Adam Elsheimer

His perfectionism, and an apparent tendency to depression, resulted in a small total output, despite the small size of all his pictures. In all about forty paintings are now generally agreed to be by him (see Kressmann below). He made a few etchings, not very successfully. However, his work was highly regarded by other artists and a…

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Adolf Frey-Moock

Adolf Frey-Moock was born in Switzerland (in Jona, not Jena as often recorded) where he was apprenticed to learn the trade of decorative fresco painting in churches. After several months as a touring artisan (during which he painted the Schöne Brunnen in Nuremberg), he entered the Academy in Munich where he studied with Wilhelm Diez. Although he…

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Adriaen van de Venne

Van de Venne was born in Delft. According to Houbraken he learned Latin in Leiden. He learned to paint from the master goldsmith and painter Simon de Valk, and afterwards learned to engrave from Jeronimus van Diest, a good painter of grisailles. He then moved to Middelburg in 1614 where he was influenced by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Pieter Brueghel…

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Albert Bierstadt

Albert Bierstadt, was born in Solingen, Germany. He was only about two years old when his family moved from Germany to New Bedford in Massachusetts. In 1853 he returned to Germany to study in Dusseldorf, where he refined his technical abilities by painting Alpine landscapes. After he returned to America in 1857, he joined an…

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Albert Maignan

Albert Pierre René Maignan (Beaumont-sur-Sarthe, 14 October 1845 – Saint-Prix, 29 September 1908) was a French painter and historical illustrator. Most of his work was devoted to historical subjects, but he also painted portraits. In 1864, at the age of 19, Maignan left his home to study law in Paris, where he graduated in 1866. During…

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Albert Pinkham Ryder

The Spouter Inn, New Bedford, in Melville’s Moby Dick, had on its wall a strange painting, ”thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced”, with such ”unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the England hags, had endeavoured to delineate chaos bewitched.” It was ”a boggy,…

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Albert-Joseph Penot

Albert Joseph Pénot (1862–1930) was a French painter known for female nudes. Today, he is more popularly and specifically recognized for a subset of paintings centring on women of darker, more macabre themes. Pénot was concerned first and foremost with anatomically accurate portrayals of women. Singular female forms were the implicit focus of his work, whereas the…

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Alberto Martini

Alberto Martini (November 24, 1876 – November 8, 1954) was an Italian painter, engraver, illustrator and graphic designer. Critics have described Martini’s range of work from “elegant and epic” to “grotesque and macabre” and consider him one of the precursors of Surrealism. Martini was born in Oderzo, Veneto and received his early training in drawing and…

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Albrecht Altdorfer

Albrecht Altdorfer (c. 1480 – February 12, 1538) was a German painter, printmaker and architect of the Renaissance era. He acquired an interest in art from his father, Ulrich Altdorfer, who was a painter and miniaturist. At the start of his career, he won public attention by creating small, intimate modestly scaled works in unconventional…

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Albrecht Durer

The National Gallery has acquired its first oil painting by Albrecht Durer. It is the only example by the 15th-century German artist to be found in any British museum. By Andrew Graham-Dixon. Almost unnoticed, Neil MacGregor, director of the National Gallery, has been determinedly pursuing an unfashionable but enlightened acquisitions policy. He has been buying…

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Alexandre Seon

Alexandre Séon (1855, Chazelles-sur-Lyon, Loire – 1917) was a French Symbolist artist, illustrator and decorator. Séon studied at the Beaux-Arts of Lyon and Paris, becoming a student of Puvis de Chavannes in 1891, with whom he later collaborated. He was closely associated with Joséphin Péladan and his Salon de la Rose-Croix, and designed the frontispiece…

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Allaert Claesz

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…

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Allaert Claesz

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…

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Alphonse de Neuville

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.…

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