ROBERT HALE IVES GAMMELL 1883-1981 Providence, RI, US

Robert Hale Ives Gammell (1893 – 1981) was an American artist best known for his sequence of paintings based on Francis Thompson's poem "The Hound of Heaven". Gammell painted symbolic images that reflected his study of literature, mythology, psychology, and religion.[1] Early life and education Gammell was born into a wealthy family in Providence, Rhode Island and attended Groton prep school. He spent much time alone drawing, and by his teens expressed his desire to pursue art. He went to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where his teachers included Edmund C. Tarbell, Joseph DeCamp, and Philip Leslie Hale, all members of the Boston School of painters. He went to the Académie Baschet where he studied with Henri Royer and William Laparra in Paris, but his studies were interrupted by World War I, during which he served with the U.S. military.[2][3] Returning to Boston, Gammell painted murals, portraits, and landscapes. He aspired to more imaginative subjects, but he felt restricted by what he considered his inferior drawing and compositional skills. He apprenticed to painter and teacher William McGregor Paxton, also of the Boston School, who was considered an expert in these skills.[4] Paxton had been a student of the French academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, who was himself a student of Paul Delaroche.[5] The Hound of Heaven In the 1930s Gammell's skill caught up with his ambition. Unlike many of his Boston School peers, he was less interested in portraits and landscapes than in symbolic and mythological images.[5] Although the decade of the 1930s had been his most productive, it ended in a mental breakdown.[2] While recovering, he discovered in Psychology of the Unconscious by Carl Jung a way to approach what he considered his greatest artistic achievement: a sequence of paintings depicting "The Hound of Heaven", a religious poem by Francis Thompson (1859 – 1907). The poem had captured Gammell's imagination when he was a boy, and for years he had made notes and sketches about it. In Thompson's poem a man is pursued by God. According to Gammell, in the catalog he wrote to accompany the sequence's first exhibit in 1956, he interpreted the poem not so much as a religious conversion as "a history of the experience known as an emotional breakdown". He wrote that Jung's work had provided the link between "myths, symbols, and poetic imagery, and the perpetually recurring emotional patterns of human life from which they evolved."[4] The series of 23 paintings was titled A Pictorial Sequence Painted by R. H. Ives Gammell Based on The Hound of Heaven.

THEO MOLKENBOER 1871-1920 Leeuwarden, Netherlands

Theodorus Henricus Antonius Adolph Molkenboer (23 February 1871, Leeuwarden – 1 December 1920, Lugano) was a Dutch painter and designer, notably, of book covers and posters. He was also an expert on the history of Dutch folk costumes and wrote several short works on that subject. Biography His father was the architect and painter Willem Molkenboer. His brother, Antoon [nl], also became a painter and his sister, Phemia, an artist as well. He began his studies in Amsterdam at the "Rijksnormaalschool voor Tekenonderwijzers" (Royal Normal School for Technical Drawing), a school that was founded by his father. He graduated in 1891 and, for a short time, worked as an architectural draftsman in the offices of Pierre Cuypers.[1] He maintained a lifelong interest in church architecture and wrote an influential article on the topic for De Katholieke Illustratie, He felt more drawn to decorative painting and portraiture so, in 1892, he enrolled at the Rijksakademie, where he studied with August Allebé, Gerrit Willem Dijsselhof, and his uncle, Antoon Derkinderen.[1] His first major commission was a portrait of Jan Six, a Professor at the Akademie and well-known art collector. He later did portraits of many notable figures in the Catholic Church. In 1897, he won the Willink van Collenprijs.[1]