Famous Artist Biography
Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452, in a Leonardo da Vinci was a very talented artist who painted
farmhouse nestled amid the undulating hills of Tuscany
outside the village of Anchiano in present-day Italy. Born
1. Leonardo da Vinci out of wedlock to respected Florentine notary Ser Piero
and a young peasant woman named Caterina, he was
raised by his father and his stepmothers. At the age of
five, he moved to his father’s family estate in nearby
Vinci, the Tuscan town from which the surname
associated with Leonardo derives, and lived with his
uncle and grandparents.
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (6 March
1475 – 18 February 1564) was a Florentine sculptor,
painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance who
exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of
Western art. Considered to be the greatest living artist
2. Michelangelo during his lifetime, he has since been described as one
of the greatest artists of all time. Despite making few
forays beyond the arts, his versatility in the disciplines he
took up was of such a high order that he is often
considered a contender for the title of the archetypal
Renaissance man, along with his rival and fellow
Florentine Medici client, Leonardo da Vinci.
3. Raphael Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (March 28 or April 6, 1483 –
April 6, 1520), known as Raphael was an Italian painter
and architect of the High Renaissance.
Contribution to Arts
the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, and many more famous
paintings. These works were made famous because of
Leonardo's understanding Linear Perspective, his
integration of light and shadow, and his superb
understanding of anatomy. In his time he was accepted
as a very talented artist. Many artists after Leonardo
mimicked his methods in hope to make their paintings
more realistic.
A number of Michelangelo's works of painting, sculpture,
and architecture rank among the most famous in
existence. His output in every field of interest was
prodigious; given the sheer volume of surviving
correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences taken into
account, he is the best-documented artist of the 16th
century. He sculpted two of his best-known works, the
Pietà and David, before the age of thirty. As an architect,
Michelangelo pioneered the Mannerist style at the
Laurentian Library. At the age of 74, he succeeded
Antonio da Sangallo the Younger as the architect of St.
Peter's Basilica. Michelangelo transformed the plan so that
the western end was finished to his design, as was the
dome, with some modification, after his death.
His work is admired for its clarity of form, ease of
composition, and visual achievement of the Neoplatonic
ideal of human grandeur. Together with Michelangelo and
Leonardo da Vinci, he forms the traditional trinity of great
masters of that period.
4. Claude Monet Claude Monet, in full Oscar-Claude Monet (born
November 14, 1840, Paris, France—died December 5,
1926, Giverny), French painter who was the initiator,
leader, and unswerving advocate of the Impressionist
style. In his mature works, Monet developed his method
of producing repeated studies of the same motif in
series, changing canvases with the light or as his
interest shifted.
5. Pablo Picasso Born on October 25, 1881, in Málaga, Spain, Pablo
Picasso's gargantuan full name, which honors a variety
of relatives and saints, is Pablo Diego José Francisco de
Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios
Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito
Ruíz y Picasso. Picasso's mother was Doña Maria
Picasso y Lopez. His father was Don José Ruiz Blasco,
a painter and art teacher. A serious and prematurely
world-weary child, the young Picasso possessed a pair
of piercing, watchful black eyes that seemed to mark him
destined for greatness
6. Vincent van Gogh Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on 30 March 1853 in
Groot-Zundert, in the predominantly Catholic province of
North Brabant in the southern Netherlands.He was the
oldest surviving child of Theodorus van Gogh, a minister
of the Dutch Reformed Church, and Anna Cornelia
Carbentus. Van Gogh was given the name of his
grandfather, and of a brother stillborn exactly a year
before his birth.Vincent was a common name in the Van
Gogh family: his grandfather. Van Gogh died in France
on July 29, 1890, at age 37, from a self-inflicted gunshot
wound.
Founder of French Impressionist painting, and the most
consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's
philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature,
especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The
term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of his
painting Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise),
which was exhibited in 1874 in the first of the independent
exhibitions mounted by Monet and his associates as an
alternative to the Salon de Paris.
Became one of the greatest and most influential artists of
the 20th century and the creator (with Georges Braque) of
Cubism. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of
the 20th century, the invention of constructed sculpture the
co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles
that he helped develop and explore. Among his most
famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a dramatic
portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by the German and
Italian airforces.
Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is
among the most famous and influential figures in the
history of Western art. Van Gogh was a post-impressionist
painter whose work, notable for its beauty, emotion and
color, highly influenced 20th century art.
7. Rembrandt Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn Born in Leiden,
Netherlands in 1606, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn
attended elementary school from 1612 to 1616 and then
attended the Latin School in Leiden, where he partook in
biblical studies and lessons on the classics. It is unclear
whether Rembrandt completed his studies at the Latin
School, but one account claims that he was removed
from school early and sent to be trained as a painter at
his own request.
8. Andy Warhol Andy Warhol born Andrew Warhola; August 6, 1928 –
February 22, 1987) was an American artist, director and
producer who was a leading figure in the visual art
movement known as pop art. Andy was the third child
born to Czechoslovakian immigrant parents, Ondrej and
Ulja (Julia). Warhol was known to suffer from a nervous
disorder that would frequently keep him at home, he
would listen to the radio and collect pictures of movie
stars around his bed.
9. Edvard Munch Edvard Munch was born in Norway in 1863, and was
raised in Christiania (known as Oslo today). He was
related to famous painters and artists in their own right,
Jacob Munch (painter), and Peter Munch (historian). In
1885, Edvard Munch traveled to Paris, and was
extremely influenced by impressionism artists Claude
Monet, Edouard Manet, and followed by the post-
impressionism artists Van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, and
Gauguin. In fact, the main style of Munch's work is post-
impressionism, and focused on this style.
An innovative and prolific master in three media, he is
generally considered one of the greatest visual artists in
the history of art and the most important in Dutch art
history. Unlike most Dutch masters of the 17th century,
Rembrandt's works depict a wide range of style and
subject matter, from portraits, self-portraits, to landscapes,
genre scenes, allegorical and historical scenes, biblical
and mythological themes as well as animal studies.
Andy Warhol was the most successful and highly paid
commercial illustrator in New York even before he began
to make art destined for galleries. Nevertheless, his
screenprinted images of Marilyn Monroe, soup cans, and
sensational newspaper stories, quickly became
synonymous with Pop art.
In the late 20th century, he played a great role in German
expressionism, and the art form that later followed; namely
because of the strong mental anguish that was displayed
in many of the pieces that he created.Norwegian painter
and printmaker whose intensely evocative treatment of
psychological themes built upon some of the main tenets
of late 19th-century Symbolism and greatly influenced
German Expressionism in the early 20th century. One of
his best known works is The Scream of 1893.
 Salvador Dalí was born Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí y
Domenech on May 11, 1904, in Figueres, Spain, located
16 miles from the French border in the foothills of the
Pyrenees Mountains. His father, Salvador Dalí y Cusi,
10. Salvador Dali was a middle class lawyer and notary. Salvador's father
had a strict disciplinary approach to raising children—a
style of child-rearing which contrasted sharply with that
of his mother, Felipa Domenech Ferres. She often
indulged young Salvador in his art and early
eccentricities.
Johannes, Jan or Johan Vermeer (October 1632 –
December 1675) was a Dutch painter who specialized in
domestic interior scenes of middle-class life. Relatively
little was known about Vermeer's life until recently. He
11. Johannes seems to have been devoted exclusively to his art, living
Vermeer out his life in the city of Delft. Until the 19th century, the
only sources of information were some registers, a few
official documents, and comments by other artists; for
this reason, Thoré-Bürger named him "The Sphinx of
Delft". John Michael Montias added details on the family
from the city archives of Delft in his Artists and Artisans
in Delft: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth
Century (1982).
Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking
and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly
skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance
masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of
Memory, was completed in August 1931. Dalí's expansive
artistic repertoire included film, sculpture, and
photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a
variety of media. Dalí attributed his "love of everything that
is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love
of oriental clothes"to an "Arab lineage", claiming that his
ancestors were descended from the Moors.
Dalí was highly imaginative, and also enjoyed indulging in
unusual and grandiose behavior. His eccentric manner
and attention-grabbing public actions sometimes drew
more attention than his artwork, to the dismay of those
who held his work in high esteem, and to the irritation of
his critics.
Vermeer was a moderately successful provincial genre
painter in his lifetime. Vermeer painted mostly domestic
interior scenes. "Almost all his paintings are apparently set
in two smallish rooms in his house in Delft; they show the
same furniture and decorations in various arrangements
and they often portray the same people, mostly women.
He was recognized during his lifetime in Delft and The
Hague, but his modest celebrity gave way to obscurity
after his death.