George Frederic Watts, OM (23 February 1817 – 1 July 1904) was a popular English Victorian painter and sculptor associated with the Symbolist movement. Watts became famous in his lifetime for his allegorical works, such as Hope (see image) and Love and Life. These paintings were intended to form part of an epic symbolic cycle…
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“The first of the great personalities in Florentine painting was Giotto. Although he affords no exception to the rule that the great Florentines exploited all the arts in the endeavor to express themselves, he, Giotto, renowned as an architect and sculptor, reputed as wit and versifier, differed from most of his Tuscan successors in having…
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Piranesi was born in Mogliano Veneto, near Treviso, then part of the Republic of Venice. His brother Andrea introduced him to Latin and the ancient civilization, and later he studied as an architect under his uncle, Matteo Lucchesi, who was Magistrato delle Acque, a Venetian engineer who specialized in excavation. From 1740 he was in…
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The Resurrection by Giovanni Bellini Easter Sunday’s picture is Giovanni Bellini’s intensely beautiful and uplifting Resurrection. Now in the Gemaldegalerie in Berlin, it was originally commissioned by a Venetian aristocrat, Marco Zorzi, as the altarpiece of his family’s funerary chapel in the church of San Michele in Isola, a small island between Venice and Murano.…
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Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (baptized 23 March 1609 – 1664) was an Italian Baroque artist, painter, printmaker and draftsman, of the Genoese school. He is best known now for his elaborate engravings, and as the inventor of the printmaking technique of monotyping. He was known as Il Grechetto in Italy and in France as Le Benédette. Castiglione…
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Gislebertus, Giselbertus or Ghiselbertus, sometimes “of Autun” (flourished in the 12th century), was a French Romanesque sculptor, whose decoration (about 1120-1135) of the Cathedral of Saint Lazare at Autun, France – consisting of numerous doorways, tympanums, and capitals – represents some of the most original work of the period. His sculpture is expressive and imaginative:…
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The Librarian by Giuseppe Arcimboldo Today is the anniversary of the birth of the Mannerist painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593), so this week’s picture is one of his ingenious “composite heads”, the so-called Librarian. The picture of a man composed entirely from books and the paraphernalia of reading, the work is traditionally said to represent Wolfgang…
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Gustav-Adolf Mossa was born in Nice on 28th January 1883. His father Alexis Mossa (1844-1926), was himself a painter from Nice who produced many posters for the Carnival of Nice at the end of the 19th century and would strongly influence the career of his son. Up to 1900, Gustav-Adolf studied at l’École des Arts…
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“Gustav Klimt first made himself known by the decorations he executed (with his brother and their art school companion F. Matsch), for numerous theatres and above all (on his own this time) for the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where he completed, in a coolly photographic style, the work begun by Makart. At the age of…
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Doré was born in Strasbourg and his first illustrated story was published at the age of fifteen. His talent was evident even earlier, however. At age five he had been a prodigy troublemaker, playing pranks that were mature beyond his years. Seven years later, he began carving in cement. Subsequently, as a young man, he…
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Although threatened by the fleeting truths of modern experience that artists like Manet, Degas, or Monet elected to paint, classical mythology, like a proper education in Greek and Latin, remained a cornerstone of nineteenth-century art and culture, propagated by the academies and illustrated in countless official paintings. It was also subject to intensely personal, even…
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Hans Baldung was born in Swabia, Germany in the year 1484 to a family of intellectuals, academics and professionals. His father was a lawyer and his uncle was a doctor, and many other of his family members maintained professional degrees. In fact, Baldung was the first male in his family not to attend university. This…
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Hans Lützelburger (died June 1526), also known as Hans Franck, was a German blockcutter (“formschneider”) for woodcuts, regarded as one of the finest of his day. He cut the blocks but as far as is known was not an artist himself. He is best known for his virtuoso work on 41 of the “superbly cut”…
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The School of Bruges was ever popular in the fifteenth century. It got off to a flying start with the incomparable art of Jan van Eyck and was continued by his successor, Petrus Christus. The formulaic but appealing painting of Hans Memling was conservative, technically highly skillful, and spiritually reassuring. His was the other side…
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He was born in Bernau in the Black Forest, Germany. Having started life as a painter of clock-faces, he entered in 1859 the Karlsruhe academy, where he studied under Schirmer and Des Coudres. He subsequently studied and worked, with but indifferent success, in Düsseldorf, Paris, Italy, Munich and Frankfurt, until his reputation became firmly established…
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The son of a craftsman, Joshua Clarke, Clarke the younger was exposed to art (and in particular Art Nouveau) at an early age. He went to school in Belvedere College in Dublin. By his late teens, he was studying stained glass at the Dublin Art School. While there his The Consecration of St. Mel, Bishop…
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Hendrik Goltzius (January or February 1558 – January 1, 1617), was a Dutch printmaker, draftsman, and painter. He was the leading Dutch engraver of the early Baroque period, or Northern Mannerism, noted for his sophisticated technique and the “exuberance” of his compositions. According to A. Hyatt Mayor, Goltzius “was the last professional engraver who drew…
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Herbert James Draper (1863 – 22 September 1920) was an English Classicist painter whose career began in the Victorian era and extended through the first two decades of the 20th century. Born in London, the son of a jeweller named Henry Draper and his wife Emma, he was educated at Bruce Castle School in Tottenham and…
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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…
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Simberg was born at Hamina (original Swedish Fredrikshamn) in Finland, the son of Colonel Nicolai Simberg and Ebba Matilda Simberg (born Widenius). In 1891, at the age of 18, he enrolled at the Drawing School of the Viipuri Friends of Art, and also studied at the Drawing School of the Finnish Art Association (Suomen Taideyhdistys) (1893–1895),…
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