José Jiménez Aranda (1837-1903) Genre painter

Luis Jiménez Aranda was a Spanish🎨-born French painter🎨 of genre scenes🎨; many in costumbrista style. His brothers, José and Manuel also became painters.

His first art lessons came from his older brother, José, followed by classes at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de Santa Isabel de Hungría under the direction of Eduardo Cano and Antonio Cabral Bejarano.

In 1868, thanks to a four year stipend from a wealthy patron, he went to Rome to see the Old Masters and complete his studies with Marià Fortuny🎨.

Anders Zorn's palette

Anders Zorn (1860-1920) was known to use a basic color palette consisting of Lead White (Flake White), Yellow Ochre, Vermilion and Ivory Black.

This limited color palette shows tremendous range in terms of color mixing.

A large variety of tonal ranges is possible using this palette, a very important development for portrait painting.

Francisque Duret | Academic sculptor

Francisque Joseph Duret (1804-1865) was a French sculptor, son and pupil of François-Joseph Duret (1732-1816).

Before becoming a sculptor, Francisque Duret had shown interest in pursuing a career in theater.

He studied for a brief time at the Conservatoire and his friend Charles Blanc (1813-1882), in an article which he dedicated in 1866, attested to the quality of observing human behavior which Duret had acquired outside his studies of drama: "His continual studies of the pantomime led him to pin down the language of gesture and the meaning of each disposition".

Suzanne Valadon | Post-Impressionist painter

Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938) was a French painter and artists' model who was born Marie-Clémentine Valadon at Bessines-sur-Gartempe, Haute-Vienne, France.

In 1894, Valadon became the first woman painter admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.

She was also the mother of painter Maurice Utrillo.

Valadon spent nearly 40 years of her life as an artist. The subjects of her drawings and paintings, such as" Joy of Life" (1911), included mostly female figures, still lifes and landscapes.

Kitty Meijering, 1974 | Ballet dancers

Kitty Meijering studied at the Amsterdam University. At this University she followed a visual arts education, which she completed in 1998.

At this moment dance and specifically ballet is the main theme Kitty dedicates her time to.

This stunning new serie shows paintings of dancers in full movement and emotion. The dancers defined in warm colours seems to dance right of the paintings!

Mark Olich, 1974 | Ballet dancers photographer

"For me, ballet is movement and music, and if there is movement in the frame, if music is heard, it's a good shoot, it rarely happens"

- Mark Olich.

Mark Olich is a Russian photographer🎨 whose works are entirely focused on the worlds of theatre and dance.

Gustave Flaubert | Quotes / Aforismi

James Tissot (1836-1902)🎨 | Young Lady in a Boat

"The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe".

"L'arte di scrivere è l'arte di scoprire ciò in cui credi".
"Fate attenzione alla tristezza. È un vizio".

"Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory".
"I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings".

"Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times".
"La nostra ignoranza della storia ci porta a calunniare i nostri tempi".

Henri Chapu | Neoclassical sculptor

Henri-Michel-Antoine Chapu (1833-1891) was a French sculptor in a modified Neoclassical tradition who was known for his use of allegory in his work.

Born in Le Mée-sur-Seine into modest circumstances, Chapu moved to Paris with his family and in 1847 entered the Petit École with the intention of studying drawing and becoming an interior decorator.

Henri Chapu | Mercure inventant le caducée | Musée-d'Orsay

Lynn Sanguedolce, 1959 | Figurative painter

American painter🎨 Lynn R. Sanguedolce is an award-winning🎨 artist who has been represented by prestigious galleries across the country. A professional artist for over thirty years, her work may be found in collections throughout the United States and abroad.

The inspiration for Lynn's work stems from her appreciation of the beauty of nature and the human form. Portraiture and figurative painting are particularly rewarding to Lynn, since they allow her to translate the essence of a subject's personality into a piece of fine art.

Vassilis Solidakis, 1948 | Figurative Expressionist painter

Βασίλης Σολιδάκης was born in Sitia of the Island of Crete, Greece. He boasts to be an 'Eteocris', who is considered to be the indigenous people of Crete with roots in the Minoan period.

Solidakis received training in painting since 1968 and continued his studies in the period 1973-1985 with Dimitris Perdikidis in Madrid, Spain.

He had his first solo exhibition in 1978 in Athens. More one-man and group shows followed in Greece and abroad.

Jonathan Wolstenholme, 1950 | The Surreal books

Jonathan Wolstenholme is an British painter and illustrator best known for his amazingly detailed works deriving from a love of old books.

Books on Books is a series of illustrations in which the book world is being described by… the books. Jonathan has had three one-man shows in London and has exhibited at the Singer and Friedlander Exhibition several times, also at the Discerning Eye Competition at the Mall Galleries winning a prize in 2002.

In 1997 an exhibition of Jonathan’s work was shown in New York at the ‘Works on Paper’ fair. In 2003 he had a joint show with fellow Portal artist George Underwood, this was a great success, Jonathan also took part in an exhibition of Idiosyncratic Portal Artists in Tanglewood, near Boston in 2004 and Portal painters at the Edinburgh Festival in the same year.

Wolstenholme regularly exhibits with Portal at all the major Art Fairs in London and Glasgow.

Cesare Lapini (1848-1893) | Figurative /Allegorical sculptor

Cesare Lapini (1848-1893) was born in Florence. He became one of the leading sculptors of his generation producing works in marble including allegorical works, copies after the Antique, genre subjects and portrait busts.

These he sold with great success along with works by his contemporaries in his gallery in Florence, to travellers on the Grand Tour, which, from having been limited in the 18th Century to the aristocracy and minor royalty now included the wealthy bourgeois from Britain, Germany, Russia, France and of course the United States.

Brian Scott [Briscott] | Portrait painter

Brian Scott [Briscott] British painter, a self-taught, uses colored pencils, unique perspective and captivating subjects to create stunning work.

Brian Scott is a self-taught artist and feels that it shouldn’t matter what your artistic history or education is, but that you love what you are doing. He has always been interested in art and took classes at night school, but found he did not enjoy the strict, regimented routine.

At first, Brian tried oils and acrylics but didn’t feel that he was successful in those mediums. In 2009 he turned to colored pencils where he found his niche and never looked back.

Miriam Briks, 1957 | Figurative painter

Polish-born American painter Miriam Briks was born in Wroclaw, Poland. Raised in New York, she graduated from the School of Art and Design and studied figurative painting and drawing extensively at the Art Students League of New York.

For the next six years she worked as an illustrator and art teacher in Los Angeles and Florence, Italy. She also continued her studies at the Academy of Art in Siena. Originally trained in classical art, she began exhibiting her work in Paris, Italy and England. Upon her return to the Untied States, she took up residence in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas.

Ludwig van Beethoven: "L'amore vuole tutto e ha ragione.."

"L'Arte! Chi la può comprendere? A chi si può rivolgere una persona per attirare l'attenzione di questa grande Dea.."

Beethoven

Andy Warhol (1928-1987) | Beethoven

- Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) è stato la figura predominante musicale nel periodo di transizione tra l'epoca Classica e Romantica.

Beethoven fu un innovatore, che ampliò il campo di applicazione della sonata, sinfonia, concerto e quartetto, e la combinazione di voci e strumenti in un modo nuovo.

La sua vita personale è stata segnata da una lotta contro la sordità, e alcune delle sue opere più importanti sono stati composti nel corso degli ultimi 10 anni della sua vita, quando era ancora in grado di sentire.

Alexander Millar, 1960 | Fly With Me

Scottish painter Alexander Millar is one of the UK's most popular contemporary artists. Born and raised in the small mining community of Springside, just outside the town of Kilmarnock on the west coast of Scotland, Millar's earliest memories were of his time spent in the company of old men dressed in dark suits smoking woodbines and large missile-shaped women decked out in big overcoats, pinnies, tartan headscarves and zipped booties, adorned with fake fur around the top.

Jeff Rowland, 1964 | VideoArt

Jeff Rowland's ideas and inspirations: 'I have always been fascinated in two areas of art; the implicit meaning and the inspiration. I was inspired to paint a rain soaked street through films I saw at the cinema.

I am always inspired to experience what I am about to paint. I remember Billy Connolly saying that he hated songs about Scotland that were written by men in London: men who had never even seen the Highlands. In other words, if you are going to do something creative, get to the very heart of it first'.

Edgar Degas | Sculpture

Degas’ sculpture stands outside the mainstream of nineteenth-century French sculpture. He was never interested in creating public monuments, and, with one exception, neither did he display his sculpture publicly. The exception was "The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer".

It was shown in the sixth Impressionist exhibition held in Paris in 1881, but the work has little to do with Impressionism. Modeled in wax and wearing a real bodice, stockings, shoes, tulle skirt, and horsehair wig with a satin ribbon, the figure astonished Degas’ contemporaries, not only for its unorthodox use of materials, but also and above all for its realism, judged brutish by some. The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer was not seen again publicly until April 1920.

Grand Prix de Rome (1663-1968) | Art history

Dea Roma, Viale Trinità dei Monti, Villa Medici, Roma

Prix de Rome, in full Grand Prix de Rome, any of a group of scholarships awarded🎨 by the French government between 1663-1968 to enable young French artists🎨 to study in Rome.

It was so named because the students who won the grand, or first, prize in each artistic category went to study at the Académie de France in Rome.

Louise Abbéma | Belle Époque painter

Louise Abbéma was a French painter (1853-1927), sculptor and designer of the Belle Époque.

Abbéma was born in Étampes, Essonne. She was born into a wealthy Parisian family, who were well connected in the local artistic community.

She began painting in her early teens, and studied under such notables of the period as Charles Joshua Chaplin, Jean-Jacques Henner and Carolus-Duran.

She first received recognition for her work at age 23 when she painted a portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, her lifelong friend and possibly her lover.