Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix (born Dec. 2, 1891, Untermhaus, Thuringia, Ger.died July 25, 1969, Singen, Baden-Wrttemberg, W.Ger.) German painter and printmaker. He studied at the academies of Dsseldorf and Dresden and experimented with Impressionism and Dada before arriving at Expressionism with a nightmarish personal vision of contemporary social reality, depicting the horrors of war and the…
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Willem van de Velde was baptised on 18 December 1633 in Leiden, Holland, Dutch Republic. A son of Willem van de Velde the Elder, also a painter of sea-pieces, Willem van de Velde, the younger, was instructed by his father, and afterwards by Simon de Vlieger, a marine painter of repute at the time, and had…
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William Blake (born Nov. 28, 1757, London, Eng.died Aug. 12, 1827, London) English poet, painter, engraver, and visionary. He was trained as an engraver by James Basire and afterward attended classes at the Royal Academy. Blake married in 1782, and in 1784 he opened a print shop in London. He developed an innovative technique for producing…
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William Bouguereaub La Rochelle, 30 Nov 1825; d La Rochelle, 19 Aug 1905). French painter. From 1838 to 1841 he took drawing lessons from Louis Sage, a pupil of Ingres, while attending the coll?ge at Pons. In 1841 the family moved to Bordeaux where in 1842 his father allowed him to attend the Ecole Municipale…
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William Degouve de Nuncques [sometimes Nunques] (28 February 1867 – 1 March 1935) was a Belgian painter. He was born at Monthermé, the Ardennes, France, of an old aristocratic family, After the Franco-Prussian war (1870–71), his parents settled in Belgium, and he taught himself to paint. In 1894 he married fellow artist Juliette Massin, who…
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William Frederick Yeames (b Taganrog, Russia, 18 Dec 1835; d Teignmouth, Devon, 3 May 1918). English painter. The son of a British consul in Russia, Yeames was sent to school in Dresden after the death of his father in 1842. He also studied painting there. The collapse of the Yeames family fortune resulted in a…
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William Hogarth was born in St. Bartholomew’s Close, London, on Nov. 10, 1697, the son of a classical scholar who conducted a private school. In his draft for an autobiography Hogarth wrote that he was exceptionally fond of shows and spectacles as a child and that he excelled in mimicry. He left school at his…
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Mortensen, William (1897-1975), American photographer. Controversial in his own time and even now, Mortensen was born in Utah, studied briefly in New York, then moved to Hollywood to work in set design, mask making, and then as a photographer and portraitist. His celebrated differences with the Group f.64 clique, particularly Ansel Adams, centred on Mortensen’s…
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William Rimmer was born in Liverpool, England, on Feb. 20, 1816. At the age of 2 he was brought to Nova Scotia and at 10 to Boston, Mass., with which city he was primarily associated. In 1840 he began his artistic career as an itinerant portrait painter and also studied medicine, which he began to…
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Xavier Mellery (b Laeken, nr Brussels, 9 Aug 1845; d Laeken, 4 Feb 1921). Belgian painter, decorative artist and draughtsman. A gardener’s son, he was brought up in a quiet suburb of Brussels, bordering the Parc Royal. He studied under the decorative artist Charles Albert (1821-89) and then, between 1860 and 1867, took a course…
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