The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (464 page)

(1523–1605).
Netherlandish painter and designer, active for almost all his career in Italy, where he was known as Giovanni Stradano (or Stradanus or della Strada). He was born in Bruges, had his main training in Antwerp with
Aertsen
, and moved to Italy in the later 1540s. A protégé of
Vasari
, he worked in various Italian cities, but mainly in Florence, where he was much employed by the
Medici
family. He assisted Vasari with frescos in the Palazzo Vecchio, for example, but his main work for the Medici was as a tapestry designer. His
Mannerist
style was influenced by Vasari , but it always retained a Netherlandish accent and he was admired for his skill in
genre
painting, a Northern speciality. Several of his designs were published in engravings.

 
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(1621–79).
English painter, appointed Serjeant-Painter to Charles II in 1660. In the words of Sir Ellis
Waterhouse
, ‘he left no branch of painting untried and would have been a universal genius had he been endowed with the requisite talent.’ The most important of his few surviving works is the allegorical ceiling painting representing
The Triumph of Truth and the Arts
(1668–9) in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford. This is a heavy-handed work, but noteworthy as the most ambitious attempt at a piece of
Baroque
decoration by any Englishman before
Thornhill
(Streeter had travelled in Italy during the Commonwealth). His reputation was evidently high in his day, for Samuel Pepys in his celebrated
Diary
calls him a ‘famous history painter … who lives handsomely’, and Robert Whitehall, whose ability as a poet happily matched that of Streeter as a painter, eulogized the Sheldonian ceiling in the immortal lines ‘…future ages must confess they owe / To Streeter more than Michael Angelo’ (
Urania, or a Description of the Painting of the Top of the Theatre at Oxford
, 1669). Streeter's son
Robert
(d. 1711) succeeded him as Serjeant-Painter.

 
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(1867–1943).
Australian painter. He was a prolific landscape painter, working in an
Impressionist
style similar to that of his friend Tom
Roberts
. Between 1898 and 1924 he spent most of his time abroad (in 1918 he was an
Official War Artist
with the Australian forces in France). His work became stereotyped, but he was enormously popular in his own country, regarded as the foremost portrayer of the remote and awesome Australian landscape. By the end of his life he had long enjoyed the status of a national institution.

 
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stretcher
.

The wooden frame or chassis on which a
canvas
is stretched and fixed. Wedges or keys in the inner corners of the stretcher enable the canvas to be tightened if it slackens.

 
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(1581–1644).
The leading Genoese painter of his period. He entered the Capuchin Order in about 1597, hence his nicknames, II Prete Genovese (the Genoese priest) and II Cappuccino (the Capuchin). In about 1610 he was allowed to leave his community to look after his sick and widowed mother, and after she died in 1630 he is said to have been pressurized to return, this accounting for his move in 1631 to Venice (where he spent the rest of his life). Strozzi was successful and prolific in both Genoa and Venice, painting portraits and allegorical and
genre
scenes (often of musicians) as well as religious works. The sensuous richness of his style was influenced by
Rubens
(who worked in Genoa), but his work is highly distinctive, with an air of refinement and tenderness that recalls van
Dyck
(who also worked in Genoa). Strozzi worked in Venice when there was a dearth of native talent in the city, and with two other ‘foreigners’,
Feti
and
Liss
, he kept alive the painterly tradition of the 16th cent.

 
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