Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (15 July 1606 – 4 October 1669) was a Dutch painter and etcher. He is generally considered one of the greatest painters and printmakers in European art history and the most important in Dutch history. His contributions to art came in a period that historians call the Dutch Golden Age. Having achieved youthful success as…
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (April 6 or March 28, 1483 – April 6, 1520), better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance, celebrated for the perfection and grace of his paintings and drawings. Together with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, he forms the traditional trinity of great masters of that period. Raphael was enormously…
The last of this year’s summer pictures is The Harvesters, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, one of a series of depictions of the months of the year which the artist painted for the Antwerp merchant Nicolaes Jongelinck in 1565. Of the five surviving pictures from that series, three are to be found in the breathtaking…
Piero di Cosimo – Italian painter. He was Florentine and trained in the studio of Cosimo Rosselli, working as his assistant in painting the frescos in the Sistine Chapel (begun 1481). The main source of information about him is Vasari who, in the Lives, portrays him as a thoroughgoing eccentric whose diet consisted principally of…
Piero della Francesca seems to have been another incorruptible, though little is known about him: his birth date could have been any time between 1400 and 1420, though we know he died in 1492. His father was a tanner and his own first job was to paint the striped poles used to carry candles in…
“Before Rubens, no Western artist of equally great talent had been as well born, as well educated, as well mothered, as well placed, or as widely and powerfully patronized. His father, a Protestant lawyer, left Antwerp for Westphalia to escape persecution. There Peter Paul was born and baptized a Calvinist; then his parents separated. Mother…
PAOLO CALIARI was born in Verona, hence he was known by the name Veronese. He studied with Antonio Badile while living in Verona, before moving to Venice in about 1553. With Titian and Tintoretto, Veronese dominated the Venetian art scene. His use of color differed from that of other painters of the Venetian school, and…
Abarber’s son, Paolo Uccello was born in Florence. In 1407 he was apprenticed to the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti. After Uccello joined the painters’ guild in 1415, there are 10 blank years. From 1425 to 1431 he executed mosaics for the facade of St. Mark’s, Venice. Uccello’s earliest known paintings, representing the creation of the animals and…
Odilon Redon was born on April 20, 1840, in Bordeaux. His father was a rich French colonist in the southern United States; his mother, of French descent, was from New Orleans. Odilon lived on his uncle’s estate in Peyrelebade until 1851, and he spent summers there from 1874 to 1897. Redon began to study drawing in…
M.C. Escher (1898-1972) produced work that remains among the most widely reproduced and popular graphic art of the twentieth century. His brain-teasing prints use interlocking shapes, transforming creatures, and impossible architectures to challenge the viewer’s perceptions of reality. Expressing what he called a “keen interest in the geometric laws contained by nature around us,” his…
It is a strange and puzzling fact that the only German painter who can be compared with Dürer for greatness and artistic power has been forgotten to such an extent that we are not even quite sure of his name. A writer of the seventeenth century makes rather confused mention of one Matthias Grünewald of…
Lucas Cranach the Elder (Lucas Cranach der Altere, 4 October 1472 – 16 October 1553), was a German Renaissance painter and printmaker in woodcut and engraving. He was court painter to the Electors of Saxony for most of his career, and is known for his portraits, both of German princes and those of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, whose cause he…
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519, Old Style) was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer. Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance Man, a man of “unquenchable curiosity” and “feverishly inventive imagination”.…
Katsushika Hokusai (October or November 1760 – May 10, 1849) was a Japanese artist, ukiyo-e painter and printmaker of the Edo period. He was influenced by such painters as Sesshu, and other styles of Chinese painting. Born in Edo (now Tokyo), Hokusai is best known as author of the woodblock print series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (c. 1831) which includes the internationally recognized print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, created…
“John Martin: Apocalypse” at Tate Britain. To say that the art of John Martin divided nineteenth-century critical opinion would be something of an understatement. The eminent Victorian, Edward Bulwer Lytton – the man who coined the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword” – declared Martin to be “the greatest, the most lofty, the…
Henry Fuseli was born in Switzerland, the son of a painter and writer, Johann Caspar Fuseli (sometimes spelt Füssli, 1707-82). His father’s love of art and literature was transmitted to his son, manifesting itself in such works as The Death of Oedipus (1784) and Titania and Bottom (c. 1780-90), as well as in Henry’s later…
Dutch painter. He specialized in domestic interiors, portraits and city views. His entire life was spent in Delft, where, it has been suggested, he may have been trained by Leonaert Bramer or Carel Fabritius. His work does indeed show an affinity with that of Fabritius, but their relationship remains uncertain. Vermeer was a Master in…
“Few people have been so eclipsed by their younger brother as Hubert was by Jan van Eyck. Today, Hubert is the merest phantom; he is that part of the Ghent altarpiece of The Adoration of the Lamb which is not by Jan – the curl of paper left by art historians when they have finished…
“Tintoretto stayed at home, but he felt in his own person a craving for something that Titian could not teach him. The Venice he was born in was not the Venice of Titian’s early youth, and his own adolescence fell in the period when Spain was rapidly making herself mistress of Italy. The haunting sense…
Hieronymus Bosch born Jeroen Anthoniszoon van Aken c. 1450 – 9 August 1516), was a Dutch painter. His work is known for its use of fantastic imagery to illustrate moral and religious concepts and narratives. Bosch produced several triptychs. Among his most famous is The Garden of Earthly Delights. This painting, for which the original…