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Inspired by: William Sidney Mount, Painter’s Triumph

Mount started his career as a sign painter, but quickly switched to portraits and historical paintings. When later he transitioned to rural scenes, he found his niche, becoming America’s first major genre painter. Many of his works were engraved and distributed in the US as well as Europe giving him wide recognition.

He was born and died in Setauket, on the north shore of Long Island. There he sketch-ed extensively in notebooks and painted plein-air oil sketches, devising a studio-wagon in which he travelled all over the island. Many of his paintings include vividly realistic images of his friends and neighbors. His personal belief regarding his work, "Never paint for the few but for the many," gave average Americans the chance to view themselves, for the first time, as subjects of art. He painted Painter’s Triumph when he was 31 and used himself as the model for the artist. The characterization of the gap-toothed, awestruck farmer is comical, but he also pokes fun at himself in this spoof of the artistic personality.

Although he was an accomplished painter, he had many other talents, such as playing the fiddle. Born into a musical family, Mount’s preoccupation with American indigenous folk music became both a hobby and an important artistic muse. He wrote and published quite a few Fiddle tunes. He also designed and patented a novel type of violin, which he called "The Cradle of Harmony."

See original: bit.ly/3TBvMVi

Although Vermeer began as an art salesman, he considered himself more of a painter. He only worked on commission and did not produce more than two or three paintings a year. This allowed him to provide for his wife and their eleven children. For this reason he only produced 45 works. Only 35 still exist.

Considered the most iconic of Vermeer’s existing masterpieces. The Art of the Painting has had a rough ride in the last century. In 1935 Andrew Mellon sought to purchase the painting from its Austrian owners for $1 million, but failed. In 1940 Adolf Hitler acquired the painting for considerably less. It was to be hung in his Fuhermuseum, which was never built. Instead it ended up in a bunker in an Austrian salt mine where it waited out the war. It was one of many masterpieces of art that were rescued by the US Army Monument Men division. Link to original: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Painting