Catalog Search Results
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Painter of languid, elegant, Edwardian beauties and sharply dressed gentlemen, John Singer Sargent was the ultimate society painter. He knew everyone who was anyone and was on personal terms with many of them, including Edward VII and the U.S. presidents Roosevelt and Wilson. This social standing was justified. Sargent was one of the greatest portrait painters ever, able to convey the personality and style of his sitters-comparable to the great Velázquez...
2) Monet
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Monet's gift was to show the world a different way of seeing and interpreting everything around us. He brought his canvases to life with dabs and swoops of color put together to give an impression of the scene. He is the ultimate Impressionist: not only did one of his paintings inspire the label "Impressionist" and so name one of the greatest art movements of all time, but he was its leader, whose work changed the way that artists represented nature,...
3) El Greco
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El Greco, or Doménikos Theotokópoulos, was born to Greek parents on the island of Crete. He is considered by many art historians to be the last great Mannerist painter. El Greco, or "The Greek," left Crete for Venice, Italy, in his mid-twenties. Following the Venetian Renaissance tradition, he began to elongate his figures, a style that would come to be associated with his most famous works. But like all artists of the time, El Greco needed a patron...
4) Hiroshige
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Ando Hiroshige is considered by many as the last of the great creative masters of the traditional Japanese woodblock print. His skill has won him worldwide fame and artistic influence, along with his contemporary, Katsushika Hokusai. Both artists widened the range of subjects they covered to encompass every aspect of life in Japan's Edo period. Although famous primarily for his landscapes and the studies of his home city of Edo, Hiroshige produced...
5) Hokusai
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Katsushika Hokusai is the most famous of a sequence of names used by a versatile and long-lived Japanese artist who worked in many genres and schools, evolving a unique style that made him known then as well as now as a true master. He was an unusual and restless man who slipped boundaries and made fresh connections, yet never sought great wealth or position. Hokusai produced over 30,000 different designs, prints, illustrations, paintings, and sketches....
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The earliest botanical illustrations are found in ancient herbals-practical works of knowledge, written to pass on crucial information about how to heal the sick. Around the time of the Renaissance, however, flowers began to be more generally appreciated for their beauty, so talented artists set about capturing their magic. Botanical illustration developed into a high art form during the golden era of the 18th and early 19th centuries. From that era,...
7) Modigliani
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Modigliani's human subjects invariably have almond-shaped eyes with long, slightly twisted noses, small pursed mouths, and elongated necks. The majority of his works are semi-formal portraits that radiate a somewhat sculptural quality, suggesting his early roots as a sculptor. Amedeo Modigliani was an Italian Sephardic Jew, born in the port town of Livorno on the northwestern coast of Tuscany on July 12, 1884. He died young, just on the verge of discovery...
8) Egon Schiele
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Egon Schiele is considered by many to be the greatest draftsman of the 20th century. The undeniable fact, however that a considerable share of his work is of an explicitly erotic nature has blinded many people to his remarkable ability, so much so that he is primarily known as an Austrian Expressionist artist of the erotic. Schiele's full artistic flowering lasted only a little over 10 years. He was cut down at the cruelly early age of 28, just as...
9) Paul Klee
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Paul Klee's philosophy of art is perhaps best summed up by his own statement: "A drawing is simply a line going for a walk." As one of the great avant garde artists of the 20th century, Swiss-born Klee was swept along with the changing moods and philosophies of the time. Klee did not readily fit into a particular artistic category. He used many styles and techniques, always exploring the different variations that each media opened up to him. An important...
10) Edouard Manet
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Many art historians consider Edouard Manet to be the father of modern art. Although often cited alongside the Impressionists, he was not a member of their group and never exhibited in their Salon des Réfusées. Instead, he pioneered a path between realism and impressionism, choosing contemporary subjects and composing them in a truly modern fashion. A number of Manet's paintings provoked outrage and scandal, but his most controversial work was Le...
11) Mucha
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Late nineteenth century Paris was a thriving, exciting place for artists, and Alphonse Mucha was the most celebrated artist working in the city. Everywhere you looked his posters and advertisement designs caught the eye and influenced popular culture. He was the favorite artist of the great actress Sarah Bernhardt and she contracted him for six years to design all her posters, costumes, set designs, programs, and more. However he was much more than...
12) Caravaggio
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Caravaggio is variously labeled a uniquely gifted artist and an arrogant, rebellious, and dangerously violent murderer. But for all his wild behavior, he was a profoundly religious man. Caravaggio, the first artist to bring realism to painting, is considered by many to be the greatest Baroque painter of all. The Old and New Testaments are brought vividly to light by Caravaggio's talent. Many of his paintings depict the grace of God as a shaft of light...
13) Mary Cassatt
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Although an American, Mary Cassatt spent the majority of her life in France and gained most of her fame and success in Europe. Not until after her death on June 14, 1926, at Chateau de Beaufresne, near Paris, did she become a truly celebrated American artist. Cassatt is known most for her paintings and pastels of mothers and their children. Never having been a mother herself, perhaps Cassatt was mesmerized by the familial bond so evident to observers...
14) Vermeer
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Jan Vermeer is acknowledged as one of the greatest artists who ever lived. Yet in his lifetime he was largely unregarded and struggled to make a living for himself and his family. He lived and worked all his life in the prosperous Dutch town of Delft painting perfectly beautiful pictures of the inhabitants and their homes. Vermeer's technique was faultlessly meticulous and consequently painstakingly slow. Fewer than forty of his paintings have survived,...
15) Degas
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Edgar Degas began as a classical painter of genre history scenes and died as one of the greatest and most innovative names in French art-although as with so many other artists, he did not receive a great deal of recognition in his lifetime. Along the way his style changed completely from strict academic formalism to near-abstract scenes of contemporary Parisian life. His primary subject was the human form, especially that of women, and he also loved...
16) Klimt
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Gustav Klimt was raised in poverty in mid-nineteenth century Vienna but his precocious artistic talent raised him from the gutter to the heights of Austrian society. Initially a generic painter of historical scenes he soon devised his own unique style featuring semi-naked women in mystical, gold-wrapped, abstract landscapes that either completely enchanted or totally outraged his audience. His trademark heavily patterned, exotically beautiful women...
17) Toulouse Lautrec
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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was one of the great personalities of fin de siecle Paris, a famous and popular figure known by, and knowing, everyone who mattered in bohemian circles. He is usually classified as a postimpressionist painter, along with his contemporaries Gauguin and van Gogh. In common with many artists, Toulouse-Lautrec had to struggle to gain acceptance, but unlike his peers, his fight was not so much for his art as for himself. At just...
18) Hieronymus Bosch
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Hieronymus Bosch is a Dutch painter of the late Middle Ages. He died in 1516. His work is known for its use of fantastic, now-viewed as horrific, imagery to illustrate moral and religious concepts and narratives of the Roman Catholic church during that time. Balancing the images of hell and tormented sinners are the bucolic, delicate, and detailed landscapes he painted on the back of his triptychs typically created for display and use in churches....
19) Albrecht Dürer
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Albrecht Dürer, who lived from 1471 to 1528, worked during the time of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. Typical of his era, religion was the subject of most of his creative work. We know more about Dürer than many artists of his day, thanks to his proclivity with the pen as well as with his paintbrush. He was also widely known across Europe during his lifetime because much of his work was disseminated by printing. Dürer left a considerable...
20) Van Gogh
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Vincent van Gogh is indisputably one of the greatest painters of the late nineteenth century. His works are some of the most recognizable and sought after of any artist. His paintings are the highlights of virtually all the greatest galleries and art collections around the world. On the rare occasions when one of van Gogh's paintings comes up for sale, it invariably breaks auction records-yet, heartbreakingly, van Gogh himself rarely had enough money...