The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (100 page)

(1774–1852).
English painter, active for almost all his career in that Far East. His movements after sailing for India in 1802 were: 1802–7 in Madras, 1807–27 in Calcutta, 1827–
c.
1830 in Canton,
c.
1830–52 in Macao. Chinnery painted a number of portraits while abroad and from time to time sent to
Royal Academy
exhibitions, but his reputation rests today on the large number of landscapes and decorative studies he made of oriential scenes.

 
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chinoiserie
.

The imitation or evocation of Chinese styles in Western art and architecture. The term is applied particularly to art of the 18th cent., when pseudo-Chinese designs in a whimsical or fantastic vein accorded well with the prevailing lighthearted
Rococo
style. By the middle of the 18th cent. the enthusiasm for things Chinese affected virtually all the decorative arts, and there was also a vogue for Chinese-style buildings in garden architecture. The taste for chinoiserie faded during the dominance of the
Neoclassical
style in the second half of the century, but there was something of a revival in the early 19th cent.

 
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(1888–1978).
Italian painter, sculptor, designer, and writer, the originator of
Metaphysical painting
. He was born in Greece, and trained in Athens, Florence, and Munich, where he was influenced by the
Symbolist
work of Böcklin and
Klinger
, with their juxtaposition of the commonplace and the fantastic. In 1909 he moved to Italy (dividing his time between Florence, Milan, and Turin) and there painted his first ‘enigmatic’ pictures, which convey an atmosphere of strangeness and uneasiness through their empty spaces, illogical shadows, and unexpected perspectives. From 1911 to 1915 he lived in Paris, becoming friendly with many members of the avant-garde, including
Apollinaire
(who championed his work) and
Picasso
. During this period he developed a more deliberate theory of ‘metaphysical insight’ into a reality behind ordinary things by neutralizing the things themselves of all their usual associations and setting them in new and mysterious relationships. In order to empty the objects of his paintings of their natural emotional significance he painted tailors' dummies as human beings (from 1914).
In 1915 de Chirico was conscripted into the Italian Army and sent to Ferrara. There he suffered a nervous breakdown, and in 1917 met
Carrà
in the military hospital and converted him to his views, launching Metaphysical painting as a movement. It was short lived, virtually ending when de Chirico and Carrà quarrelled in 1919, but it was highly influential on
Surrealism
, and it was during the later 1920s, when Surrealism was becoming the most talked-about artistic phenomenon of the day, that de Chirico's international reputation was established. However, it was his early work that the Surrealists admired and they attacked him for adopting a more traditional style in the 1920s, when his output included some distinctive pictures featuring horses on unreal seashores with broken classical columns. In the 1920s and 1930s he spent much of his time in Paris (and in 1935–7 he lived in the USA) before settling permanently in Rome in 1944. By this time his paintings had become repetitive and obsessed with technical refinement. His other work included a number of small sculptures and set and costume designs for opera and ballet; his writings include a Surrealistic novel,
Hebdomeros
(1929), and two volumes of autobiography (1945 and 1960). In the catalogue of the exhibition ‘Italian Art in the 20th Century’ (Royal Academy, London, 1989) Wieland Schmied writes: ‘Giorgio de Chirico remains among the most controversial of all twentieth-century artists. There is no other figure of such seminal importance on whom the experts' opinions are so divided or their interpretations so widely divergent.’

 
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(1726–1801).
Polish-German painter and illustrator, born in Danzig (now Gdansk), and active mainly in Berlin. He began his career by painting
enamels
. His early oil paintings were imitations of the French manner, and his fame rests on the more individual book illustrations and graphic work of all kinds which he produced prolifically from
c.
1770 onwards. Most attractive are the little intimate sketches he made of the bourgeois life around him, not least of his own family. In 1797 he became Director of the Berlin Academy.

 
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Christie's
.

The popular name for the firm of Christie, Manson & Woods, the oldest fine art auctioneers in the world (
Sotheby's
was founded earlier, but originally sold only books). It was founded by James Christie (1730–1803), who gave up a commission in the Navy to become an auctioneer and held his first sale on 5 December 1766 in rooms in Pall Mall, in the same premises in which the exhibitions of the
Royal Academy
were held until 1779. He was a friend of
Reynolds
and
Gainsborough
, and Christie's developed a tradition of holding the studio sales of prominent artists. The firm acquired its present name in 1859, when James Christie's grandsons took new partners. Its headquarters are still in London and there are branches in New York, Amsterdam, and Geneva.

 
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