Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

Il pittore Spagnolo Bartolomé Esteban Pérez Murillo (1618-1682) è una delle figure più importanti della pittura Barocca spagnola.
Nacque nel 1618, ultimo figlio di una famiglia di quattordici fratelli. Suo padre, Gaspar Esteban, era un barbiere-chirurgo, sua madre si chiamava María Pérez Murillo, Bartolomé prese il suo cognome per firmare le sue opere. Alla morte dei genitori, essendo ancora un bambino, venne cresciuto da sua sorella maggiore, Ana, sposata anche lei con un barbiere-chirurgo di nome Juan Agustín de Lagares, con il quale Bartolomé ebbe una buona relazione. Si formò nella bottega di Juan Castillo dove conobbe la pittura fiamminga, nonostante non si sappia di suoi viaggi all'estero, si pensa che la conoscenza di questo tipo di pittura, da parte di Murillo, derivasse dal fatto che Siviglia era un importante centro commerciale all'epoca, questo favorì i contatti tra i cittadini di questa città con le popolazioni di mercanti del Nord Europa.

Jean-Gabriel Domergue, the inventor of the Pin-Up

Jean-Gabriel Domergue (1889-1962) was a French painter specialising in portraits of Parisian women. He went on to paint approximately 3,000 portraits. Domergue invented a new type of woman: thin, airy, elegant, with a swanlike neck and wide seductive eyes which gaze upon the world with longing.

Guy Wiggins ~ American Impressionist painter

Guy Carleton Wiggins [1883-1962], the noted American Impressionist and one of the foremost artists affiliated with the art colony at Old Lyme, Connecticut, was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1883. He was the son of Carleton Wiggins, a prominent painter associated with the American Barbizon School. He spent the early years of his life in England where he received a grammar school education and traveled throughout Europe. Following in his father's footsteps, Wiggins became interested in painting and drawing during his boyhood.
His creative and technical abilities were acknowledged at the age of eight, when various New York critics publicly praised a group of watercolors he had done in France and Holland. He received his first serious training in architectural draughtsmanship when he studied architecture at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute around 1900. However his artistic inclination proved stronger and he went on to enroll at the National Academy of Design in New York where his teachers included William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri. Recognition and critical acclaim soon followed. By the age of twenty, one of Wiggins' works had been purchased for the Permanent Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Christa Kieffer

German painter Christa Kieffer was born in Tubingen, Germany. As a child, her earliest memories are of “soaking up the atmosphere of a particular place or region”. An intuitive kindergarten teacher recognized Kieffer’s potential and provided her with a quiet place to draw and paint. The artist studied extensively throughout Europe then moved to the United States to attend the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles.

Frédéric Dufoor, 1943

Born in Tournai, Belgian painter Frédéric Dufoor attended the Institute of Saint-Luc in Tournai and also the Academy of Mons. After a brief Bohemian interlude, he was enrolled with the studio of Louis Van Lint, at Saint-Luc in Brussels. In 1967, he went on to teach at the Superior Institute for Graphic Communications for 10 years, then held the post of professor at Saint-Luc in Brussels until December 1998. Initially, briefly influenced by his professors, he developed his art as an aesthetic one, spare, to the limits of abstraction.