Pietro Antonio Rotari | A peasant girl In profile wearing a white scarf

Pietro Antonio Rotari 1707-1762) was an Italian painter of the Baroque period.

Born in Verona, he led a peripatetic career, and died in Saint Petersburg, where he had traveled to paint for the Russian court.

His portraits, mostly of women, are renowned for being beautiful and realistic.

Rotari's works were generally limited to royal portraits held by notables such as emperors and court ladies.

Marcel Proust: "Non smettere di cercare ciò che ami, o finiresti per amare ciò che trovi"

• "Dobbiamo essere grati alle persone che ci rendono felici. Sono i premurosi giardinieri che fanno fiorire la nostra anima".

• "Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom".

• "La musica è forse l’esempio unico di ciò che avrebbe potuto essere - se non ci fossero state l’invenzione del linguaggio, la formazione delle parole, l’analisi delle idee - la comunicazione delle anime".

• "La felicità è benefica per il corpo, ma è il dolore che sviluppa i poteri della mente".

• "Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind".

Henri Fantin-Latour | Symbolist painter

Henri Fantin-Latour, in full Ignace-Henri-Jean-Théodore Fantin-Latour, (born Jan. 14, 1836, Grenoble, France-died Aug. 25, 1904, Buré), French painter, printmaker and illustrator noted for his still lifes with flowers and his portraits, especially group compositions, of contemporary French celebrities in the arts.

Fantin-Latour’s first teacher was his father, a well-known portrait painter.

Later, he studied at the school of Lecoq de Boisbaudran and attended the École des Beaux-Arts.

Paul Cézanne | The Card Players series

Paul Cézanne | The Card Players, 1890-1892 | Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Card Players is a series of oil paintings by the French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Cézanne.

Painted during Cézanne's final period in the early 1890s, there are five paintings in the series.

The versions vary in size, the number of players, and the setting in which the game takes place.

Paul Cézanne | Post-Impressionist painter

Cézanne's🎨 works were rejected numerous times by the official Salon in Paris and ridiculed by art critics when exhibited with the Impressionists.

Yet during his lifetime Cézanne was considered a master by younger artists who visited his studio in Aix.

Along with the work of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, the work of Cézanne, with its sense of immediacy and incompletion, critically influenced Matisse and others prior to Fauvism and Expressionism.

After Cézanne died in 1906, his paintings were exhibited in a large museum-like retrospective in Paris, September 1907.

The 1907 Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne greatly affected the direction that the avant-garde in Paris took, lending credence to his position as one of the most influential artists of the 19th century and to the advent of Cubism.

Cézanne's explorations of geometric simplification and optical phenomena inspired Picasso, Braque, Metzinger, Gleizes, Gris and others to experiment with ever more complex views of the same subject and eventually to the fracturing of form.

Cézanne thus sparked one of the most revolutionary areas of artistic enquiry of the 20th century, one which was to affect profoundly the development of modern art.

• Picasso referred to Cézanne as "the father of us all" and claimed him as "my one and only master!"

Other painters such as Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin, Kasimir Malevich, Georges Rouault, Paul Klee, and Henri Matisse acknowledged Cézanne's genius.