Buonarroti Michaelangelo

(1475-1564)

Michelangelo was born in Caprese, Italy, as a son of a local magistrate. After moving to Florence during his early childhood, he eventually apprenticed under Domenico Ghirlandaio in 1488. About two years later, he studied at a sculpture school in the Medici garden run by Bertoldo di Giovanni, which created opportunities to meet many humanists, poets, and other artists of his time. With the death of Lorenzo de' Medici, his patron, in 1492, Michelangelo fled to Bologna due to political situations. There, he sculpted many of his famous works for five years, and returned to Florence to reconcile with his reputation. In 1508, Rome, Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to fresco the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He fired his workshop and worked single-handedly for 6 years to complete the entire artwork. While mainly working for the papacy in his later years, Pope Clement VIII soon commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Last Judgement also for the Sistine Chapel, which reflected the pessimism of the artist and a post-Reformation obsession with wrath and punishment. Michaelangelo died at the age of 89. Michaelangelo's art inspired and affected his contemporaries and subsequent generations of painters with incalculable effects up to the present t day.

"The Last Judgement"

The Creation of Adam

"Pieta"

Rembrandt, Harmenszoon vin Rijn (1606 - 1669)

Rembrandt was a Dutch painter, draftsman, and etcher from Leyden. He trained in Amsterdam where he developed a style akin to that of Caravaggio. He established his reputation as a portraitist and was subsequently in great demand, painting more than 40 commissions in the next two years. He married in 1634. His series of portraits painted over a period of 40 years reveals the growing insight and depth paralleled in other works. Youthful exuberance and flamboyant style gives way to patience, compassion and essential simplicity. The drama of early works is replaced by a profound compelling intensity. As a result, he was less favoured as a society portraitist, and his genius went unappreciated. Rembrandt died alone and in poverty, having outlived his wife, his son and his mistress A giant in the history of art. Rembrandt's paintings are characterized by luxuriant brushwork, rich colour, and a mastery of dark portraiture. Numerous portraits and self-portraits allow us to glimpse the character of the man. His drawings constitute a vivid record of contemporary Amsterdam life.

"Aristotle, w/bust of Homer"

"Bathing in a River"

"Old Man with Gold Chain"

"Bethsheba"

"Jeremiah"

Claude Monet (1840-1926)

Claude Oscar Monet was a French impressionist painter who brought the study of the transient effects of natural light to its most refined expression.

"Garden in Flower"

"Artist's Garden at Vtheuil"

"Gare St. Lazare"

Henri Matisse (1869 1954)

Henri mile Benot Matisse was a French artist, leader of the Fauve group, regarded as one of the great formative figures in 20th-century art, a master of the use of color and form to convey emotional expression. He was regarded as a leader of radicalism in the arts, and gained the approval of a number of influential critics and collectors. Among the many important commissions he received was that of a Russian collector who requested mural panels illustrating dance and music. His broadly conceived themes ideally allowed him freedom of invention and play of form and expression. His images of dancers, and of human figures in general, convey expressive form first and the particular details of anatomy only secondarily.

"Green Stripe"

"Music" "

Paul Czanne (1839-1906)

Czanne was born in the southern French town of Aix-enProvence, January 19, 1839, the son of a wealthy banker. In 1862, He was alienated from his family, who found his behavior peculiar and failed to appreciate his revolutionary art. After a number of bitter family disputes, the aspiring artist was given a small allowance and sent to study art in Paris. During the greater part of his own lifetime, however, Czanne was largely ignored, and he worked in isolation. He mistrusted critics, had few friends, and, until 1895, exhibited only occasionally. Many of Czanne's early works were painted in dark tones applied with heavy, fluid pigment, suggesting the moody, romantic expressionism of previous generations.

"Le Chteau Noir"

"Bathers "
Les Grandes Baigneuses)"

"The Kitchen Table"

"House of Pre Lacroix"

"Tulips in a Vase"

"Blue Vase Still Life"

"Onions & Bottle Still Life"

"Chestnut Trees, Jas de Bouffan"

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Renoir was born in Limoges on February 25, 1841. As a child he worked in a porcelain factory in Paris, painting designs on china; at 17 he copied paintings on fans, lamp shades, and blinds. He studied painting formally in 1862-63 at the academy of the Swiss painter Charles Gabriel Gleyre in Paris. Renoir's early work was influenced by two French artists, Claude Monet in his treatment of light and the romantic painter Eugne Delacroix in his treatment of color. Renoir first exhibited his paintings in Paris in 1864, but he did not gain recognition until 1874, at the first exhibition of painters of the new impressionist school.

"Lady Sewing"

"Doges' Palace Venice"

"On The Terrace"

"The Promenade"

"Mixed Flowers in an Earthenware Jug"

"La Loge"

"Nude in the Sunlight"

"Near the Lake"

"Ball at Moulin de la Galette"

"La Grenouillre"

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)

Gauguin was born in Paris on June 7, 1848, into a liberal middle-class family. After an adventurous early life, including a four-year stay in Peru with his family and a stint in the French merchant marine, he became a successful Parisian stockbroker, settling into a comfortable bourgeois existence with his wife and five children. In 1874, after meeting the artist Camille Pissarro and viewing the first impressionist exhibition, he became a collector and amateur painter. He exhibited with the impressionists in 1876, 1880, 1881, 1882, and 1886. In 1883 he gave up his secure existence to devote himself to painting; his wife and children, without adequate subsistence, were forced to return to her family. From 1886 to 1891 Gauguin lived mainly in rural Brittany (except for a trip to Panama and Martinique from 1887 to 1888), where he was the center of a small group of experimental painters known as the school of Pont-Aven. Under the influence of the painter mile Bernard, Gauguin turned away from impressionism and adapted a less naturalistic style, which he called synthetism. He found his inspiration in the art of indigenous peoples, in medieval stained glass, and in Japanese prints; he was introduced to Japanese prints by the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh when they spent two months together in Arles, in the south of France, in 1888. Gauguin's new style was characterized by the use of large flat areas of nonnaturalistic color.

In 1891, ruined and in debt, Gauguin sailed for the South Seas to escape European civilization and everything that is artificial and conventional. Except for one visit to France from 1893 to 1895, he remained in the Tropics for the rest of his life, first in Tahiti and later in the Marquesas Islands. The essential characteristics of his style changed little in the South Seas; he retained the qualities of expressive color, denial of perspective, and thick, flat forms. Under the influence of the tropical setting and Polynesian culture, however, Gauguin's paintings became more powerful, while the subject matter became more distinctive, the scale larger, and the compositions more simplified. His subjects ranged from scenes of ordinary life, such as Tahitian Women, or On the Beach, to brooding scenes of superstitious dread, such as Spirit of the Deadwatching.

"Tahitian Women"

"Breton Landscape"

"Still LIfe & 3 Puppies"

"Farmhouse in Brittany"

"Riders on the Beach"

"The White Horse"

Diego Velzquez (1599-1660)

Diego Rodrguez de Silva y Velzquez was a Spanish painter who is considered to have been the country's greatest baroque artist. He, with Francisco de Goya and El Greco, forms the great triumvirate of Spanish painting.

"Las Meninas"

"The Forge of Vulcan"

Guido Reni (1575 - 1642)

Guido Reni was an Italian painter and engraver from Bologna. After training at the Carracci Academy he made several visits to Rome, where he established himself as a leading Baroque artist and a rival of Caravaggio

"Angel of the Annunciation"

"Aurora"

"St Cecilia"

Jean-Lon Grme (1824-1904)

While financially successful Gerome was not commercially motivated. He frequently painted pictures that he had little chance of selling and often gave them away to his friends. In addition when he took up sculpture later in his life he made a practice of underpricing his work. His reasoning was that since state funds allocated to sculpture were so limited he didn't want to be paid the high price he could command for his work

"The Pelt Merchant"

"The Bath"

"Pygmalion and Galatea"

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)

Van Gogh was born March 30, 1853, in Groot-Zundert, son of a Dutch Protestant pastor. Early in life he displayed a moody, restless temperament that was to thwart his every pursuit. By the age of 27 he had been in turn a salesman in an art gallery, a French tutor, a theological student, and an evangelist among the miners at Wasmes in Belgium. His experiences as a preacher are reflected in his first paintings of peasants and potato diggers; of these early works, the best known is the rough, earthy Potato Eaters. Dark and somber, sometimes crude, these early works evidence van Gogh's intense desire to express the misery and poverty of humanity as he saw it among the miners in Belgium.

In 1886 van Gogh went to Paris to live with his brother Tho van Gogh, an art dealer, and became familiar with the new art movements developing at the time. Influenced by the work of the impressionists and by the work of such Japanese printmakers as Hiroshige and Hokusai, van Gogh began to experiment with current techniques. Subsequently, he adopted the brilliant hues found in the paintings of the French artists Camille Pissarro and Georges Seurat. In 1888 van Gogh left Paris for southern France, where, under the burning sun of Provence, he painted scenes of the fields, cypress trees, peasants, and rustic life characteristic of the region. During this period, living at Arles, he began to use the swirling brush strokes and intense yellows, greens, and blues associated with such typical works as Bedroom at Arles, and Starry Night. For van Gogh all visible phenomena, whether he painted or drew them, seemed to be endowed with a physical and spiritual vitality.

For a time he was in a hospital at Arles. He then spent a year in the nearby asylum of Saint-Rmy, working between repeated spells of madness. Under the care of a sympathetic doctor, whose portrait he painted (Dr. Gachet), van Gogh spent three months at Auvers. Just after completing his ominous Crows in the Wheatfields, he shot himself on July 27, 1890, and died two days later.

"Self Portrait with Straw Hat"

"Church at Auvers"

"Irises in a Vase,
Yellow Background"

"Blossoming Chestnut Branches"

"Roses in a Vase"

"The Starry Night"

"Irises"

"Courtyard, Hospital in Arles"

"Cafe Terrace at Night"

Fishing Boats on the Beach

"The Potato Eaters"

"Garden of St Paul's Hospital"

"Sunflowers, Blue Background"

"Courtyard, St Pauls Hospital"

Edvard Munch (1863- 1944)

Edvard Munch was a Norwegian artist whose brooding and anguished paintings and graphic works, based on personal grief and obsessions, were instrumental in the development of expressionism. Perhaps the best known of all Munch's work is The Scream. This, amongst others reflect Munch's childhood trauma, of losing his mother and sister to tuberculosis

"The Scream"

Paul Klee (1879 - 1940)

A Swiss-born painter and graphic artist whose personal, often gently humorous works are replete with allusions to dreams, music, and poetry, Paul Klee is difficult to classify. Primitive art, surrealism, cubism, and children's art all seem blended into his small-scale, delicate paintings, watercolors, and drawings

"Mask with the Little Flag"

"Once Emerged from the Grey of Night"

Wassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944)

Ranked among the artists whose work changed the history of art in the early years of the 20th century, the Russian abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky is generally regarded as one of the originators of abstract painting, or abstract expressionism. In both his painting and his theoretical writings he influenced modern styles. Spending many years of his life in Germany, Kandinsky became an instrumental force in the development of German expressionism.

"Flood Improvisation"

"Colorful Life"

John William Godward (1861-1922)

Inspired by the painter Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema, Godward imitated his Neoclassical style. Both were counted among the members of the "Marble School," known for its depictions of subjects drawn from ancient Greek and Roman life placed in elaborate settings, with especially careful and realistic rendering of details like marble and flowers.

"Dolce Far Niente"

Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)

Pablo Ruiz y Picasso was a Spanish painter and sculptor, generally considered the greatest artist of the 20th century. He was unique as an inventor of forms, as an innovator of styles and techniques, as a master of various media, and as one of the most prolific artists in history. He created more than 20,000 works

"Les Demoiselles"

"Aficionado"

"The Jester"

Cei trei muzicieni

Guernica