Francesco Maria Guazzo, aka Guaccio, aka Guaccius (15??-16??) is most well known for the writing the Compendium Maleficarum (Book of Witches). He was a member of one of the oldest of the Catholic Ambrosian orders. These religious brotherhoods had appeared at various times since the 14th Century in and around the city of Milan and were…
Francesco de’ Rossi (1510–1563) was an Italian Mannerist painter from Florence, also active in Rome. He is known by many names, prominently the adopted name Francesco Salviati or as Il Salviati, but also Francesco Rossi and Cecchino del Salviati. Salviati was born and died in Florence. He apprenticed under Giuliano Bugiardini, Baccio Bandinelli, Raffaele Brescianino,…
“Fra Angelico was a Dominican friar in the monastery at Fiesole. The convent of San Marco was taken over by his Order in 1436, and he was commissioned to decorate the friar’s cells with frescoes painted directly on to wet plaster walls. These were intended to stimulate prayer and meditation rather than to be a…
Mary Evelyn De Morgan, née Pickering, was a late-Victorian artist who lived and worked in a period marked by cataclysmic changes. Born mid-century in an England ruled over by Queen Victoria, she lived to see a series of changes climaxing in 1914 with the collapse of established world order. It was amidst this atmosphere of…
Ernst Fuchs (born February 13, 1930) is an Austrian painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, architect, stage designer, composer, poet, singer and one of the founders of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism. In 1972 he acquired the derelict Otto Wagner Villa in Hütteldorf, which he restored and transformed. The villa was inaugurated as the Ernst Fuchs…
Portrait of the painter Ernst Ferdinand Oehme. Painting by Johann Karl Ulrich Baehr . Ernst Ferdinand Oehme (* 23 April 1797 in Dresden , † 10 April 1855 ) was a of the German Romantic attributable painter. After he was self-taught beginnings in 1819 at the Dresden Art Academy and received in the same year students of…
Émile Friant (16 April 1863, Dieuze, Moselle – 9 June 1932, Paris) was a French artist. Friant was born in the commune of Dieuze. He would later be forced to flee to Nancy due to the encroachment of the Kingdom of Prussia’s soldiers. His paintings were featured throughout his lifetime at the Salon, until a…
Eliphas Levi, born Alphonse Louis Constant (February 8, 1810 – May 31, 1875), was a French occult author and ceremonial magician. “Eliphas Levi”, the name under which he published his books, was his attempt to translate or transliterate his given names “Alphonse Louis” into Hebrew although he was not Jewish. His second wife was French sculptress Marie-Noémi…
Elihu Vedder is an American artist who never lived in Britain, and finds a place on these pages, along with a few other foreign painters, because his work is so much in the same spirit as that of British Victorian artists, and especially the Classical School. The so-called ‘American Pre-Raphaelites’ tend to be landscape painters,…
Edward Robert Hughes (1851–1914) was an English painter who worked in a style influenced by Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism. Some of his best known works are Midsummer Eve and Night With Her Train of Stars. Hughes was the nephew of Arthur Hughes. He often used watercolour/gouache. He was elected ARWS in 1891, and chose as his…
“Burne-Jones is the most important and the best painter of the second wave of Pre-Raphaelites. A poetic young man from Birmingham who, like Morris, was preparing for a career in the church, he never had any academic art training and consequently developed his own very distinctive approach, using medieval models as his template but invigorating…
Édouard Chimot (26 November 1880 – 7 June 1959) was a French artist, illustrator and editor whose career reached its peak in the 1920s in Paris, through the publication of fine quality art-printed books. As artist his own work occupies a characteristic place, but as editor also his role was extremely important in bringing together…
Born in Toulouse, France, he began his career by studying law at the University of Toulouse. He also studied art, switching to it full time after he became bored with law, and having won prizes at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. He spent a very brief period at the Académie Julian in Paris in 1904…
Domenico de’ Rossi (1659–1730) was an Italian sculptor and engraver. In 1709 Domenico inherited the printshop of Giovanni Giacomo de’ Rossi, by the church of Santa Maria della Pace, the largest and most long-lived publisher of the Roman baroque. Several generations of the de’ Rossi participated in the family publishing firm established in the 17th century,…
Dieric Bouts (born ca. 1415 – 6 May 1475) was an Early Netherlandish painter. According to Karel van Mander in his Het Schilderboeck of 1604, Bouts was born in Haarlem and was mainly active in Leuven (Louvain), where he was city painter from 1468. Van Mander confused the issue by writing biographies of both “Dieric…
“ANECDOTES HAVE their own truth, deeper, often, than the bare historical truth that would be theirs if the events they pretend to record in fact took place. It is a matter of historical truth that Velazquez painted the great portrait of his slave and assistant, Juan de Pareja, during his second sojourn in Italy. Pareja…
French painter, active in Italy. He was for a long time confused with FRAN?OIS DE NOM?, and the work of both artists was thought to be by a Mons’ Desiderio, a ‘highly praised painter of perspectives and city scenes’ (de Dominici). It is now generally accepted that Mons? Desiderio was the pseudonym of Didier Barra…
David Teniers the Younger (15 December 1610 – 25 April 1690) was a Flemish artist born in Antwerp, the son of David Teniers the Elder. His son David Teniers III and his grandson David Teniers IV were also painters. His wife Anna, née Anna Breughel, was the daughter of Jan Brueghel the Elder and the…
A member of the Ryckaert family of artists, he was born and raised in Antwerp, the city in which he conducted his career and in which he died. He was the son of David Ryckaert II, grandson of David Ryckaert I, and nephew of Martin Ryckaert. David Ryckaert was a pupil of his homonymous father; his…
The son of Bartholomäus Hopfer, a painter, and his wife Anna Sendlerin, Daniel moved to Augsburg early in his life, and acquired citizenship there in 1493. In 1497 he married Justina Grimm, sister of the Augsburg publisher, physician and druggist Sigismund Grimm. The couple had three sons, Jörg, Hieronymus and Lambert, the last two of whom…