GIOTTO

Giotto di Bondone (c. 1267–January 8, 1337), better known simply as Giotto, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence. He is generally considered the first in a line of great artists who contributed to the Italian Renaissance.



Giotto's contemporary Giovanni Villani wrote that Giotto was "the most sovereign master of painting in his time, who drew all his figures and their postures according to nature. And he was given a salary by the commune [of Florence] in virtue of his talent and excellence."

The later 16th century biographer Giorgio Vasari says of him "…He made a decisive break with the …Byzantine style, and brought to life the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life, which had been neglected for more than two hundred years."

Giotto's masterwork is the decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, commonly called the Arena Chapel, completed around 1305

GIORGIONE

Giorgione (c. 1477 — 1510) is the familiar name of Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco, an Italian painter, one of the seminal artists of the High Renaissance in Venice. Giorgione is known for the elusive poetic quality of his work, and for the fact that only very few (around six) paintings are known for certain to be his work.

The resulting uncertainty about the identity and meaning of his art has made Giorgione one of the most mysterious figures in European painting.

Madge GILL

Madge Gill (1882 – 1961), born Maude Ethel Eades, was an English artist. Born an illegitimate child in East Ham, Essex, (now Greater London), she spent much of her early years in seclusion and was placed in an orphanage at the age of 9. At the age of 25, she married her cousin, Thomas Edwin Gill, a stockbroker. Together they had three sons with their second, Reginald, dying of the Spanish flu. The following year she gave birth to a stillborn baby girl and almost died herself, contracting a serious illness that left her bedridden for several months and blind in her left eye.

After recovering from her illness, she took a sudden and passionate interest in drawing, creating thousands of mediumistic works over the following 40 years, most done with ink in black and white. The works came in all sizes, from postcard-sized to huge sheets of fabric, some over 30 feet (9.1 m) long. She claimed to be guided by a spirit she called "Myrninerest" (my inner rest) and often signed her works in this name. The figure of a young woman in intricate dress appeared thousands of times in her work, and is often thought to be a representation of herself or her lost daughter.

Gill rarely exhibited her work and never sold any pieces out of fear of angering "Myrninerest." After her first son, Bob, died in 1958 she started drinking heavily and stopped drawing. Following her death in 1961, thousands of drawings were discovered in her home; the collection is currently owned by the London Borough of Newham which has no plans to display them.

Théodore GERICAULT

Théodore Géricault (26 September 1791 – 26 January 1824) was an important French painter and lithographer, known for "The Raft of the Medusa" and other paintings. He was one of the pioneers of the Romantic movement.

Paul GAUGIN

Paul Gauguin (7 June 1848 – 8 May 1903) was a leading Post-Impressionist painter. Gaugin's bold experimentation with coloring led directly to the Synthetist style of modern art while his expression of the inherent meaning of the subjects in his paintings, paved the way to Primitivism and the return to the pastoral. He was also an influential exponent of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms.

Thomas GAINSBOROUGH

Thomas Gainsborough (christened 14 May 1727 – 2 August 1788) was one of the most famous portrait and landscape painters of 18th century Britain.



His most famous works, such as 'Portrait of Mrs. Graham'; 'Mary and Margaret: The Painter's Daughters'; 'William Hallett and His Wife Elizabeth, nee Stephen, known as The Morning Walk'; and 'Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher', display the unique individuality of his subjects.

Caspar David FRIEDRICH

Caspar David Friedrich (5 September 1774 – 7 May 1840) was a 19th century German Romantic painter, considered by many critics to be one of the finest representatives of the movement. Alongside other romantic painters, such as J. M. W. Turner or John Constable, Friedrich made landscape painting a major genre in Western art.

Lucian FREUD

Lucian Michael Freud, OM, CH (born 8 December 1922) is a British painter. Freud was born in Berlin, Germany in 1922, son of Jewish parents Ernst Ludwig Freud, an architect, and Lucie née Brasch. He is the grandson of Sigmund Freud and brother of writer and politician Clement Raphael Freud and of Stephan Gabriel Freud.

Freud and his family moved to the U.K. in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism, and gained British citizenship in 1939. During this period he attended Dartington Hall school in Totnes, Devon, and later Bryanston School.

Helen FRANKENTHALER

Helen Frankenthaler (born December 12, 1928) is an American post-painterly abstraction artist. Born in New York City, she was influenced by Jackson Pollock's paintings and by Clement Greenberg. She later married fellow artist Robert Motherwell.

Her career was launched in 1952 with the exhibition of 'Mountains and Sea'. This painting is large - measuring seven feet by ten feet - and has the effect of a watercolor, though it is painted in oils. In it, she used the technique of painting directly on to an unprepared canvas so that the material absorbs the colors. She heavily diluted the oil paint with turpentine or kerosene so that the color would soak into the canvas. This technique, known as "soak stain" was adopted by other artists (notably Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland) and launched the second generation of the Color Field school of painting. This method would leave the canvas with a halo effect around each area to which the paint was applied.

Piero della FRANCESCA

Piero della Francesca (c. 1412 – 12 October 1492) was an Italian artist of the Early Renaissance. To contemporaries, he was known as a mathematician and geometer as well as an artist, though now he is chiefly appreciated for his art. His painting was characterized by its serene humanism and its use of geometric forms, particularly in relation to perspective and foreshortening.

Jean Honore FRAGONARD

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (5 April 1732 – 22 August 1806) was a French painter and printmaker whose late Rococo manner was distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism.



One of the most prolific artists active in the last decades of the ancien régime, Fragonard produced more than 550 paintings (not counting drawing and etchings), of which only five are dated. Among his most popular works are genre paintings conveying the atmosphere of intimacy and veiled eroticism.

Lucio FONTANA

Lucio Fontana (19 February 1899 – 7 September 1968) was a painter and sculptor born in Rosario, Argentina, the son of an Italian father and an Argentine mother. He was mostly known as the founder of Spatialism and his ties to Arte Povera.

Fontana's works can be found in the permanent collections of more than one hundred museums around the world.

John Duncan FERGUSSON

John Duncan Fergusson (1874–1961) was a Scottish artist, regarded as one of the major artists of the Scottish Colourists school of painting.

While studying at the Louvre in Paris, Fergusson was impressed by the impressionist paintings at the Salle Caillebotte and these were an important influence on his developing style. Later he would also be influenced by Fauvism and the fauvist principles would become a strong feature of his art. Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac wrote in his foreword to Fergusson's memorial exhibition of 1961: "His art is a deep and pure expression of his immense love of life. Endowed with a rare plastic feeling, almost sculptural in its quality. He joined with it an exceptional sense of colour, outspoken, ringing colours, rich and splendid in their very substance."

Richard ESTES

Richard Estes (born May 14, 1932 in Kewanee, Illinois) is an American painter who is best known for his photorealistic paintings. The paintings generally consist of reflective, clean, and inanimate city and geometric landscapes. He is regarded as one of the founders of the international photo-realist movement of the late 1960s.

El GRECO

El Greco - "The Greek" (1541 – 7 April 1614) was a painter, sculptor, and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. He usually signed his paintings in Greek letters with his full name, Doménicos Theotokópoulos, underscoring his Greek origin.

El Greco was born in Crete, but in 1577 he moved to Toledo, Spain, where he lived and worked until his death. In Toledo, El Greco received several major commissions and produced his best known paintings.

El Greco's dramatic and expressionistic style was met with puzzlement by his contemporaries but found appreciation in the 20th century. El Greco is regarded as a precursor of both Expressionism and Cubism, while his personality and works were a source of inspiration for poets and writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke and Nikos Kazantzakis. El Greco has been characterized by modern scholars as an artist so individual that he belongs to no conventional school. He is best known for tortuously elongated figures and often fantastic or phantasmagorical pigmentation, marrying Byzantine traditions with those of Western painting

Albrecht DURER

Albrecht Dürer (21 May 1471 – 6 April 1528) was a German painter and mathematician. He was born and died in Nuremberg, Germany and is best known as one of the greatest creators of old master prints, along with Rembrandt and Goya. His prints were often executed in series, including the Apocalypse (1498) and his two series on the passion of Christ, the Great Passion (1498–1510) and the Little Passion (1510–1511).



Dürer's best known individual engravings include Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513), Saint Jerome in his Study (1514) and Melencolia I (1514), which has been the subject of extensive analysis and speculation. His most iconic images are his woodcuts of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1497–1498) from the Apocalypse series, the "Rhinoceros", and numerous self-portraits in oils.

Marcel DUCHAMP

Marcel Duchamp (28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French artist (he became an American citizen in 1955) whose work and ideas had considerable influence on the development of post-World War II Western art, and whose advice to modern art collectors helped shape the tastes of the Western art world.



Thousands of books and articles attempt to interpret Duchamp's artwork and philosophy, but in interviews and his writing, Duchamp only added to the mystery. The interpretations interested him as creations of their own, and as reflections of the interpreter.

A playful man, Duchamp prodded thought about artistic processes and art marketing, not so much with words, but with actions such as dubbing a urinal "art" and naming it Fountain. He produced relatively few artworks as he quickly moved through the avant-garde rhythms of his time.

Andre DERAIN

André Derain (10 June 1880 – 8 September 1954) was a French painter and co-founder of Fauvism with Henri Matisse.

Eugene DELACROIX

Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (26 April 1798 – 13 August 1863) was the most important of the French Romantic painters. Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement.

Willem DE KOONING

Willem de Kooning (April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was an abstract expressionist artist, born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In the post-World War II era, de Kooning painted in a style that came to be referred to variously as Abstract expressionism, Action painting, and the New York School.

Jacques-Louis DAVID

Jacques-Louis David (30 August 1748 – 29 December 1825) was a highly influential French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the prominent painter of the era. In the 1780s his cerebral brand of history painting marked a change in taste away from Rococo frivolity toward a classical austerity and severity, chiming with the moral climate of the final years of the ancien régime.

David later became an active supporter of the French Revolution and friend of Maximilien Robespierre, and was effectively a dictator of the arts under the French Republic. Imprisoned after Robespierre's fall from power, he aligned himself with yet another political regime upon his release, that of Napoleon I. It was at this time that he developed his 'Empire style', notable for its use of warm Venetian colours. David had a huge number of pupils, making him the strongest influence in French art of the 19th century, especially academic Salon painting.

Salvador DALI

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech (11 May 1904 – 23 January 1989), was a Spanish surrealist painter born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain. 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 1931.



Salvador Dalí's artistic repertoire also included film, sculpture, and photography. He collaborated with Walt Disney on the Academy Award-nominated short cartoon Destino, which was released posthumously in 2003. He also collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock on Hitchcock's film Spellbound.

Widely considered to be greatly imaginative, Dalí had an affinity for doing unusual things to draw attention to himself. This sometimes irked those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, since his eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork. The purposefully-sought notoriety led to broad public recognition and many purchases of his works by people from all walks of life.

Gustave COURBET

Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet (10 June 1819 – 31 December 1877) was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting.

Best known as an innovator in Realism (and credited with coining the term), Courbet was a painter of figurative compositions, landscapes and seascapes. He also worked with social issues, and addressed peasantry and the grave working conditions of the poor. Courbet believed the Realist artist's mission was the pursuit of truth, which would help erase social contradictions and imbalances.

Jean COROT

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (16 July 1796 – 22 February 1875) was a French landscape painter and printmaker in etching. Corot was the leading painter of the Barbizon school of France in the mid-nineteenth century. He is a pivotal figure in landscape painting: his work simultaneously referencing the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipateing the plein-air innovations of Impressionism.

Of Corot Claude Monet exclaimed "There is only one master here — Corot. We are nothing compared to him, nothing." His contributions to figure painting are hardly less important; Edgar Degas preferred his figures to his landscapes, and the classical figures of Pablo Picasso pay overt homage to Corot's influence.

John CONSTABLE

John Constable (11 June 1776 – 31 March 1837) was an English Romantic painter. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home, which he invested with an intensity of affection.



His most famous paintings include "Dedham Vale" of 1802 and "The Hay Wain" of 1821. Although his paintings are now among the most popular and valuable in British art, he was never financially successful and did not become a member of the establishment until he was elected to the Royal Academy at the age of 52. He sold more paintings in France than in his native England.

Dan CHRISTENSEN

Dan Christensen (October 6 1942, January 20 2007) was an American abstract painter, he is best known for paintings that relate to Lyrical Abstraction, Color field painting and Abstract expressionism. His early work from 1965-1966 was related to Minimalism.

Marc CHAGALL

Marc Chagall (7 July 1887 – 28 March 1985) was a Belarussian/French painter of Russian-Jewish origin who was born in Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire. Among the celebrated painters of the 20th century, he is associated with the modern movements after impressionism.

Chagall's works fit into several modern art categories. He took part in the movements of the Paris art world which preceded World War I and was thus involved with avant-garde currents. However, his work always found itself on the margins of these movements and emerging trends, including Cubism and Fauvism. He was closely associated with the Paris School and its exponents, including Amedeo Modigliani.

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