He was born in Wooer’s Alley, Dunfermline, Fife, to a family of weavers who worked with damask. He continued the family trade for a short time. He had strong artistic inclinations however and studied briefly at the Royal Academy, London in 1843. He painted in the Pre-Raphaelite style and became a painter of historical, fairy, allegorical…
Jose Guadalupe Posada: (1852–1913) was a Mexican cartoonist illustrator and artist whose work has influenced many Latin American artists and cartoonists because of its satirical acuteness and political engagement. Posada was born in Aguascalientes, on February 2, 1852. His education in his early years was drawn from his older brother Cirilo, a country schoolteacher, who taught…
Painter of classical, historical, and literary subjects. John William Waterhouse was born in 1849 in Rome, where his father worked as a painter. He was referred to as “Nino” throughout his life. In the 1850s the family returned to England. Before entering the Royal Academy schools in 1870, Waterhouse assisted his father in his studio.…
“Visiting the galleries of Baroque painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art one afternoon, some friends and I paused before Rubens’s portrait of himself with his family, and reminded one another what a remarkable man he was. A painter of stupefying energy and force, he ran a workshop, listened to music as he painted, did…
John Payne (1607–1647) was an English engraver, who was one of the earliest exponents of the art of engraving in England. His best work was the finest produced by a native-born engraver working during the reign of Charles I. Payne had considerable skill in engraving, and many of his portraits and title-pages have great merit.…
J. H. Valda was a English illustrator and artist, who had studied alongside John Millais at the Sass’s Academy in London and had painted the portrait of King Edward VII.
“Born into an affluent middle class family in Southampton, Millais was a naturally talented artist with an engaging, unspoiled personality. He became the youngest pupil ever at the R.A. Schools when he arrived there aged 11, and the youngest to complete the course five years later. Technically he was extremely competent and was the star…
John Duncan was born in Dundee, Scotland in 1866. His father was a cattleman. John, however, had no interest in the family business and preferred the visual arts. By the age of 11 he was a student at the Dundee School of Art, then based at the High School of Dundee. Called a madman by some…
John of Berry or John the Magnificent (French: Jean de Berry; 30 November 1340 – 15 June 1416) was Duke of Berry and Auvergne and Count of Poitiers and Montpensier. He was the third son of King John II of France and Bonne of Luxemburg; his brothers were King Charles V of France, Duke Louis…
The Honourable John Maler Collier OBE RP ROI (27 January 1850 – 11 April 1934) was a leading English artist, and an author. He painted in the Pre-Raphaelite style, and was one of the most prominent portrait painters of his generation. Both his marriages were to daughters of Thomas Henry Huxley. He studied painting at…
John Charles Dollman RWS RI ROI (1851–1934) was an English painter and illustrator. Dollman was born in Hove on 6 May 1851 and moved to London to study at South Kensington and the Royal Academy Schools, after which he set up a studio at Bedford Park, London. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1870 to…
John Bauer (June 4, 1882 – November 20, 1918) was a Swedish painter and illustrator best known for his illustrations of Bland tomtar och troll (Among Gnomes and Trolls). Princess Tuvstarr and the Fishpond (named after Carex cespitosa), painted in 1913, is perhaps Bauer’s most notable work. John Bauer was born and raised in Jönköping with…
Grimshaw’s primary influence was the Pre-Raphaelites. True to the Pre-Raphaelite style, he created landscapes of accurate colour, lighting, vivid detail,and realism. He painted landscapes that typified seasons or a type of weather; city and suburban street scenes and moonlit views of the docks in London, Leeds, Liverpool, and Glasgow also figured largely in his art.…
Son of a much ridiculed poet, William Thomas Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald appears to have had little or no formal training, but from 1845 he was exhibiting at the British Institution and the Royal Academy. Although he is chiefly known for his fairy pieces, Fitzgerald seems to have made a living as a portrait painter and illustrator,…
Praetorius was born in Jáchymov, Bohemia. From 1557 he studied at the University of Wittenberg, and from 1562 to 1569 he lived in Nuremberg. His astronomical and mathematical instruments are kept at Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg. In 1571 be became Professor of mathematics (astronomy) at Wittenberg where he met Valentinus Otho and Joachim Rheticus. He died…
Johannes Gehrts (26 February 1855 St. Pauli – 1921 Dusseldorf), brother of Carl Gehrts (1853-1898), was a leading German illustrator whose work appeared in popular magazines such as Die Gartenlaube, in the design of children’s books and in works of his friend Felix Dahn. He depicted scenes from Germanic and Norse mythology, legends and sagas,…
Johann Frank Kirchbach (British, 1859-1912)
Jean-Léon Gérôme was born at Vesoul, Haute-Saône. He went to Paris in 1840 where he studied under Paul Delaroche, whom he accompanied to Italy (1843–1844). He visited Florence, Rome, the Vatican and Pompeii, but he was more attracted to the world of nature. Taken by a fever, he was forced to return to Paris in…
He was born at Nancy, in northeastern France, to an artistic and theatrical family. The name “Grandville” was his grandparents’ professional stage name. Grandville received his first instruction in drawing from his father, a painter of miniatures. At the age of twenty-one he moved to Paris, and soon afterwards published a collection of lithographs entitled…
Benjamin-Constant was born in Paris. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he was a pupil of Alexandre Cabanel. A journey to Morocco in 1872 strongly influenced his early artistic development and lead him to produce Romantic scenes under the spell of Orientalism. Among his noted works in this vein are Last…