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THE ARTISTJohn Banovich is a world-renowned artist and one of the foremost conservationists of our era. He has created over 700 original works, and his award-winning oil paintings are exhibited in museums and noteworthy collections across the globe. His deep passion, unwavering commitment and knowledge of wildlife continues to inspire.

ARTWORKThrough experiencing John Banovich’s portfolio of past original paintings we are left with the ultimate understanding that as an artist John Banovich has shattered the traditional standards that define Wildlife Art. Through viewing his portfolio it becomes starkly apparent that his paintings are far more than representational art depicting the subject matter. There is an undeniable allure to the beasts within John Banovich’s paintings that successfully provide wildlife the platform to transcend both their natural habitats and their artistic genre to find refuge in our contemporary world.

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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

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.

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

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.

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.

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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. 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 

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 

4Dutch 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.

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

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]

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.

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

 

Two horses in a meadow, 1649

 

Figures with Horses by a Stable

 

Cattle in a Meadow, 1652

 

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

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