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.

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.

Ute Hadam, 1958 | Abstract painter

Ute Hadam paints on canvas of different sizes. She mixes herself pigments with acrylic mediums of différetes consistency in order to enhance the structure. Colors and shades are melted with subtle silk paper collages to obtain transparency and relief.

Inspiration

The universe of the artist is the endless wealth of nature. The dynamic play of shapes and lights of plant, mineral or human world becomes a pretext for an original artistic interpretation. In her compositions, you find always a research of beauty of nature.

Boris Kustodiev (1878-1927)

Boris Mikhaylovich Kustodiev / Бори́с Миха́йлович Кусто́диев was a Russian painter and stage designer.

Early life

Boris Kustodiev was born in Astrakhan into the family of a professor of philosophy, history of literature, and logic at the local theological seminary.

His father died young, and all financial and material burdens fell on his mother's shoulders.

The Kustodiev family rented a small wing in a rich merchant's house. It was there that the boy's first impressions were formed of the way of life of the provincial merchant class.

The artist later wrote, "The whole tenor of the rich and plentiful merchant way of life was there right under my nose... It was like something out of an Ostrovsky play". The artist retained these childhood observations for years, recreating them later in oils and water-colours.