dell, whose father held positions with the Admiralty of Amsterdam and the wine merchants' guild, both institutions that later gave commissions to the artist. Within a few years (1655) he became the head of the guild and received orders to deliver two chimney pieces for rooms in the new town hall designed by Jacob van Campen, and four more for the Admiralty of Amsterdam.

Around this time, Bol was a popular and successful painter. His palette had lightened, his figures possessed greater elegance, and by the middle of the decade he was receiving more official commissions than any other artist in Amsterdam. Godfrey Kneller was his pupil. Bol delivered four paintings for the two mansions of the brothers Trip, originally also from Dordrecht.

Bol's first wife died in 1660. In 1669 Bol married for the second time to Anna van Erckel, widow of the treasurer of the Admiralty, and apparently retired from painting at that point in his life. In 1672 the couple moved to Keizersgracht 672, then a newly designed part of the city, and now the Museum Van Loon. Bol served as a governor in a Home for Lepers. Bol died a few weeks after his wife, on Herengracht, where his son, a lawyer, lived.

Probably his best known painting is a portrait of Elisabeth Bas, the wife of the naval officer Joachim Swartenhondt and an innkeeper near the Dam square. This and many other of his paintings would in the 19th century be falsely attributed to Rembrandt.
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Louis-Léopold Boilly

Louis-Léopold Boilly (Jul 5, 1761 - Jan 4, 1845) was a French painter and draftsman. A gifted creator of popular portrait paintings, he also produced a vast number of genre paintings vividly documenting French middle-class social life. His life and work spanned the eras of monarchical France, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Empire, the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy.

Boilly was born in La Bassée in northern France, the son of a local wood sculptor. A self-taught painter, Boilly began his career at a very young age, producing his first works at the age of twelve or thirteen. In 1774 he began to show his work to the Austin friars of Douai who were evidently impressed: within three years, the bishop of Arras invited the young man to work and study in his bishopric. While there, he produced a cascade of paintings – some three hundred small works of portraiture. He received instruction in trompe l'oeil painting from Dominique Doncre (1743–1820) before moving to Paris around 1787.

At the height of the revolutionary Terror in 1794, Boilly was condemned by the Committee of Public Safety for the erotic undertones of his work. This offence was remedied by an eleventh-hour discovery in his home of the more patriotic Triumph of Marat (now in the Musée des Beaux Arts, Lille) which saved him from serious penalties.

Boilly was a popular and celebrated painter of his time. He was awarded a medal by the Parisian Salon in 1804 for his work The Arrival of a Mail-coach in the Courtyard of the Messageries. In 1833 he was decorated as a chevalier of the nation's highest order, the Légion d'honneur.

Boilly died in Paris on 4 January 1845. His youngest son, Alphonse Boilly (1801–1867), was a professional engraver who apprenticed in New York with Asher Brown Durand.

Boilly's early works showed a preference for amorous and moralising subjects. The Suitor's Gift is comparable to much of his work in the 1790s. His small-scale paintings with carefully mannered colouring and precise detailing recalled the work of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painters such as Gabriël Metsu (1629–1667), Willem van Mieris and Gerard ter Borch (1617–1681), of whose work Boilly owned an important collection. After 1794, Boilly began to produce far more crowded compositions that serve as social chronicles. Boilly was also well respected for his portraiture, producing many portraits of the middle classes and other famous contemporaries.

Boilly remains a highly regarded master of oil painting. A major exhibition of his work, The Art of Louis-Léopold Boilly: Modern Life in Napoleonic France, travelled to the United States where it was shown at both the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth and the National Gallery of Art in Washington (1995). The Musée des Beaux Arts in Lille held its most recent large-scale exhibition of Boilly's work during the winter season of 2011–2012.
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Jakob Bogdani

Jakob Bogdani (1658 - 1724), whose names are sometimes spelt Jacob and Bogdany, was a Hungarian and British artist well known for his still life and exotic bird paintings.

Bogdani was born in city of Prešov, then in Sáros County in the north of the Kingdom of Hungary, in Slovakia. In 1684 he went to Amsterdam where he lived and worked until moving to London in 1688. There he found success as a specialist still life and bird painter at the court of Queen Anne, and several of his paintings became part of the Royal Collection. One of his chief patrons was Admiral George Churchill, brother of the Duke of Marlborough, whose famous aviary at Windsor Park may have supplied subjects for some of his paintings.

Bogdani married Elizabeth Hemmings with whom he had two children, William, who became a prominent British civil servant, and Elizabeth, who married the painter Tobias Stranover. He influenced the bird painter Marmaduke Cradock. He died in Finchley, London.

His bird paintings featured an array of exotic species such as cockatoos, macaws, and mynas, which were likely to have been imported to European menageries at the time. He mixed them with familiar European birds such as great and blue tits, European green woodpeckers and Eurasian jays. He would often highlight a painting with a bird of red plumage, such as a scarlet ibis, red avadavat or northern cardinal. Numerous birds were usually crowded into his landscapes; an exception was the highly regarded Two Icelandic Falcons, painted around the end of the 17th century or early 18th. Currently housed in Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery, it depicts two snowy white Gyrfalcons.

One of his pictures was used as the cover of the 1974 Procol Harum album Exotic Birds and Fruit.
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Alighiero Boetti

Alighiero Fabrizio Boetti (Dec 16, 1940 - Feb 24, 1994) known as Alighiero e Boetti was an Italian conceptual artist, considered to be a member of the art movement Arte Povera.

He is most famous for a series of embroidered maps of the world, Mappa, created between 1971 and his death in 1994. Boetti's work was typified by his notion of 'twinning', leading him to add 'e' between his names, 'stimulating a dialectic exchange between these two selves'.

Alighiero Boetti was born in Turin, to Corrado Boetti, a lawyer, and Adelina Marchisio, a violinist. Boetti abandoned his studies at the business school of the University of Turin to work as an artist. Already in his early years, he had profound and wide-ranging theoretical interests and studied works on such diverse topics as philosophy, alchemy and esoterics. Among the preferred authors of his youth were the German writer Hermann Hesse and the Swiss-German painter and Bauhaus teacher Paul Klee. Boetti also had a continuing interest in mathematics and music.

At seventeen, Boetti discovered the works of the German painter Wols and the cut canvases of Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana. Boetti's own works of his late teen years, however, are oil paintings somewhat reminiscent of the Russian painter Nicolas de Staël. At age twenty, Boetti moved to Paris to study engraving. In 1962, while in France he met art critic and writer Annemarie Sauzeau, whom he was to marry in 1964 and with whom he had two children, Matteo (1967) and Agata (1972). Working in his hometown of Turin in the early 1960s amidst a close community of artists that included Luciano Fabro, Mario Merz, Giulio Paolini, and Michelangelo Pistoletto, among others, Boetti established himself as one of the leading artists of the Arte Povera movement. From 1974 to 1976, he travelled to Guatemala, Ethiopia, Sudan. Boetti was passionate about non-western cultures, particularly of central and southern Asia, and travelled to Afghanistan and Pakistan numerous times in the 1970s and 1980s, although Afghanistan became inaccessible to him following the Soviet invasion in 1979. In 1975, he went back to New York.

Active as an artist from the early 1960s to his premature death in 1994, Boetti developed a significant body of diverse works that were often both poetic and pleasing to the eye while at the same time steeped in his diverse theoretical interests and influenced by his extensive travels.

He died of a brain tumour in Rome in 1994 at the age of 53.

Having shown in Milan and Turin, Boetti was invited by Harald Szeemann to participate in the seminal exhibition "Live in your Head. When Attitudes Become Form" in 1969. Boetti had his first US solo exhibition in New York at John Weber Gallery in 1973. In 1978, he held an anthological exhibition curated by Jean-Christophe Ammann at the Kunsthalle Basel that featured historical works alongside more recent ones. He continued to show throughout Italy and the United States until his premature death. He was the subject of a retrospective in 1992 that traveled to Bonn and Münster, Germany, and Lucerne, Switzerland. He has been honored post-humously with several large-scale exhibitions, most notably at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome (1996); the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Vienna in 1997; the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main in 1998; Whitechapel Gallery, London (1999); and Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz. The artist took part in Documentas 5 (1972) and 7 (1982) and the Venice Biennale (1978, 1980, 1986, 1990, 1995). In 2001, the Venice Pavillon was completely dedicated to Alighiero e Boetti’s work. In 2012, for the exhibition Game Plan, a significant number of works have been lent to the MoMA by Tornabuoni art Gallery.
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Jan Boeckhorst

Jan Boeckhorst (1604 - Apr 21, 1668), was a German-born Flemish Baroque painter whose style was heavily influenced by Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck and Jacob Jordaens.

Jan Boeckhorst was born in Münster, Westphalia as the second oldest of twelve children. His family belonged to Münster’s highly respected citizens (Honoratioren) and his father Heinrich was for a while the mayor of Münster. Jan Boeckhorst became a canon in the Jesuit order at age 17. He only started his artistic study when he was about twenty-two years of age.

In the mid 1620s Boeckhorst moved to Antwerp apparently to study with Peter Paul Rubens. There is no firm evidence that Boeckhorst actually studied under Rubens, only a statement by Rubens’ nephew Philip to that effect. However, a close relationship between the artists during the 1630s is documented. Boeckhorst likely also briefly trained with Jordaens during Rubens' stay in London in the late 1620s. In Antwerp, Boeckhorst was known as Lange Jan (Tall John) because of his tall stature.

From 1626 to 1635 Boeckhorst worked on a commission paid for by the devout merchant Lodewijk De Roomer to complete 26 works for a chapel in the Falcon monastery in central Antwerp (or for St. Joseph’s chapel in the Antwerp convent of St. Augustine). These works on which he collaborated with Jan Wildens are now lost. Between 1627 and 1632 he likely worked closely with Anthony van Dyck who was during that period back in Antwerp after a long stay abroad. The two artists collaborated on individual works of art while Boeckhorst also produced copies after van Dyck.

Jan Boeckhorst became a master in the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke in 1633-1634. He was a regular collaborator with Rubens in the mid 1630s. He first worked on the decorations for the 1635 Joyous Entry (the so-called 'Pompa Introitus') into Antwerp of the new governor of the Habsburg Netherlands Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand. Rubens was in overall charge of this project. For the Pompa Introitus Broeckhorst contributed architectural elements on the 'Arch of Isabella' and the figures of 'Securitas' and 'Salus publica' in collaboration with Gerard Seghers and Jan Borchgraef.

Boeckhorst traveled to Italy in 1635. He returned to Antwerp and in the period 1636-1638 he collaborated with Rubens’ workshop on a large commission to make mythological decorations for the hunting pavilion Torre de la Parada of the Spanish king Philip IV near Madrid. For this project Jan Boeckhorst painted decorations after oil sketches by Rubens.

In 1639 Boeckhorst traveled to Italy again where he resided in Rome. In Rome he likely joined the circle of Dutch and Flemish artists in Rome known as the Bentvueghels. It was the custom among the Bentvueghels to adopt a nickname. Boeckhorst's nickname was possibly Doctor Faustus.

The date of his return to Antwerp is not known with certainty and estimates vary from 1639 to 1649. It is known that he completed a few unfinished works of Rubens' after Rubens' death in 1640. After his return to Antwerp he received multiple commissions from religious institutions in Flanders including for the Saint James Church in Bruges and the Saint Michael's Church and Saint James Church in Ghent.

Jan Boeckhorst died on 21 April 1668 in Antwerp where he was buried in the Saint James Church. His large collection was sold after his death in a sale which lasted six days and raised the considerable sum of 6,026 guilders. His collection included a complete set of early drawings of Rubens.

General:
Boeckhorst was a versatile painter who produced history paintings on religious and mythological subjects, allegorical works, genre scenes and portraits. Boeckhorst also worked as a designer of cartoons for tapestries. He is known to have designed eight tapestries on the myths of Apollo. The Musée Mont-de-Piété in Bergues preserves 8 preliminary drawings for this Apollo series of tapestries.

Boeckhorst also provided designs for the Antwerp publishers. In the early 1650s he provided several designs for the Breviarium Romanum and 9 border decorations for the Missale Romanum, all engraved by Cornelis Galle the Younger and published by the Plantin Press in Antwerp.

There only exist three signed and dated paintings (dated between 1646 and c. 1660) and five that are dated only from 1659-1666. The first signed painting, a Madonna and Child with Saint John is dated 1646, about 20 years after his arrival in Antwerp. Because of the few number of signed paintings it has been difficult to attribute works to Boeckhorst with certainty and some attributions are contested among art historians.

Collaborations:
As was common practice among Antwerp painters, Boeckhorst often collaborated as a figure painter on compositions with landscape painters Jan Wildens and Jan Brueghel the Younger and still life painter Frans Snyders. An example is the Peasants going to the market (Rubenshuis, Antwerp) on which he collaborated with Frans Snyders. This genre scene, which also acts as an allegory of the four elements, is of a monumentally large scale at 217.5 cm in height and 272.5 cm in width. The work shows the influence of Jordaens' genre paintings.

Boeckhorst may have collaborated on devotional garland paintings. Garland paintings are a special type of still life developed in Antwerp by Jan Brueghel the Elder in collaboration with the Italian cardinal Federico Borromeo at the beginning of the 17th century. The genre was initially connected to the visual imagery of the Counter-Reformation movement and typically involved a collaboration between a figure painter and a still life painter. No collaborations with Boeckhorst on garland paintings have been attributed with certainty.

Boeckhorst is believed to have made changes to works by Rubens. He did so with a tronie painted by Rubens around 1613 called King David playing the Harp (Städel, Frankfurt am Main). The second Rubens tronie of c. 1616/17, which Boeckhorst transformed around 1640/41 into a bust-length format was the Head of a bearded man in profile holding a bronze figure (Christie’s, London, 2 July 2013, lot 30). He possibly also enlarged Rubens’ Rise of the Blessed at the request of Jan Wildens in order to form a pendant with the Fall of the Damned then in Wildens’ own collection. After the late 1630s Boeckhorst's collaborations appear to have ceased.

Portraits:
Boeckhorst's portraits are influenced by Anthony van Dyck and Cornelis de Vos, the two leading portrait painters in the first half of the 17th century. He occasionally painted lively group portraits. Some of his large group portraits, such as the Portrait of a Family (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), are in the style of Cornelis de Vos but with more liveliness and spontaneity.

Central in his group portraits is the emphasis on the virtue of strong family bonds, the so-called 'Concordia familiae'. Boeckhorst was skilled in depicting his models in a spontaneous and lively manner. His portraits are of an informal character. He also used backdrop draperies, which in imitation of Jordaens, were represented very vividly.

Later works:
His later works from the 1650s and 1660s include numerous altarpieces for churches throughout Flanders and designs of cartoons for tapestries. The expressiveness of van Dyck's figures and use of colors, such as in Ulysses discovers Achilles dressed up as a girl (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), is also noticeable in works from this period.
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Karl Bodmer

Johann Carl Bodmer (Feb 6, 1809 - Oct 30, 1893) was a printmaker, etcher, lithographer, zinc engraver, draughtsman, painter, illustrator and hunter. Known as Karl Bodmer in literature and paintings, as a Swiss and French citizen his name has been listed as Johann Karl Bodmer and Jean-Charles Bodmer respectively. After 1843, likely as a result of his son Charles-Henry Barbizon, he began to sign his works K Bodmer.

Karl Bodmer was well known in Germany for his watercolours, drawings and aquatints of cities and landscapes of the Rhine, Mosel and Lahn rivers. After he moved to France following his return from an expedition in the American West, he became a member of the Barbizon School, a French landscape painting group from the mid-19th century. He created many oil paintings with animal and landscape motifs, as well as wood engravings, drawings, and book illustrations. For his work, Bodmer was made a Knight in the French Legion of Honour in 1877.

He is best known in the United States as a painter who captured the American West of the 19th century. He painted extremely accurate works of its inhabitants and landscape. He accompanied the German explorer Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied from 1832 through 1834 on his Missouri River expedition. Bodmer was hired as an artist by Maximilian in order to accompany his expedition and record images of cities, rivers, towns and peoples they saw along the way, including the many tribes of Native Americans along the Missouri River and in that region. Bodmer had 81 aquatints made from his work to illustrate Prince Maximilian's book entitled Maximilian Prince of Wied's Travels in the Interior of North America (1839-1841 in German/published in English translation in 1843-1844).

Johann Carl Bodmer was born on 11 February 1809 in Zurich, Switzerland. When he was thirteen, his mother’s brother, Johann Jakob Meier (a prominent engraver), became Bodmer's teacher. Meier was an artist, having studied under the well-known artists Heinrich Füssli and Gabriel Lory. Young Bodmer and his older brother, Rudolf, joined their uncle on artistic travels throughout their home country.

By 1828, Bodmer had left his native Switzerland to work as a painter and engraver in the German city of Koblenz. It was there that he and his work came to the attention of Prinz Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied. This German aristocrat had successfully led a scientific expedition to Brazil in 1815–1817. He decided to embark on another such venture, this time to North America and especially the American West. He hired Bodmer to accompany his expedition and make a visual record of the places and peoples encountered, through painting, drawings, etc. The aristocrat was known popularly to naturalists then and now as Prince Max.

After delays, Bodmer, in the company of Prince Max and David Dreidoppel, a huntsman and taxidermist, sailed for North America on 17 May 1832. In a letter of that date, Prince Max wrote to his brother that Bodmer "is a lively, very good man and companion, seems well educated, and is very pleasant and very suitable for me; I am glad I picked him. He makes no demands, and in diligence he is never lacking."[citation needed]

Arriving in Boston, Massachusetts, on 4 July, the three encountered hardships and delays caused largely by a cholera epidemic in the eastern states. It swept across the northern tier to Michigan via travelers on the waterways. The three men finally reached Pittsburgh, and started from there October 8 to travel west along the Ohio River. They arrived in Mt. Vernon, Indiana about midnight on 18 October. The next morning, the party made their way to New Harmony, Indiana.

Prince Max had planned to spend only a few days in New Harmony, but his stay "was prolonged by serious indisposition, nearly resembling cholera, to a four months' winter residence." The Prince devotes a chapter of his book of the expedition to New Harmony and its environs. He featured the work and personalities of Thomas Say and Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, two leading American naturalists. Lesueur was also a prolific artist.

Unlike the Prince and Dreidoppel, Bodmer escaped the illness. Alone, he left New Harmony at the end of December, and on 3 January 1833 caught a steamboat at Mt. Vernon, Indiana. He traveled down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, spending a week with Joseph Barrabino. This Italian-American naturalist was a friend of Say and Lesueur. (A fine pencil portrait of Barrabino, drawn by Lesueur, is preserved at the New Harmony Workingmen's Institute.)

In April 1833, Prince Max and Bodmer set out from St. Louis, Missouri on the 2,500-mile journey by steamboat and later keelboat up the Missouri River. They eventually traveled as far as Fort McKenzie (near present-day Fort Benton, Montana). After wintering at Fort Clark near the Mandan villages, they returned downriver the following spring, having spent more than a year on the Upper Missouri. Bodmer had extensively documented the journey with visual images, while Prince Max took copious notes for the book he intended to write.

After completing the expedition, Bodmer returned to Germany with Prince Maximilian, then traveled to France. In Paris he had many of his paintings from the expedition (81 in total) reproduced as aquatints. The Prince had these images incorporated into his book of the expedition, which was first published in German in Koblenz as Reise in das innere Nord-Amerika in den Jahren 1832 bis 1834 in twp volumes from 1839 to 1841. Its English translation, Maximilian Prince of Wied’s Travels in the Interior of North America, during the years 1832–1834, was published in London in 1843-1844.

Bodmer moved permanently to Barbizon, France, and became a French citizen. Recorded as Jean-Charles Bodmer, he went by "Charles Bodmer". He became a member of the Barbizon School, a group of painters who specialized in landscapes and works featuring animals. He worked in a variety of genres: painting, etching, wood engraving and illustration. Among his well-known works from this period was La Foret en Hiver (Interior of the forest in winter), exhibited at the Salon 1850 in Paris. It was painted at Fontainebleau forest. Bodmer also made an engraving of his painting, and reproductions were popular in the 1860s. Impressionist Claude Monet later painted the same trees, titling his painting The Bodmer Oak. This scene was the subject as well of numerous photographs in the 1870s.

The Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska is home to the largest of three known collections of Bodmer's watercolors, drawings, and prints. Bodmer captured a challenging and dramatic landscape that was still unfamiliar to audiences in the eastern United States and Europe.

His portraits were the first accurate portrayal of western Indians in their homelands, and they are considered remarkable for their careful detail and sensitivity to the personalities of his sitters. To this day, Bodmer's work remains one of the most perceptive and compelling visual accounts of the American interior. Bodmer's work is recognised as among the most accurate painted images ever made of Native Americans, their culture and artifacts, and of the scenery of the pristine "Old West".
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