Boleslaw Szankowski | Portrait painter

Bolesław Szańkowski (1873-1953) was an Polish painter🎨, known for working in the Realist style.

Szańkowski studied at the academies in Cracow and Munich with Ludwig Herterich and in Paris with Benjamin-Constant, Gaudara and Jean Paul Laurens.

He went on to work in Munich, where he contributed to the periodicals, Youth (Jugend) and Simplicity (Simplicissimus).

From 1907 to 1925 he participated in the annual exhibitions of the Munich Glass Palace.

Mary Qian, 1973 | Impressionist painter

A Chicago-based fine art painter, Mary is a winner of many awards🎨, including Oil Painters of America gold Medal.

Originally from Shanghai, China, Mary went through the traditional Chinese educational system focusing on the sciences while studying Chinese painting and calligraphy on her own. Before coming to the US, she admired the ancient Chinese painters🎨 but found her true voice for painting when she discovered the western artists.

It was the realism of Rembrandt🎨, Velazquez🎨, Repin🎨 -her particular favorites- that she found to be the artistic style that she had been looking for.

Vito Campanella | Surrealist / Metaphysics painter

Vito Campanella (1932-2014) was an Italian-Argentine painter, known for working in the Surrealism style. Campanella was born in Monopoli, Italy.

After more than 50 years devoted to painting, Vito Campanella is a universal artist, a renowned painter called Master by the prestigious Swiss dictionary "Art Leaders of the World".

For biographical notes -in english and italian- and other works by Campanella see:

• Vito Campanella, 1932-2014 | Surrealism /Metaphysics painter🎨.

Vito Campanella, 1932-2014 | Surrealist / Metaphysics painter

Although Vito Campanella🎨 started to paint at the age of 14 in his native Monopoli, his love for visual arts began much earlier. He was born in 1932 and endured the sorrow, agony and shortage that surrounded World War II. In the aftermath of the armed conflict, daily life in Southern Italy changed forever. Allied planes crisscrossing the sky and ceaseless bombings left indelible memories he later translated into works of art.

As a child, Campanella used to attend both primary and art schools, where his painting gift thrived and ripened. His early calling soon turned into a sound career. In 1948 the young artist was selected to create a mural to adorn the local church and earned the Pintura delle Regioni Award🎨 in Naples.

Shortly after, Campanella was invited to show his paintings in Bari, where he was awarded at the age of 20. Later he moved to Florence where he enthusiastically participated in its rich cultural activities and continued to paint. Always on the move and eager to expand his aesthetic potential, he tried many different styles, including Pop art, abstraction and geometry before discovering in Surrealism his true field.

René Magritte | Surrealist painter

René Magritte🎨, in full René-François-Ghislain Magritte (born Nov. 21, 1898, Lessines, Belg.- died Aug. 15, 1967, Brussels) Belgian artist, one of the most prominent Surrealist painters🎨, whose bizarre flights of fancy blended horror, peril, comedy, and mystery.

His works were characterized by particular symbols-the female torso, the bourgeois "little man", the bowler hat, the castle, the rock, the window, and others.

After studying at the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts (1916-18), Magritte became a designer for a wallpaper factory and then did sketches for advertisements.

In 1922 he saw a reproduction of Giorgio de Chirico’s painting The Song of Love (1914), an evocative and haunting juxtaposition of odd elements (a classical bust and a rubber glove among them) in a dreamlike architectural space; it had a great influence on Magritte’s mature style.

Richard Schmid, 1934 | Realist / Impressionist painter

Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, American🎨 Master painter Richard Schmid became one of the foremost Impressionist painters🎨 of the Southwest in the late 20th century.

He is known for what he calls "The Grand Manner", a certain mingling of virtuosity and unrestrained joy in art.

His earliest artistic influence came from his maternal grandfather, Julian Oates, an architectural sculptor. Richard's initial studies in landscape painting, figure drawing, and anatomy began at the age of twelve and continued into classical techniques under William H. Mosby at the American Academy of Art in Chicago.

Mosby, a graduate of the Belgian Royal Academy in Brussels and the Superior Institute in Antwerp, was a technical expert on European and American realism.

Studies with him involved working exclusively from life, at first using the conceptual and technical methods of the Flemish, Dutch and Spanish masters, and eventually all of the late 19th century European and American painters.

Jane Wells Loudon | The Victorian garden

Jane Loudon was to Victorian gardening what Mrs Beeton was to cookery. Her beautifully illustrated books on gardening and plant identification sold in their thousands and women all over the country were enthused enough by them to take up gardening as a hobby.

- Loudon [née Webb], Jane (1807-1858), writer on botany and magazine editor, was born on 19 August 1807 at Ritwell House, near Birmingham. Her mother died when she was twelve, and her father, Thomas Webb, a businessman, suffered financial reverses a few years later.

Little is known of Jane Webb's early education, but, following the death of her father in 1824, she set out to earn money by writing. In addition to Prose and Verse (1824) she published anonymously The Mummy!

A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827), a pioneering work of science fiction that brought together political commentary, Egyptomania, and interest in technology.