Takanori Oguiss 荻須高徳 | Paris painting

Takanori Oguiss (1901-1986), a Japanese Expressionist painter known as "the Parisien born in Japan", was active in the Parisian art world in the early 20th century. He is noted for capturing the alcoves and street corners of the French capital with his characteristic lack of showiness and aesthetic balance, often choosing to forgo the inclusion of human figures.

Sally Swatland, 1946 | Plein air Figurative painter

Sally Swatland was born in Washington, DC and moved to Greenwich, Connecticut when she was seven. Her father was a successful attorney, which allowed her family to spend long periods in the countryside with many vacations at various seaside locations throughout the United States. She shared a passion with her family for beaches, sunshine, and fresh air. Most summer days were spent at the beach playing in tidal pools, chasing minnows, collecting shells and exploring.

Maria Giulia Alemanno | Magical Realism painter

And the ORISHAS are like dead thar are not dead.

A long chain that rivets the present and the past, linking the souls of today and yesterday, beyond time and space.

Africa and America, what it was and it will be, hearth and sky.

They are like the ancestors’ spirits, the incarnation of generations, the survival of ties, the alphabet of continuità and memory.

Maria Giulia Alemanno, Lellina, like a Malinke griot, lives to tell stories.

And she, an Italian, has searched and found them in the deepness of Cuba.

Giampaolo Talani, 1955 | Abstract painter / sculptor

Giampaolo Talani was born in San Vincenzo (LI).

After attending Art School in Lucca and in Florence he went to the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence where he met Goffredo Trovarelli as his teacher.

Throughout his studies he experimented with all art classical techniques but finally he chose painting, he also devoted himself to the fresco technique in which he is one of the greatest contemporary experts.

In his youth he painted the great cycle of fresco paintings in the church of San Vincenzo, and that was followed by other works: the "Preaching of San Bernardino" in the Episcopal Palace of Massa Marittima, the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Frassine.

Aldo Mazzi, 1937 | Plein air painter

Aldo Mazzi was born in Livorno, Italy where he lives and works without rest in his studio located inside of the historical "Casini di Ardenza".

Mazzi is a self-taught artist who paints since his early youth and who can be appreciated as a part of the "macchiaiola" and "post-macchiaiola" tradition, always strongly related to the live painting, the so-called "En plein air".

Dino Pelagatti | Post Macchiaioli painter

Dino Pelagatti (1932-2016) nasce a Livorno il 2 Agosto del 1932.

Inizialmente influenzato dallo stile dei pittori Post Macchiaioli, nel corso degli anni ha rinnovato la tecnica delle sue raffigurazioni creando uno stile personalizzato e contemporaneo.

Gli anni della guerra vengono percepiti dal giovane Pelagatti come una difficile esperienza umana perché con la sua famiglia non abbandonò mai Livorno. Nel dopoguerra risultò difficile per Pelagatti rendere mestiere vero e proprio la pittura a causa del forte orientamento popolare verso pittori Macchiaioli e Post Macchiaioli già affermati. 

Roberto Fontirossi, 1940 | Surrealist /Visionary painter

Roberto Fontirossi is an Italian painter, known for working in the surrealist style. Fontirossi was born in Lucca, Italy, where he lives and works.

1961 - First Solo Show at Galleria S. Salvatore in Lauro, Roma.

1964 - IX Quadriennale di Roma, awarded the Premio per il Bianco e Nero.

His work can be found in many private and public collections.

Francesco Tammaro, 1939 | Belle Époque painter

Francesco Tammaro was born in Naples in 1939 where he attended the Instituto D'Arte di Napoli, one of the most reputed Fine Art schools in Italy. Shortly after graduation he traveled to France where he lived for a few years.
Tammaro is best know for his characteristic views of Paris, the famous cafes of Paris, interior Bistros as well as his pastoral picnic scenes on the banks of the Seine.
The artist is now also a valued and appreciated teacher of art at the Fine Arts Academy, who has the capacity of awakening in his students the love of a style of art which seems to be disappearing, suffocated by superficiality and abstraction.

Svetlana Shalygina, 1973 | Abstract Figurative painter

Svetlana Shalygina was born into a poor, humble working class family in Efremov, Russia. She and an older sister were raised in a small, studio apartment 200 miles south of Moscow by parents who worked in a local factory but were very devoted to their children. Svetlana grew up close to nature in wide-open Russian countryside and picturesque valleys which she sketched and painted throughout her childhood. It was here she developed a strong interest in Russian classical art, poetry, music and literature.

François Boucher | The Four Seasons

Source: The Frick Collection, New York

The son of a painter, François Boucher (1703-1770) was born in Paris and trained first with his father, then briefly with François Lemoine.

In 1723 he won the Academy’s first prize for painting but was denied the sojourn in Rome that normally resulted from the competition.

To earn his living the young artist produced reproductive engravings throughout the 1720s, notably after drawings and paintings by Watteau.

François Boucher - The Four Seasons, Autumn, 1755

Camille Lambert | Post Impressionist painter

Camille-Nicolas Lambert (1876-1963) was born in Arlon, Belgium in 1874. He was a student of the Académie des Beaux-Arts de Liége and Anvers.

He won the second place Prix de Rome in 1898, and third place Prix de Rome in 1901 and 1904. Lambert exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français in Paris and the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. He was a member of circle Pour l'Art, and he exhibited in 1912 at the 20th Salon.

Danny Ferland, 1975 | Portrait painter

Danny Ferland was born in Quebec City, Quebec.

He was self taught for many years before discovering the magnificence of figurative art during a European trip in 2002.

Seeing the historical artworks in countless museums is what made him realize the outmost importance of genuine academic training.

In 2008 he moved to New York city after being accepted into the Janus Collaborative school of art.

Rembrandt | The Return of the Prodigal Son, 1668

In the Gospel According to Luke (15: 11-32), Christ relates the parable of the Prodigal Son.

A son asks his father for his inheritance and leaves the parental home, only to fritter away all his wealth.

Arriving at last at sickness and poverty, he returns to his father's house. The old man is blinded by tears as he forgives his son, just as God forgives all those who repent.

This whole work is dominated by the idea of the victory of love, goodness and charity.

The event is treated as the highest act of human wisdom and spiritual nobility, and it takes place in absolute silence and stillness.

Thomas Gainsborough | Rococo / Romantic painter

Tate, Britain / The portrait and landscape painter Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788)🎨 was born at Sudbury, Suffolk, the fifth son of a cloth merchant.

He was apprenticed at the age of thirteen to a London silversmith, and was taught by Hubert Gravelot, a French book-illustrator.

By 1745 he had established his own studio in London. He married Margaret Burr in 1746, and by 1748 had taken up residence in Suffolk.

He moved to Ipswich in 1752, and settled at Bath as a portraitist in 1759.

He took as an apprentice his nephew, Gainsborough Dupont (1754-97) in 1772.

Thomas Gainsborough | The Mall in St. James Park, 1783 | Art in Detail

National Gallery, London / Thomas Gainsborough was, with Reynolds (his main rival), the leading portrait painter in England in the later 18th century. The feathery brushwork of his mature work and rich sense of colour contribute to the enduring popularity of his portraits. Unlike Reynolds, he avoids references to Italian Renaissance art or the Antique, and shows his sitters in fashionable contemporary dress.

Stanhope Forbes | Plein Air /Genre painter

Tate, London / Stanhope Alexander Forbes (1857-1947) Painter of realistic genre, frequently in the open air, historical subjects and landscapes. Born 18 November 1857 in Dublin, son of a railway manager and a French mother. Studied at Lambeth School of Art, the R.A. Schools 1874-1878 and for two years in Paris under Bonnat. Influenced by Bastien-Lepage and painted in Brittany with La Thangue 1880. Settled in Cornwall 1884 and became a leading member of the ‘Newlyn School’.

Archibald Thorburn | Naturalism wildlife painter

Archibald Thorburn (31 May 1860 - 9 October 1935 Hascombe, Surrey) was a Scottish /British animal painter and bird illustrator, painting mostly in watercolour.

He regularly visited Scotland to sketch birds in the wild, his favourite haunt being the Forest of Gaick near Kingussie in Invernesshire. His widely reproduced images of British wildlife, with their evocative and dramatic backgrounds, are enjoyed as much today as they were by sportsmen and birdlovers of a century ago.

Peacock and Peacock Butterfly

Rembrandt | Self-Portrait, 1658

Of the many self-portraits Rembrandt painted over a lifetime, this is perhaps the greatest, not only for its poignant revelations of the self, but for his sure handling of paint.

The initial effect on viewers is daunting, as though they are confronting an ill-tempered monarch.

The strange costume he wears is timeless.

In place of a crown, he wears a large velvet artist's beret.

Rembrandt | Self-Portrait, 1658 | Frick Collection, New York

Laura Knight | Avant-Garde painter

Dame Laura Knight (1877-1970) was one of the most popular and pioneering British artists of the twentieth century. Her artistic career took her from Cornwall to Baltimore, and from the circus to the Nuremberg Trials. She painted dancers at the Ballets Russes and Gypsies at Epsom races, and was acclaimed for her work as an official war artist.

Knight used portraiture to capture contemporary life and culture, and her paintings are remarkable for their diverse range of subjects and settings.

Lucien Fontanarosa | Post-Impressionist /Expressionist painter

Lucien Fontanarosa (1912-1975) was born to Italian parents in Paris where his father worked as a tailor. Fontanarosa grew up in Paris and also in Padua, Italy. He showed interest in art as a child, and spent his free time sketching the streets of Paris as a boy along the banks of the Seine. He took classes in these early years in Classical Art at the Academie Julian.

Dario de Regoyos | Plein air painter

Darío de Regoyos y Valdés was born in Ribadesella (Asturias) in 1857 and died in Barcelona in 1913. He spent his childhood and teenage years in Madrid. He began his artistic training in 1877 as a pupil of Carlos de Haes in the landscape department, receiving classes in landscape drawing. His eagerness to travel and learn about emerging foreign art movements spurred him in 1879 to visit Brussels, where his musician friends Isaac Albéniz and Enrique Fernández Arbós were then staying.

On the advice of Carlos de Haes, while in Brussels he contacted the man who had been Haes’s master years earlier, the Belgian painter Joseph Quinaux (1822-1895).

Fernando Fader | Post-impressionist painter

Fernando Fader (April 11, 1882 - February 25, 1935) was a French-born Argentine painter of the Post-impressionist school.

Fernando Fader was born in Bordeaux, France in 1882. His father, of Prussian descent, relocated the family to Argentina in 1884, settling in the western city of Mendoza before returning to France a few years later. Graduating from secondary school, Fader returned to Mendoza in 1898, where he first practiced his skill as an artist painting urban landscapes. Fader relocated to Munich in 1900, where he enrolled at a local vocational school. This training allowed him enrollment at the prestigious Munich Academy of Fine Arts, where he was mentored by Heinrich von Zügel, prominent in Europe's Naturalist Barbizon School.

Diane Millsap | Cityscape painter

Diane Millsap is a full-time, professional artist. Born in Southern California, and raised in the Chicago area, she and her husband now live in rural northern Illinois. She received her formal art training at Western Illinois University and from her mother, an accomplished watercolor artist. After a career in furniture design, she now paints full time.

Peter Gric, 1968 | Magic Realism painter

Peter Gric is Austrian painter, drawer and illustrator originally from Czech Republic.

In his art appear motives of futuristic landscapes and architecture, biomechanical surrealism and Fantastic realism. Gric is member of the art groups Libellule and Labyrinthe.

Peter Gric was born in Brno, former Czechoslovakia.

Rembrandt | Portrait of an Old Man, 1645

In this painting, Rembrandt turned his attention to the subject of old age, a recurring theme in his work that was also the focus of a large number of self portraits.

The identity of the figure in the painting is, however, unknown.

The rich costume that he is wearing gives no indication of the old man’s occupation or social status.

Rather, it appears to be an accessory belonging to the painter’s studio that he used as a powerfully effective decorative element.

Rex Preston, 1948 | Abstract Landscape painter

Born in Yardley, Birmingham, Rex Preston is one of Britain's leading landscape artists. He trained at Newcastle under Lyme School of Art and then Derby College of Art. Rex Preston has lived in Derbyshire for most of his life and although his home area of the Peak District and Pennines has exerted a huge influence on his painting, he travels the country searching for favourite subjects like Cornwall or the Lake District.

Daniel Courbois | Romantic Impressionist painter

Daniel Courbois belongs to one of the finest Impressionist painters in France. His paintings are on show at Gallery France which is located in Beynac et Cazenac. Dordogne, France.

Daniel Courbois travels throughout France and paints his romantic paintings plein air but uses also sheds as atelier which he ​encounters on his travels.

Daniel is an eccentric who doesn't like promoting himself and he has no permanent place or residence.

During 2014 we discovered Daniel by accident while he was working in the Dordogne area. | © Gallery France

Simeon Nijenhuis, 1969 | Impressionist painter

Simeon Nijenhuis is transforming reality, creating a metaphor, for him the main function of the visual arts. Simeon is also someone who paints from his feeling. From his inner urge he depict topics that fascinate him as vividly as possible. Often, captivating shades, fabric expressions or special light falling on an object, are the reason for making a painting.
Spontaneous and intuitive, he then gets to work to capture this atmosphere. Here he plays with an impressive variety of brushstrokes, subtle shades and textures in the paint. Continuing until the right dynamics versus harmony is found and the optimal power of expression is reached.

Peter Fiore, 1955 | Abstract Landscape painter

Peter Fiore is an American landscape painter who is best known for painting light and his striking use of color. Previously, he worked as a professional illustrator where he collaborated on thousands of projects and won numerous awards. Today his landscape paintings are widely collected and are in many corporate and private collections. He has won numerous awards and has been featured in a number of publications including Fine Art Connoisseur as an "Artist to Watch".

Vernon Ward | Edwardian Era painter

Vernon de Beauvoir Ward (1905-1985) was a 20th-century British painter and commercial artist noted for his works of flowers, birds and Edwardian subjects and who lived for most of his life in Hampstead in London.

• Early life and education

He was born in Hampstead, the son of an art dealer, educated at St Joseph's Roman Catholic school in Highgate and trained at the Slade School of Art in London under Henry Tonks, Wilson Steer and Sir Walter Russell. He was the cousin of John Stanton Ward.