Painting 2 - Sir Joshua Reynolds,

Sirr Joshua Reynolds, (born July 16, 1723, Plympton, Devon, England—died February 23, 1792, London), portrait painter and aesthetician who dominated English artistic life in the middle and late 18th century. Through his art and teaching, he attempted to lead British painting away from the indigenous anecdotal pictures of the early 18th century toward the formal rhetoric of the continental Grand Style. With the founding of the Royal Academy in 1768, Reynolds was elected its first president and knighted by King George III.

Reynolds was the leading English portraitist of the 18th century. Through study of ancient and Italian Renaissance art, and of the work of Rembrandt, Rubens and Van Dyck, he brought great variety and dignity to British portraiture.

His paintings are not perfectly preserved due to faulty technique. The carmine reds have faded, leaving flesh-tones paler than intended, and the bitumen used in the blacks has tended to crack.

Source: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/500800/Sir-Joshua-Reynolds
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/sir-joshua-reynolds

Painting 1. Abraham Solomon "The Lion in Love"

Abraham Solomon (English, 1824-1862) "The Lion in Love", Oil.

Abraham Solomon was a successful Victorian painter specializing in contemporary social scenes and in other genre.

Born as the second son of Meyer Solomon, a Leghorn hat manufacturer, by his wife Catherine, in Sandys Street, Bishopsgate in east London. His father was one of the first Jews to be admitted to the freedom of the city of London. Two members of the family besides Abraham became artists. A younger brother, Simeon Solomon, acquired much acclaim as a Pre-Raphaelite painter. A sister, Rebecca Solomon, exhibited domestic subjects at the Royal Academy.

At the age of thirteen Abraham became a pupil in Sass's school of art in Bloomsbury, and in 1838 gained the Isis silver medal at the Society of Arts for a drawing from a statue. In 1839 he was admitted as a student of the Royal Academy, where he received in the same year a silver medal for drawing from the antique, and in 1843 another for drawing from the life.

Solomon died in Biarritz in France, of heart disease, on 19 December 1862. He married, on 10 May 1860, Ella, sister of Dr. Ernest Hart; she survived her husband.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Solomon