For Claude Monet the designation ‘impressionist’ always remained a source of pride. In spite of all the things critics have written about his work, Monet continued to be a true impressionist to the...
Until the end of the 19th century Naïve Art, created by untrained artists and characterised by spontaneity and simplicity, enjoyed little recognition from professional artists and art critics. Naïve...
Reflecting their owner’s taste and serving as an impressive exhibition space for visitors, cabinets of curiosities were a place of interest in the houses of the wealthy in the 16th an 17th centuries....
Encounter one of history’s greatest civilisations through miniatures. In Persian Miniatures, the story of the magnificent Persian Empire is told by way of a small but vibrant artistic tradition. The...
Raphael was the artist who most closely resembled Pheidias. The Greeks said that the latter invented nothing; rather, he carried every kind of art invented by his forerunners to such a pitch of...
Sargent was born in Florence, in 1856, the son of cultivated parents. When Sargent entered the school of Carolus-Duran he attained much more than the average pupils. His father was a retired...
Mega Square Shoes focuses on the history of the shoe and elevates the shoe to the rank of a work of art. The author is a leading expert on the subject and curator of France‘s Shoe Museum, which holds...
Cézanne transformed a teacup into something alive, raising still-life to the point that it ceased to be inanimate. Wassily Kandinsky said about the French artist: “He painted these things as human...
A jeweler with an established reputation through the world, Louis Comfort Tiffany was the spearhead of the Art Nouveau movement in the United States. At a time and in a country in perpetual growth,...
During the Renaissance, Italian painters would traditionally depict the wives of their patrons as Madonnas, often rendering them more beautiful than they actually were. Over centuries in religious...
Hieronymus Bosch was painting frightening, yet vaguely likable monsters long before computer games were ever invented, often including a touch of humour. His works are assertive statements about the...
Behind Frida Kahlo’s portraits, lies the story of both her life and work. It is precisely this combination that draws the reader in. Frida’s work is a record of her life, and rarely can we learn so...
Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), who can be assigned to the school of classical modernism, was born in Amersfort, Netherlands. After studying in Amsterdam, he started his artist´s career in the...
Michelangelo, like Leonardo, was a man of many talents; sculptor, architect, painter and poet, he made the apotheosis of muscular movement, which to him was the physical manifestation of passion. He...
For Claude Monet the designation ‘impressionist’ always remained a source of pride. In spite of all the things critics have written about his work, Monet continued to be a true impressionist to the...
Born in 1860 in a small Czech town, Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) was an artist on the forefront of Art Nouveau, the modernist movement that swept Paris in the 1910s, marking a return to the simplicity...
In 1905 Georgia travelled to Chicago to study painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1907 she enrolled at the Art Students’ League in New York City, where she studied with William Merritt...
Picasso was born a Spaniard and, so they say, began to draw before he could speak. As an infant he was instinctively attracted to artist’s tools. In early childhood he could spend hours in happy...
Born in 1912, in a small town in Wyoming, Jackson Pollock embodied the American dream as the country found itself confronted with the realities of a modern era replacing the fading nineteenth...
Lautrec studied with two of the most admired academic painters of the day, Léon Bonnat and Fernand Cormon. Lautrec’s time in the studios of Bonnat and Cormon had the advantage of introducing him to...
