Samuel Palmer | Romantic / Visionary painter

Samuel Palmer RWS Hon.RE (Hon. Fellow of the Society of Painter-Etchers) (1805-1881) was a British landscape painter, etcher and printmaker.

He was also a prolific writer.

Palmer was a key figure in Romanticism in Britain and produced visionary pastoral paintings.

Palmer painted churches from around age twelve, and first exhibited Turner-inspired works at the Royal Academy at the age of fourteen.

He had little formal training, and little formal schooling, although he was educated briefly at Merchant Taylors' School.

Giuseppe de Sanctis | Genre painter

Giuseppe De Sanctis (1858-1924) was an Italian painter, primarily of portraits and cityscapes.

He was born in Naples. His father, Cesare, was a businessman who loved music, art and the theater.

He was, in fact, a close friend of Verdi, who attended Giuseppe's baptism.

As a result, contrary to the experience of many other aspiring artists, his family encouraged his desire to become a painter.

Vincent van Gogh | Irises, 1890

In May 1890, just before he checked himself out of the asylum at Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh painted four exuberant bouquets of spring flowers, the only still lifes of any ambition he had undertaken during his yearlong stay: two of irises, two of roses, in contrasting color schemes and formats.

In the Museum’s Irises he sought a “harmonious and soft” effect by placing the “violet” flowers against a “pink background”, which have since faded owing to his use of fugitive red pigments.

Vincent van Gogh | Irises, 1890 | Metropolitan Museum of Art

Gilberto Geraldo, 1962 | Figurative painter

Born in Sao Paulo, Gilberto Geraldo started his dedication towards paintings and drawings by the age of 11 with a clear goal of becoming an artist.

By the age of 16, he was made a member of the Artists Association of Sao Paulo.

Nevertheless he was not intimidated by the premature and ascending success of his career, moving on into his studies and researches, searching for the excellence of his art.

Zaha Hadid, the great Dame of Architecture

Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid DBE RA (Arabic: زها حديد Zahā Ḥadīd; 31 October 1950 - 31 March 2016) was an Iraqi-British architect, artist and designer, recognized as a major figure in architecture of the late-20th and early-21st centuries.

Born in Baghdad, Iraq, Hadid studied mathematics as an undergraduate and then enrolled at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in 1972.

In search of an alternative system to traditional architectural drawing, and influenced by Suprematism and the Russian avant-garde, Hadid adopted painting as a design tool and abstraction as an investigative principle to "reinvestigate the aborted and untested experiments of Modernism [...] to unveil new fields of building".