Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842) | Neoclassical painter

Elisabeth Louise Vigée-Le Brun was one of the most successful portraitists of 18th century France, gaining renowned in particular for her self-portraits and depictions of courtly women, Queen Marie Antoinette most famously.

Born in Paris as the eldest child of the portraitist Louis Vigée (1715-1767) and Jeanne Maissin, Vigée Le Brun was trained by her father from an early age.

She succeeded in gaining entrance to the Académie de Saint-Luc at the age of just nineteen, a remarkable accomplishment for a woman at the time.

Maxime Maufra (1861-1918) Impressionist painter

Maxime Maufra was a French🎨 landscape and marine painter, etcher and lithographer.

Maufra first began painting at 18.

He was encouraged to do so by two artists from Nantes such as the brothers Charles Leduc and Alfred Leduc and the landscape painter Charles Le Roux.

Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo | Il Quarto Stato / The Fourth Estate, 1901

The monumental painting Il Quarto Stato /The Fourth Estate by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo (1868-1907)🎨 portrays a group of workers on strike.

It symbolises the social protest at the beginning of the 20th century, as well as the emergence of a new social class - the proletariat - which becomes aware of its rights within the new industrial society.

Giuseppe Pelizza da Volpedo | Neo-Impressionist painter

Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo (July 28, 1868 - June 14, 1907) was an Italian Neo-Impressionist painter🎨. He was born and died in Volpedo, in the Piedmont region of northern Italy.

Pellizza was a pupil of Pio Sanquirico. He used a Divisionist technique🎨 in which a painting is created by juxtaposing small dots of paint according to specific color theory.

Cesare Ciani (1854-1925) | Post-Macchiaioli painter

Cesare Ciani was an Italian painter🎨 associated with the Post-Macchiaioli group.

A student of Giuseppe Ciaranfi at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence in 1878, where he won a prize for painting, Cesare Ciani was also strongly influenced by the work of the Macchiaioli painter Giovanni Fattori🎨, with whom he also studied.

Fattori’s guidance is readily evident in Ciani’s landscapes, city scenes and portraits, confidently painted with broad, sketchy brushstrokes.

Henri Matisse | Art Quotes

• "What I am after, above all, is expression".
• "Ciò che sto cercando, soprattutto, è l'espressione".
• "I have worked to enrich my intelligence and meet my mind’s various needs, striving with all of my being for an understanding of the different interpretations of art given by the ancient and modern masters".
• "Ho lavorato per arricchire la mia intelligenza, per soddisfare le differenti esigenze del mio spirito, sforzando tutto il mio essere alla comprensione delle diverse interpretazioni dell'arte plastica date dagli antichi maestri e dai moderni".

Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) | Genre Rococo Era painter

Jean-Baptiste Greuze was a French painter🎨 of portraits, genre scenes🎨 and history painting.

Greuze studied first at Lyon and afterward at the Royal Academy in Paris.

He first exhibited at the Salon of 1755 and won an immediate success with his moralizing genre painting of Father Reading the Bible to His Children (1755).

Edwin Austin Abbey | Pre-Raphaelite painter / Illustrator

Edwin Austin Abbey, American painter🎨 and one of the foremost illustrators of his day.

While working as an illustrator for the publishing house of Harper and Brothers, New York City, Abbey began to create illustrations for the poems of Robert Herrick in 1874.

He went on to create illustrations for some of the works of Oliver Goldsmith and William Shakespeare🎨.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Portraits / Figures | Page 2

• "Shall I tell you what I think are the two qualities of a work of art? First, it must be indescribable, and, second, it must be inimitable".
• "Vuoi sapere quali sono le due qualità di un'opera d'arte? In primo luogo, deve essere indescrivibile e, in secondo luogo, deve essere inimitabile".

Pierre-Auguste Renoir🎨

Gustave Caillebotte | A Balcony in Paris

Those boulevards, don’t forget, were still pretty new in 1877.

In the mid-19th Century, Napoléon III had ordered a massive redevelopment of the unruly French capital - led by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the prefect of the Seine, who boldly (you might say pitilessly) cleared out Paris’s dense, politically restless faubourgs.

In their place arose standardised blocks of housing, fronting new extended axes that showcased landmarks like so many imperial baubles.

Lorenzo Bartolini | Faith in God / Fiducia in Dio, 1835

Lorenzo Bartolini🎨's "Fiducia in Dio" is the artist's best-known work and, more generally, is emblematic of Italian sculpture🎨 in the generation after Canova🎨. The model recalls Canova🎨's Mary Magdalen, but the work is more indebted to the observation of nature than the influence of the antique. It typifies the move towards a softer Neo-classicism which made way for Romanticism in Italian sculpture🎨.

Camille Claudel | L'âge mûr / L'Età matura, 1902

The Age of Maturity/L'âge mûr is probably the work that most lends itself to an interpretation based on autobiographical narrative: the end of the relationship between Claudel🎨 and Rodin🎨.

In actual fact, the association of the three figures with Camille Claudel🎨, Auguste Rodin🎨 and Rose Beuret arose some time after the sculpture was first exhibited. The critics initially saw it as the “symbolic representation of Destiny, in which the ageing man is torn away from love, youth and life”.

Auguste Rodin | Victor Hugo et les Muses, 1890

After Victor Hugo’s death in 1885, it was decided to erect a monument in his honour in the Panthéon as a pendant to Injalbert’s statue of Mirabeau. Auguste Rodin🎨 was awarded🎨 the commission in 1889. The sculptor chose to depict Victor Hugo in exile, seated amongst the rocks of Guernsey, his arm outstretched as if to calm the waves. It was an image both of the poet lost in contemplation and of the champion of the Republican cause.

This first project, “which lacked clarity and whose silhouette was muddled”,was unanimously rejected. In 1891, the Ministry of Fine Arts found another site for it. It would eventually be erected in the gardens of Palais-Royal.

Édouard Manet | Le déjeuner sur l'Herbe, 1863

Rejected by the jury of the 1863 Salon, Manet🎨 exhibited Le déjeuner sur l’herbe under the title Le Bain at the Salon des Refusés (initiated the same year by Napoléon III) where it became the principal attraction, generating both laughter and scandal.

Yet in Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, Manet🎨 was paying tribute to Europe's artistic heritage, borrowing his subject from the Concert champêtre - a painting by Titian🎨 attributed at the time to Giorgione🎨 (Louvre) - and taking his inspiration for the composition of the central group from the Marcantonio Raimondi engraving after Raphael's Judgement of Paris🎨.

Federico del Campo (1837-1923) | Vedute painter

Federico del Campo was a Peruvian painter who was active in Venice where he was one of the leading vedute painters of the 19th century.

Del Campo was born in Lima and left his native Peru at a young age.

Nothing is known with certainty about his early studies in Peru.

He studied at Madrid's Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando) in Madrid from around 1865. Here he established a friendship with Lorenzo Valles, a history painter.

Leo Tolstoy | Quotes / Aforismi

Ilia Efimovich Repin🎨 (Ukrainian-born Russian Realist painter, 1844-1930)| Portrait of Leo Tolstoy, 1887

Best known for his two classic novels, 'War and Peace' and 'Anna Karenina' Leo Tolstoy, in full Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy / Лев Никола́евич Толсто́й (1828-1910), was a Russian🎨 writer, a master of realistic fiction and one of the world’s greatest novelists.

• "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself".
• "Tutti pensano a cambiare il mondo, ma nessuno pensa a cambiare se stesso".
• "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way".
• "Tutte le famiglie felici si assomigliano fra loro, ogni famiglia infelice è infelice a suo modo".
• "If you look for perfection, you'll never be content".
• "Se cerchi la perfezione, non ti accontenterai mai".

Ivan Kramskoi | An unknown lady, 1883

‣ Author: Ivan Kramskoi🎨 / Ива́н Крамско́й (Russian painter and art critic, 1837-1887).

‣ Title: Portrait of an Unknown Woman, also known as The Unknown Woman, An Unknown Lady or Stranger - Russian: Неизвестная.

‣ Medium: oil on canvas.

‣ Date: 1883.

‣ Provenance: Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia.

The viewer is intrigued both by the heroine of the painting and its name.
Ivan Kramskoi depicted a young woman in a carriage against the Anichkov Palace in St Petersburg.

The woman is not so much beautiful as she is impressive and "chic".

Walter Langley (1852-1922) | Genre painter

Walter Langley was an British painter🎨 and founder of the Newlyn School of plein air artists.

He was born in Birmingham and his father was a journeyman tailor.

At 15 he was apprenticed to a lithographer.

At 21 he won a scholarship to South Kensington and he studied designing there for two years. The sometimes highly ornate work is mainly in gold and silver and in a Renaissance style🎨.

Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893) | Pre-Raphaelite painter

Ford Madox Brown was a British painter of moral and historical subjects, notable for his distinctively graphic and often Hogarthian version of the Pre-Raphaelite style.

Arguably, his most notable painting was Work (1852–1865). Brown spent the latter years of his life painting the twelve works known as The Manchester Murals, depicting Mancunian history, for Manchester Town Hall.

British painter Ford Madox Brown was born at Calais and trained at Antwerp, in Paris and at Rome, where he came into contact with the Nazarenes.

Georges Seurat (1859-1891) | Pointillist painter

Georges-Pierre Seurat was a French🎨 post-Impressionist artist. He is best known for devising the painting techniques known as chromoluminarism as well as pointillism🎨.

While less famous than his paintings, his conté crayon drawings have also garnered a great deal of critical appreciation.

Seurat's artistic personality was compounded of qualities which are usually supposed to be opposed and incompatible: on the one hand, his extreme and delicate sensibility, on the other, a passion for logical abstraction and an almost mathematical precision of mind.

His large-scale work, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-1886)🎨, altered the direction of modern art by initiating Neo-impressionism, and is one of the icons of late 19th-century painting.