Cristofano Allori (17 October 1577 – 1 April 1621) was an Italian portrait painter of the late Florentine Mannerist school. Allori was born at Florence and received his first lessons in painting from his father, Alessandro Allori, but becoming dissatisfied with the hard anatomical drawing and cold coloring of the latter, he entered the studio…
He was born into a family of artists, and learned to paint from his father Herman, along with his brothers Abraham and Herman Saftleven the Younger. He lived for a time in Utrecht with his brother. Saftleven’s subject matter covered various subjects, including genre works, portraits, beach scenes, and biblical and mythological themes. Some consider his…
Jacques Albin Simon Collin de Plancy (1793 or 1794 –1881) was a French occultist, demonologist and writer; he published several works on occultism and demonology. He was born in 1793 or 1794 in Plancy (presently Plancy-l’Abbaye) and died in 1881 in Paris. He was a free-thinker influenced by Voltaire. He worked as a printer and…
Gillot was born in Langres. He was a painter, engraver, book illustrator, metal worker, and designer for the theatre. He had Watteau as an apprentice between 1703 and 1708. Gillot’s sportive mythological landscape pieces, with such titles as Feast of Pan and Feast of Bacchus, opened the Academy of Painting at Paris to him in…
Charles Allan Gilbert (September 3, 1873 – April 20, 1929), better known as C. Allan Gilbert, was a prominent American illustrator. He is especially remembered for a widely published drawing (a memento mori or vanitas) titled All Is Vanity. The drawing employs a double image (or visual pun) in which the scene of a woman…
Profoundly yet sensitively Germanic, images by Caspar David Friedrich are those of a Wagner in nucleo – without the heavy orchestral breathing. Implicitly musical, the painter’s tender art reaches back to Mozart and on to Richard Strauss, filled with death and transfiguration. A one-man, more benevolent Brothers Grimm, Friedrich, born in Swedish Pomerania, never terrorized…
Schwabe was born in Altona, Holstein, and moved to Geneva, Switzerland at an early age. After studying art in Geneva, he relocated to Paris as a young man, where he worked as a wallpaper designer, and he became acquainted with Symbolist artists. His paintings typically featured mythological and allegorical themes; as an essentially literary artist,…
Carlo Farneti – Illustration for a 1935 edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, from the collection of Richard Sica.
Carl Gustav Carus (3 January 1789 – 28 July 1869) was a German physiologist and painter, born in Leipzig, who played vaorious roles during the Romantic era. A friend of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, he was a many-sided man: a doctor, a naturalist, a scientist, a psychologist, and a landscape painter who studied under Caspar…
One of the most prolific artists of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, Byam Shaw excelled as a painter, illustrator, printmaker, theatre designer, teacher and muralist. John Byam Liston Shaw was born in Madras on 13 November 1872, the son of John Shaw and Sophia Alicia Byam Gunthorpe. His father was Registrar to the High…
The style of this painter of Istrian origin is highly unusual. Active in Mantua and Padua (though he cannot be identified with the monk and prophet of the same name [1437-1531], as was once thought), his work reveals the influence of Mantegna together with some elements drawn from Ferrarese painting. It is characterized by a…
The religious supernatural recognizes – zed a self torn between transcendent forces that fought for its possession. The Devil and his minions, the Demons, engaged in a struggle for the soul with the angels and guardian spirits. When the religious supernatural expresses the search for salvation in terms of conflict and terror it anticipates the universe…
Rackham was born in London as one of 12 children. In 1884,at the age of 17,he was sent on an ocean voyage to Australia to improve his fragile health, accompanied by two Aunts. At the age of 18, he worked as a clerk at the Westminster Fire Office and began studying part-time at the Lambeth…
Arthur Hughes was born in London on 27 January 1832, to Edward and Amy Hughes. He entered Archbishop Tenison’s Grammar School in about 1838, and while there displayed an early talent for drawing; in 1846 he entered the School of Design, Somerset House where he studied under Alfred Stevens. In 1847 he enrolled in the…
Arthur Hacker was born in London, the son of Edward Hacker, the line engraver. He went to the RA Schools before studying in Paris under Leon Bonnat, who was internationally famous as a portrait painter and a lifelong friend of Degas. Bonnat was the ideal teacher for Hacker who became a fashionable portrait painter himself. His…
Artemisia Gentileschi (July 8, 1593–c.1656) was an Italian Baroque painter, today considered one of the most accomplished painters in the generation after Caravaggio. In an era when female painters were not easily accepted by the artistic community or patrons, she was the first female painter to become a member of the Accademia di Arte del…
Arno Breker was born in Elberfeld, Northern German, on July 19th, 1900. In his late teens be began the study of stone-carving and anatomy and at age 20 began attending the Duesseldolf Academy of Arts where he began his study of sculpture and an immensely successful art career. His work between 1933 and 1942 was most…
Antonello da Messina, properly Antonello di Giovanni di Antonio (c. 1430 – February 1479) was an Italian painter from Messina, Sicily, active during the Italian Renaissance. His work shows strong influences from Early Netherlandish painting and, unusually for a painter from Southern Italy, he was influential on the art of Northern Italy, especially Venice. The following…
Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville (31 May 1835 – 18 May 1885) was a French Academic painter who studied under Eugène Delacroix. His dramatic and intensely patriotic subjects illustrated episodes from the Franco-Prussian War, the Crimean War, the Zulu War and portraits of soldiers. Some of his works have been collected by the Hermitage Museum in St.…
Aertgen Claesz. van Leyden (Leiden, c. 1498 – Leiden, c. 1564), also known as Allaert or Aert van Leyden, was a 16th-Century Dutch painter, draughtsman and designer of stained glass. Works by this artist can be found at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New…