Orsola Caccia (1596-1676) | Mannerist painter

Orsola Maddalena Caccia, born Theodora Caccia (1596-1676) was an Italian Mannerist painter and Catholic nun.

She painted religious images, altarpieces, and still lifes.

The daughter of painter Guglielmo Caccia and Laura Olivia, she was baptized Theodora Orsola on December 4, 1596.

In 1620, she entered the Ursulines convent at Bianzè, where she changed her name to Orsola Maddalena after she took her vows.

Park Im Gyu 박임규 | Watercolor painter

Park Im Gyu (Korean: 박임규) is an South Korean Artist who is renowned for his delicate brushstrokes and precise character descriptions through pencil and watercolor.

Park Im Gyu was born in Hamyang County, a county in South Gyeongsang Province, South Korea.

Currently lives and works in Ulsan Metropolitan City.

Jack Butler Yeats RHA | Expressionist painter

Jack Butler Yeats RHA (29 August 1871 - 28 March 1957) was an Irish artist and Olympic medalist. W. B. Yeats was his brother.

Butler's early style was that of an illustrator; he only began to work regularly in oils in 1906.

His early pictures are simple lyrical depictions of landscapes and figures, predominantly from the west of Ireland - especially of his boyhood home of Sligo.

Yeats's work contains elements of Romanticism.

He later would adopt the style of Expressionism.

Ewa Czarniecka, 1975 | Impressionist painter

Ewa Czarniecka is a Polish born Artist from the small South-Eastern village of Krasiczyn.

Naturally one of her early influences was the work of Bronislow Linke which she first discovered aged 13, when she would try and mimic his artwork to recreate the overwhelming feeling she felt to see it for the first time.

For years Ewa used pen and paper to express her thoughts, spending hours everyday writing in a journal.

Margaret Keane | Big eyes

Andy Warhol said:

"I think what Keane has done is terrific! If it were bad, so many people wouldn’t like it".

Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Margaret Keane (born Peggy Doris Hawkins, September 15, 1927 - June 26, 2022) always loved to paint and draw since an early age.

She first made her paintings famous in San Francisco’s North Beach in the 1950s.

Margaret’s work drew little accolades from art critics but was loved and admired by the world.

Margaret went on to become one of the most successful living artists in the early 60s to present day.

Jean-Paul Sartre: "Ogni parola ha conseguenze. Il silenzio anche!"

• "Il desiderio si esprime attraverso la carezza, come il pensiero attraverso il linguaggio".

• "Desire is expressed by caress, thought by language".

• "All'inizio, l'uomo esiste, si alza e compare sulla scena, solo in seguito definisce se stesso".

• "Quando i ricchi si fanno la guerra, sono i poveri a morire".

• "When the rich make war, it's the poor that die".

Auguste Rodin | The Thinker (detail) | Musee Rodin

Pablo Picasso | Boulevard de Clichy, Paris, 1901

Artists from all countries came to Paris to find a connection to the modern era.

On his first trip to Paris, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) painted a street in Montmartre, the neighborhood that was popular among artists, in the Impressionist style.

The picture is part of a group of about thirty works that the then nineteen-year-old artist presented at his solo exhibition in the Galerie Ambroise Vollard in 1901 in Paris. | Source: © Museum Barberini, Potsdam

Pablo Picasso | Boulevard de Clichy, Paris, 1901 | Museum Barberini, Potsdam

Raoul Du Gardier | Genre / seascape painter

Raoul Alfred Henri Robert du Gardier (1 April 1871 - 17 October 1952) was a French painter.

He was born in Wiesbaden (Ger), the son of a very wealthy French family.

In 1890 he studied at the Écoles des Beaux Arts in Paris under Gustave Moreau, Théobald Chartran, Élie Delaunay and Albert Maignan.

Pietro Gabrini | Genre painter

Pietro Gabrini (Rome, 1856-1926) was an Italian painter and watercolourist who worked in variety of mediums on diverse subject matters.

A pupil of Guglielmo de Sanctis, he soon devoted himself to painting historical and literary subjects - "Romeo and Juliet", exhibited in Rome in 1885.

From the mid-1980s he also tackled genre subjects and landscapes, creating watercolors of the Roman countryside.

François Mauriac: "Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are"!

• "Dimmi ciò che leggi e ti dirò chi sei, è vero, ma ti conoscerei meglio se mi dicessi quello che rileggi".

• "Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread".

François Mauriac

• "The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book".

• "La macchina tecnologicamente più efficiente che l’uomo abbia mai inventato è il libro".

Herman Northrop Frye

Carl Spitzweg | The Bookworm, 1850 | Grohmann Museum

Mary Beale | Baroque painter

Mary Beale (née Cradock; bapt. 26 March 1633 – bur. 8 October 1699) was an English portrait painter.

She was part of a small band of female professional artists working in London.

Beale became the main financial provider for her family through her professional work - a career she maintained from 1670/71 to the 1690s.

Beale was also a writer, whose prose Discourse on Friendship of 1666 presents scholarly, uniquely female take on the subject.

Cornelis de Heem | Baroque painter

Cornelis de Heem (8 April 1631 (baptized) - 17 May 1695 (buried) was a still-life painter associated with both Flemish Baroque and Dutch Golden Age painting.

He was a member of a large family of still-life specialists, of which his father, Jan Davidszoon de Heem (1606–1684), was the most significant.

Cornelis was baptised in Leiden on 8 April 1631, and moved with his family to Antwerp in 1636.

Max Pietschmann | Symbolist painter

Ernst Max Pietschmann (1865-1952) was a German Symbolist painter.

Max Pietschmann studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts from 1883 to 1889.

His teachers included Leon Pohle and Ferdinand Pauwels.

Pietschmann belonged to the painters' colony in Goppeln near Bannewitz, which specialized in plein air painting.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel: "The masses will always be below the average".. 1871

Journal Intime / 12th June 1871: - "Numbers make law, but goodness has nothing to do with figures.

Every fiction is self-expiating, and democracy rests upon this legal fiction, that the majority has not only force but reason on its side - that it possesses not only the right to act but the wisdom necessary for action.

The fiction is dangerous because of its flattery; the demagogues have always flattered the private feelings of the masses.

René Magritte (1898-1967) | Le lieu commun, 1964 | Christie's

Maurice Ravel: "The only love affair I have ever had was with music!"

• "Dobbiamo sempre ricordare che la sensibilità e l'emozione costituiscono il vero contenuto di un'opera d'arte".

• "Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second".

• "We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art".

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec | Spanish Dancer | Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

René Magritte | The “Renoir” period, 1940-1947

- "For the period I call 'Surrealism in full sunlight', I am trying to join together two mutually exclusive things: one, a feeling of levity, intoxication, happiness, which depends on a certain mood and on an atmosphere that certain Impressionists, or rather, Impressionism in general, have managed to render in painting.

Without Impressionism, I do not believe we would know this feeling of real objects perceived through colours and nuances, and free of all classical reminiscences... and, two, a feeling of the mysterious quality of objects" - René Magritte.

Jacques-Émile Blanche | Portrait painter

Jacques-Émile Blanche (1861-1942) was a French painter and writer.

His father, a fashionable nerve specialist, owned a clinic where many of Blanche's sitters had been patients.

As a painter he had both talent and charm, and he enjoyed a great vogue in his day.

His work lacks originality and was much influenced by such contemporaries as James Tissot and John Singer Sargent.

The loose brushwork and subdued colouring of his portraits are also reminiscent of Edouard Manet and English 18th-century artists, especially Thomas Gainsborough.

Greek Art History and Sitemap

Greek art began in the Cycladic and Minoan civilization, and gave birth to Western classical art in the subsequent Geometric, Archaic and Classical periods (with further developments during the Hellenistic Period).

It absorbed influences of Eastern civilizations, of Roman art and its patrons, and the new religion of Orthodox Christianity in the Byzantine era and absorbed Italian and European ideas during the period of Romanticism (with the invigoration of the Greek Revolution), until the Modernist and Postmodernist.

Greek art is mainly five forms: architecture, sculpture, painting, pottery and jewelry making.

Zorba's Dance / La Danza di Zorba, 1964

Jean-Etienne Liotard | Orientalist Pastel painter

Jean Etienne Liotard | Woman in Turkish Dress, Seated on a Sofa, 1752 | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Jean-Etienne Liotard was a widely traveled artist whose French Huguenot family had settled in Geneva, where he was born, owing to the passage of the Edict of Nantes.

From 1738 to 1742 he lived in Istanbul (Constantinople) and thereafter painted genre scenes of non-Muslim women in Turkish costume, such as this one, which were greatly admired throughout western Europe.

In pastel, his technique is colorful and exceptionally smooth and flawless.

Jean Etienne Liotard | Woman in Turkish Dress, seated on a Sofa, 1752 (pastel over red chalk underdrawing on parchment) | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Rachel Ruysch | Baroque painter

Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750), who has been called the "most celebrated Dutch woman artist of the 17th and 18th centuries", was successful for nearly 70 years as a specialist in flower paintings.

Born in The Hague, Ruysch moved to Amsterdam with her family when she was three.

Her maternal grandfather, Pieter Post, was an important architect and her father, Frederik Ruysch, an eminent scientist from whom she learned how to observe and record nature with great accuracy.

Matthias Stom | Baroque painter

Matthias Stom or Matthias Stomer (1600-1652) was a Dutch, or possibly Flemish, painter who is only known for the works he produced during his residence in Italy.

He was influenced by the work of non-Italian followers of Caravaggio in Italy, in particular his Dutch followers often referred to as the Utrecht Caravaggists, as well as by Jusepe de Ribera and Peter Paul Rubens.

The Ladies of the Baroque | Part 1

As in the Renaissance Period, many women among the Baroque artists came from artist families. Artemisia Gentileschi is an example of this.

She was trained by her father, Orazio Gentileschi, and she worked alongside him on many of his commissions.

Luisa Roldán was trained in her father's (Pedro Roldán) sculpture workshop.

Artemisia Gentileschi | Judith and her maid with the head of Holofernes, 1613 | Gallerie degli Uffizi, Firenze.

Michaelina Wautier | Baroque painter

Michaelina Wautier, also Woutiers (1604-1689), was a painter from the Southern Netherlands.

Only since the turn of the 21st century has her work been recognized as that of an outstanding female Baroque artist, her works having been previously attributed to male artists, especially her brother Charles.

Wautier was noted for the variety of subjects and genres that she worked in.

This was unusual for female artists of the time who were more often restricted to smaller paintings, generally portraits or still-lifes.

Maria Sibylla Merian | Baroque Era Illustrator

Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) was a German naturalist and scientific illustrator.

She was one of the earliest European naturalists to observe insects directly. Merian was a descendant of the Frankfurt branch of the Swiss Merian family.

Merian received her artistic training from her stepfather, Jacob Marrel, a student of the still life painter Georg Flegel.

Merian published her first book of natural illustrations in 1675.

Elga Sesemann | Expressionist painter

Elga Sesemann (March 28, 1922 - January 21, 2007) was a Finnish post-war neo-romantic painter.

She was an expressionist whose themes often included melancholy, depression, anxiety and loneliness.

Sesemann was born in Viipuri (Vyborg) on the Karelian Isthmus.

Sesemann's family is of German origin and grew up speaking German and Russian.

Pablo Neruda | Ode al primo giorno dell’anno / Ode to the First Day of the Year

Lo distinguiamo dagli altri

come se fosse un cavallino

diverso da tutti i cavalli.

Gli adorniamo la fronte

con un nastro,

gli posiamo sul collo sonagli colorati,

Olga Darchuk, 1976

Karl Feiertag | Genre painter

Karl Holiday (1874, Vienna - 1944, Weidling) was an Austrian painter.

Karl Urlaub studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna with Franz Rumpler, Kasimir Pochwalski and Josef Mathias Trenkwald.

He worked in Vienna and Munich for various advertising companies and moved to Weidling with his wife.

Luigi Pirandello | Sogno di Natale, 1896

Sentivo da un pezzo sul capo inchinato tra le braccia come l'impressione d'una mano lieve, in atto tra di carezza e di protezione. Ma l'anima mia era lontana, errante pei luoghi veduti fin dalla fanciullezza, dei quali mi spirava ancor dentro il sentimento, non tanto però che bastasse al bisogno che provavo di rivivere, fors'anche per un minuto, la vita come immaginavo si dovesse in quel punto svolgere in essi.

Era festa dovunque: in ogni chiesa, in ogni casa: intorno al ceppo, lassù; innanzi a un Presepe, laggiù; noti volti tra ignoti riuniti in lieta cena; eran canti sacri, suoni di zampogne, gridi di fanciulli esultanti, contese di giocatori. . . E le vie delle città grandi e piccole, dei villaggi, dei borghi alpestri o marini, eran deserte nella rigida notte. E mi pareva di andar frettoloso per quelle vie, da questa casa a quella, per godere della raccolta festa degli altri; mi trattenevo un poco in ognuna, poi auguravo:

- Buon Natale - e sparivo. . .

Tiziano Vecellio | La Madonna di San Niccolò dei Frari, 1533-1535

Salvatore Quasimodo | Natale / Christmas

Natale. Guardo il presepe scolpito,

dove sono i pastori appena giunti

alla povera stalla di Betlemme.

Anche i Re Magi nelle lunghe vesti

salutano il potente Re del mondo.

Jacopo Tintoretto | The Madonna of the Stars, c. 1575-1585 | National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Ellen Thesleff | Expressionist painter

Ellen Thesleff (5 October 1869 - 12 January 1954) was an expressionist Finnish painter, regarded as one of the leading Finnish modernist painters.

Thesleff was born in Helsinki, the eldest daughter of five siblings and her father was an amateur painter.

She took private lessons and then, in 1887, studied for two years at the Finnish Art Society Drawing School (now known as the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts) with Gunnar Berndtson.

Harriet Backer | Impressionist painter

Biography from: Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo, Norvegia

Harriet Backer inspired a new generation of artists.

In Backer’s family, art and culture were part of how the children were raised.

Her older sister Agathe was musically gifted and wanted to become a pianist.

She had to go abroad to learn, and Harriet became her sister's traveling companion.

Asta Nørregaard | Portrait painter

Asta Nørregaard (13 August 1853 - 23 March 1933) was a Norwegian painter who is best known for her portraits.

Nørregaard was born in Christiania (now Oslo), Norway.

She was the daughter of Hans Peter Nørregaard (1818–1872) and Elise Jacobine Hesselberg (1821–1853).

Pavel Mitkov, 1977 | Impressionist /Abstract painter

Award winning painter Pavel Mitkov, born in Sofia, Bulgaria, is the most successful and collected Bulgarian artist in the European connoisseur of art community in recent years.

Extremely talented, his philosophy of life pertains to wisdom unusual for his young age.

The paintings of Pavel Mitkov reflect not only his natural artistic talent, but also his passion for painting.

Galileo Chini | Art Nouveau painter

One of the leading players in the Art Nouveau style, or Liberty style as it is known in Italy, the Tuscan painter Galileo Chini (1873-1956) - who was also a graphic artist and a ceramicist) - occupies a unique place in the panorama of Italian art.

Born in Florence, Galileo Chini pursued his artistic studies in a sporadic, desultory manner, attending the Scuola Libera di Nudo at the city's Accademia di Belle Arti for a while, but without ever gaining any kind of diploma from it, he was to break off his studies in order to work as an artisan in the workshop of his uncle, a restorer and decorator.

Giuseppe Amisani | Belle Époque painter

Italian portrait painter of the Belle Époque Giuseppe Amisani (1881-1941) was an important figure in his lifetime, though almost entirely forgotten today - his name is not included in the principal works of reference in the twenty-first century.

He was a close contemporary of Umberto Boccioni and of Pablo Picasso, but completely ignored currents such as Futurism and Cubism which changed the face of fine art in the twentieth century, preferring to satisfy the tastes of his clients, who were the noble, rich and the famous of his time.

His reputation was for elegance and for the fresh colours of his palette.

A retrospective exhibition of his work at the Castello Sforzesco of Vigevano in the province of Pavia in 2008 was the first dedicated to him in fifty years.

Robert Armetta | Classical realist painter

Armetta has studied extensively throughout the United States and Europe, at schools including Columbus College of Art and Design, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Barnstone Studios, Atelier Lack, the Florence Academy of Art, the New York Academy of Art 1998 the Water Street Atelier.

He has exhibited widely, in both solo and group exhibitions, across the United States, at venues including the National Academy of Design, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, the Susquehanna Museum of Art, Sotheby’s, the State University of New York at Farmingdale, St. John’s University, Messiah College, Arcadia Fine Art, John Pence Gallery, Century Gallery, and Seraphin Gallery.

La Belle Époque

La Belle Époque is a period of French and European history, usually considered to begin around 1871-1880 and to end with the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

Occurring during the era of the Third French Republic, it was a period characterised by optimism, regional peace, economic prosperity, colonial expansion, and technological, scientific, and cultural innovations.

In this era of France's cultural and artistic climate (particularly within Paris), the arts markedly flourished, with numerous masterpieces of literature, music, theatre, and visual art gaining extensive recognition.

Jean Béraud | Seaside Café, 1884 | The Clark Art Institute

Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant | Orientalist painter

Biography from: Christie's

Born in Paris into a Languedoc family, Jean Joseph Benjamin Constant (1845-1902) trained in Toulouse at the local Academie before moving to Paris in 1866.

He enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts and completed his training under the academic master Alexandre Cabanel.

His studies were interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War and the young artist never resumed his formal training.

Instead, in the early 1870s he travelled to Spain, and fell under the spell of the Mudejar architecture of Andalucia.

Fanny Fleury | Academic painter

Fanny Laurent Fleury, known as Madame Fanny (1846-1923) was a French painter.

Fleury was born in Paris, France, and trained with Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran, Marie Durand and Jean-Jacques Henner.

She developed a reputation as a talented portraitist and painter of figure studies.

She also painted genre scenes and still life, which she exhibited at the Salons of Saint-Etienne and Dijon.

Jean-Jacques Henner | Academic painter

Jean-Jacques Henner (5 March 1829 - 23 July 1905) was a French painter, noted for his use of sfumato and chiaroscuro in painting figures, religious subjects and portraits.

Henner was born at Bernwiller (Alsace). He began his studies in art as a pupil of Michel Martin Drolling and François-Édouard Picot.

In 1848, he entered the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, and took the Prix de Rome with a painting of Adam and Eve finding the Body of Abel in 1858.

In Rome, he was guided by Flandrin, and painted four pictures for the gallery at Colmar among other works.

Juana Romani | Belle Époque painter

Biography from: Sotheby's

Born in Velletri, Italy, Joana Carolina Carlessimo, called Juana Romani, moved with her family as a young girl to Paris, where she first encountered painting as an art school model.

At age nineteen, Romani began her training as the pupil of Jean-Jacques Henner before becoming a student of Ferdinand Roybet, and later, his mistress.

Like Roybet, she chose historical subjects and painted many portraits of young, mysterious women in costume.

Ottilie Roederstein | Portrait painter

Ottilie Wilhelmine Roederstein (22 April 1859 - 26 November 1937) was a German-Swiss painter.

She was the long-time companion of Elisabeth Winterhalter, one of the first female doctors in Germany.

Roederstein was born in Zürich, Switzerland.

Gottardo Segantini | Divisionist painter

Biography from: The British Museum

Gottardo Guido Segantini (1882-1974) - Painter and etcher. The eldest son of the painter Giovanni Segantini.

Born in Pusiano near Brianza in the province of Como.Gottardo SegantiniHe moved with his family to Savognin in Switzerland in 1882 and to Maloja in 1894.

In 1899 Gottardo Segantini spent a few months at the Accademia di Brera before going on to Zurich to study engineering at the Technical University (now ETH) where he learnt the technique of etching, and began painting in 1902.

Jan Brueghel the Elder | Baroque painter

Biography from: The National Gallery, London

Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625) was born in Brussels in 1568, the son of Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

He is said to have been taught in Antwerp by Pieter Goetkint and to have visited Cologne.

From 1589-1596 he worked in Italy, mainly in Naples, Rome, and Milan where he met one of his most important patrons, Cardinal Federico Borromeo, who remained a lifelong friend.

Anselm Kiefer, 1945 | Neo-expressionist painter / sculptor

"Art is difficult, it is not entertainment!" - Anselm Kiefer, German painter and sculptor.

Biography from: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Anselm Kiefer was born in Donaueschingen, Baden-Württembürg, Germany, and raised near the east bank of the Rhine in the region of the Black Forest.

Kiefer was named after the nineteenth-century classical painter Anselm Feuerbach and planned from childhood to become an artist.

After studies at the university in Freiburg and the academy in Karlsruhe, he studied informally in the early 1970s with the artist Joseph Beuys on occasional visits to Düsseldorf.

Anselm Kiefer | Die fruchtbare Halbmond / La Mezzaluna fertile | Sammlung Essl Museum

Dora Hitz | Impressionist / Symbolist painter

Dora Hitz (30 March 1856, Altdorf bei Nürnberg - 20 November 1924, Berlin) was a Court Painter to the Romanian Royal Family, a member of the November Group and co-founder of the Berlin Secession.

Dora Hitz mainly painted figures, especially portraits of women, girls and mothers, sometimes in the style of symbolism.

Since her stay in France she has painted oil paintings, gouaches and watercolors in the Impressionist style.

When she was six years old, her family moved to Ansbach and at thirteen she was sent to Munich to study at the "Damenmalschule der Frau Staatsrat Weber", an art school for young women, where she studied with Wilhelm von Lindenschmit the Younger.

Otolia Kraszewska (1859-1945)

Otolia Gräfin Kraszewska (February 15, 1859 in Żytomierz - March 3, 1945 in Munich) was a Polish cartoonist, illustrator and painter.

Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg with Ivan Aivazovsky.

Around 1890, she left for Munich and settled there permanently, becoming involved with the Polish colony centered around Józef Brandt.

Leonora Carrington | Surrealist sculpture

Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was a painter, writer, sculptor, alchemist, visionary, and was the darling of the 1930s Surrealism movement.

She never tried to be a Surrealist, but her paintings of fantastical creatures and living furniture happened to encapsulate the essence of the movement.

Gustave François Barraud (Swiss, 1883-1964)

Gustave François Barraud (Geneva, 1883-1964) was an Swiss painter, illustrator and designer.

Is particularly well known for his still lifes, flowers, landscapes, portraits, female figures, wood engravings and lithographs.

Leopold Müller | Orientalist painter

Leopold Carl Müller (9 December 1834 - 4 August 1892) was an Austrian genre painter noted for his Orientalist works.

Biography

Born in Dresden to Austrian parents, he was a pupil of Karl von Blaas and of Christian Ruben at the Academy in Vienna.

Obliged to support his family after his father's death, he worked eight years as an illustrator for the Vienna Figaro.