Irish-born painter, who went to England as a child and entered the Royal Academy Schools at 14. He was the pupil and brother-in-law of John Varley. He became a highly successful Victorian genre painter, influenced - as was Wilkie - by Dutch 17th-century genre. His technique of painting in thin layers on a white ground links him tenuously with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but his pretty and undemandingly trivial subject matter, his use of a middle tone, and traditional 18th-century systems of composition, later incurred their particular displeasure and rejection. He became an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1815, and, following the success of his The Fight Interrupted in 1816, a Royal Academician. He designed the first penny post envelope issued by Rowland Hill in 1840.

                                                                                                 Painter of the Bolognese school who, along with others, introduced the post-Renaissance Italian style of painting known as Mannerismto France and helped to inspire the French classical school of landscape painting.

 He began his career in Modena as a student of the sculptor Antonio Begarelli. His "Martyrdom of St. Peter and St. Paul" in the church of S. Pietro, Modena (1547), probably established his reputation. During his stay in Bologna (1548-52), his style matured, influenced by his contemporaries Correggio and Parmigianino.His stucco-surface landscapes in the Poggi (now Palazzo dell'Università) survive to show his understanding of nature.

 In 1552 Abbate was called to the court of the king of France, Henry II, at Fontainebleau, and remained in France for the rest of his life. With Francesco Primaticciohe composed immense murals, most of them later lost. His easel works, which included an enormous number of lyrical landscapes based upon pagan themes, were burned in 1643 by the Austrian regent, Anna. 

Among his later paintings executed for Charles IX were a series of landscapes with mythologies that influenced the 17th-century French painters Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. He also designed a series of tapestries, "Les Mois arabesques," and some of his designs were adopted by the painted enamel industry of Limoges. His last works are believed to be 16 murals (1571) in which he was assisted by his son, Giulio Camillo. His work in France is recognized as a principal contribution to the first significant, wholly secular movement in French painting, the Fontainebleau style.

Art Review: British art rocks at RISD

01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, October 6, 2011

By Bill Van Siclen

What does it mean to be known as “a collector’s collector”?

For much of his life, that description seemed to stick to the Providence-born art collector Richard Brown Baker like the label on a well-tailored suit. And why not?

Beginning in the 1940s and continuing until his death in 2002, Baker parlayed a relatively modest inheritance into one of the great collections of post-World War II art. Some of his scoops — a great Jackson Pollock painting, “Arabesque,” picked up for the now-paltry sum of $2,500; a set of Roy Lichtenstein prints snapped up for $5 a sheet — have become the stuff of art-collecting legend.

WORLD: With exhilarating songs, the Creole Choir of Cuba salutes Haiti from a distance - and it's finally making inroads in the United States. 

Federal Hill festival honors favorite son Columbus

Columbus Day in Providence will be celebrated with a three-day festival on Providence’s Federal Hill.

“It’s all about bringing family and friends together,” said Chris Chabot, of the Federal Hill Commerce Association, which organizes the festival.