- Sandro Botticelli was an Italian painter of Early Renaissance and an artist of Florentine School. During his lifetime he was one of the most acclaimed painters in Italy. Among his best known works are The Birth of Venus and Primavera.
- Jan van Eyck (1390–1441) was an Early Netherlandish painter active in Bruges and one of the most significant Northern Renaissance artists of the 15th century. Van Eyck painted both secular and religious subject matter, including commissioned portraits, donor portraits and both large and portable altarpieces. His work comes from the International Gothic style, but he soon eclipsed it, in part through a greater emphasis on naturalism and realism. Van Eyck’s portraits are characterized by his manipulation of oil paint and a meticulous attention to detail. Van Eyck was highly sought after as a portrait artist. Among his best known works are Arnolfini Portrait and Ghent Altarpiece.
- Leonardo Davinci was an Italian painter, sculptor, and architect of High Renaissance, and one of three most famous Renaissance artists. Leonardo is renowned primarily as a painter. Among his works, perhaps fifteen of his paintings have survived, the Mona Lisa is the most famous and most parodied portrait and The Last Supper the most reproduced religious painting of all time, with their fame approached only by Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. Leonardo’s drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, being reproduced on items as varied as the euro coin, textbooks, and T-shirts.
- Michelangelo Buonarroti was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance, and one of three most famous Renaissance artists. A number of his works in painting, sculpture, and architecture rank among the most famous in existence. His output in every field during his long life was prodigious; when the sheer volume of correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences that survive is also taken into account, he is the best-documented artist of the 16th century. Two of his best-known works, the Pietà and David, were sculpted before he turned thirty. Despite his low opinion of painting, Michelangelo also created two of the most influential works in fresco in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling and The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.
- Raphael Sanzio was an Italian Realism painter, and architect of the High Renaissance. 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. The best known work is The School of Athens in the Vatican Stanza della Segnatura.
- Rembrandt van Rijn was a Flemish Baroque painter, and a proponent of an extravagant Baroque style that emphasized movement, color, and sensuality. He is well known for his Counter-Reformation altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and history paintings of mythological and allegorical subjects.
- Jean-Antoine Watteau was a French painter whose brief career spurred the revival of interest in colour and movement, as seen in the tradition of Correggio and Rubens. He revitalized the waning Baroque style, shifting it to the less severe, more naturalistic, less formally classical Rococo.
- Peter Paul Rubens was a Flemish Baroque painter, and a proponent of an extravagant Baroque style that emphasized movement, color, and sensuality. He is well known for his Counter-Reformation altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and history paintings of mythological and allegorical subjects. Among his best known works are The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, c. and The Three Graces.
- Michelangelo Caravaggio was an Italian artist active in Rome, Naples, Malta, and Sicily between 1592 and 1610. His paintings, which combine a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, had a formative influence on the Baroque school of painting. Among his best known works are Boy with a Basket of Fruit and Judith and Holofernes.
- Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he considered himself to be a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was Ingres’s portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest legacy. A man profoundly respectful of the past, he assumed the role of a guardian of academic orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style represented by his nemesis, Eugène Delacroix. His exemplars, he once explained, were “the great masters which flourished in that century of glorious memory when Raphael set the eternal and incontestable bounds of the sublime in art … I am thus a conservator of good doctrine, and not an innovator.” Nevertheless, modern opinion has tended to regard Ingres and the other Neoclassicists of his era as embodying the Romantic spirit of his time, while his expressive distortions of form and space make him an important precursor of modern art. Among his best known works are Grande Odalisque and The Turkish Bath.
- Diego Velázquez was one of the most important painters of the Spanish Golden Age, and an individualistic portrait artist of the contemporary Baroque period. Among his best known works are Vieja friendo huevos and Portrait of the eight-year old Infanta Margarita Teresa in a Blue Dress.
- Eugène Delacroix was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school. Delacroix’s use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of color profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement. His most famous work is Liberty Leading the People.
- Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) was an influential French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the preeminent 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, heightened feeling harmonizing 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 (1758–1794), 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. At this time he developed his Empire style, notable for its use of warm Venetian colors. The best-known work is The Death of Marat.
- Francisco Goya was a Spanish Romantic painter and a court painter to the Spanish Crown. The subversive imaginative element in his art, as well as his bold handling of paint, provided a model for the work of artists of later generations, notably Manet, Picasso. Among his best known works are The Third of May 1808 and The Nude Maja.
- Gustave Courbet was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. Committed to painting only what he could see, he rejected academic convention and the Romanticism of the previous generation of visual artists. His independence set an example that was important to later artists, such as the Impressionists and the Cubists. Courbet occupies an important place in 19th-century French painting as an innovator and as an artist willing to make bold social statements through his work. Courbet wrote a Realist manifesto for the introduction to the catalogue of this independent, personal exhibition, echoing the tone of the period’s political manifestos. In it he asserts his goal as an artist “to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my epoch according to my own estimation.” Among his best known works are The Artist’s Studio and Nude Woman with a Dog.
- Gustav Klimt was an Austrian Symbolist painter, and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. Klimt is noted for his paintings, murals, sketches, and other objets d’art. Klimt’s primary subject was the female body; his works are marked by a frank eroticism. The best-known work is The Kiss.
- Edvard Munch was a 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 most well-known works is The Scream of 1893.
- Jan Vermeer was a Dutch painter who specialized in scenes of ordinary people going about their everyday life, and in domestic interior scenes of middle-class life. He is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work. Vermeer worked slowly and with great care, using bright colors and sometimes expensive pigments, with a preference for lapis lazuli and Indian yellow. He is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work. 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.” Among his best known works are The Milkmaid and Girl with a Pearl Earring.
- Claude Monet was a 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. Monet’s ambition of documenting the French countryside led him to adopt a method of painting the same scene many times in order to capture the changing of light and the passing of the seasons.
- Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty, and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that “Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to Watteau.
- Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th-century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne’s often repetitive, exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable. He used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields. The paintings convey Cézanne’s intense study of his subjects. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th-century Impressionism and the early 20th century’s new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism. Both Matisse and Picasso are said to have remarked that Cézanne “is the father of us all.”
- Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist who was not well appreciated until after his death. Gauguin was later recognized for his experimental use of colors and synthetist style that were distinguishably different from Impressionism. His work was influential to the French avant-garde and many modern artists, such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.
- Vincent van Gogh was a Post-Impressionist painter of Dutch origin whose work, notable for its rough beauty, emotional honesty and bold color, had a far-reaching influence on 20th-century art. Among his best known works are Vase with Twelve Sunflowers and The Café Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles, at Night.
- Georges Seurat was a French Post-Impressionist painter and draftsman. He is noted for his innovative use of drawing media and for devising the technique of painting known as pointillism. His large-scale work A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte altered the direction of modern art by initiating Neo-impressionism. It is one of the icons of late 19th-century painting.
- Amedeo Modigliani was a Jewish Italian painter and sculptor and sculptor who worked mainly in France. He is known for portraits and nudes in a modern style characterized by elongation of faces and figures, that were not received well during his lifetime, but later found acceptance. Modigliani’s oeuvre includes mainly paintings and drawings. From 1909 to 1914, however, he devoted himself mainly to sculpture. His main subject was portraits and full figures of humans, both in the images and in the sculptures. During his life, Amedeo Modigliani had little success, but after his death he achieved greater popularity and his works of art achieved high prices. Among his best known works are Nu Couché au coussin Bleu, Red Nude, Dedie Hayden, and his sculpture Female Head 1011/1912.
- Ilya Repin was the most renowned Russian artist of the 19th century, when his position in the world of art was comparable to that of Leo Tolstoy in literature. He played a major role in bringing Russian art into the mainstream of European culture.
- Nicolai Fechin was a Russian-American painter known for his portraits and works featuring Native Americans. After graduating with the highest marks from the Imperial Academy of Arts and traveling in Europe under a Prix de Rome, he returned to his native Kazan, where he taught and painted. He exhibited his first work in the United States in 1910 in an international exhibition in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
- Henri Matisse was a French Fauvism artist, known for his use of color and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was also a printmaker and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.
- André Derain was a French artist, painter, sculptor and co-founder of Fauvism with Henri Matisse. During the German occupation of France in World War II, Derain lived primarily in Paris and was much courted by the Germans because he represented the prestige of French culture. Derain accepted an invitation to make an official visit to Germany in 1941, and traveled with other French artists to Berlin to attend a Nazi exhibition of an officially endorsed artist, Arno Breker. Derain’s presence in Germany was used effectively by Nazi propaganda, and after the Liberation he was branded a collaborator and ostracized by many former supporters.
- Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. As one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, 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 portrayal of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.
- Wassily Kandinsky was an influential Russian painter. He is credited with painting the first purely abstract works. Kandinsky’s creation of abstract work followed a long period of development and maturation of intense thought based on his artistic experiences. He called this devotion to inner beauty, fervor of spirit, and spiritual desire inner necessity; it was a central aspect of his art.
- Salvador Dali was a prominent Spanish surrealist painter. 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. 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. Among his best known works are The Persistence of Memory and his contemporary sculpture Homage to Newton.
- Auguste Rodin was a French sculptor. Although Rodin is generally considered the progenitor of modern sculpture, he did not set out to rebel against the past. He was schooled traditionally, took a craftsman-like approach to his work, and desired academic recognition, although he was never accepted into Paris’s foremost school of art. Rodin possessed a unique ability to model a complex, turbulent, deeply pocketed surface in clay. Many of his most notable sculptures were roundly criticized during his lifetime. His sculptures suffered a decline in popularity after his death in 1917, but within a few decades, his legacy solidified. Rodin remains one of the few sculptors widely known outside the visual arts community. Rodin’s most famous sculpture is The Thinker.
- Henry Moore was an English surrealism sculptor and artist. He was best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art. His forms are usually abstractions of the human figure, and his works are usually suggestive of the female body.
- Alexander Calder was an influential American artist and sculptor. He is best known as the originator of the mobile, a type of kinetic sculpture made with delicately balanced or suspended components which move in response to motor power or air currents. By contrast, Calder’s stationary sculptures are called stabiles. He also produced numerous wire figures. His art was recognized with many large-scale exhibitions.
- Andy Warhol was an American artist who was a leading figure of pop-art and one of the icons of contemporary art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture and advertisement that flourished by the 1960s. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became a renowned and sometimes controversial artist. His silkscreen series depicting icons of the mass-media (as a reinterpretation of Monet’s series of Water lilies or the Rouen Cathedral) are one of the milestones of contemporary Art, with a huge influence in the Art of our days.
- Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was well known for his unique style of drip painting. He was most famous from 1947 to 1950. He produced artworks like Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950. It is composed of, brown, black, and white—very basic colors. Like Pollock said in his quote, he tries to express feeling here by the motion of the work instead of conveying it through the colors. Many paintings by him don’t have names; instead, they are numbered so it doesn’t give the piece a symbolic meaning, just a feeling.
- Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) was an American pop artist. During the 1960s, along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist among others, he became a leading figure in the new art movement. His work defined the basic premise of pop art through parody. Favoring the comic strip as his main inspiration, Lichtenstein produced hard-edged, precise compositions that documented while it parodied often in a tongue-in-cheek humorous manner. His work was heavily influenced by both popular advertising and the comic book style. He described pop art as “not ‘American’ painting but actually industrial painting”. His paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City. Whaam! and Drowning Girl are generally regarded as Lichtenstein’s most famous works, with Oh, Jeff…I Love You, Too…But… arguably third. Drowning Girl, Whaam! and Look Mickey are regarded as his most influential works. Woman with Flowered Hat has held the record for highest Lichtenstein auction price since May 15, 2013.
- Stefan-Sagmeister is a New York-based graphic designer and typographer, and one of the most popular graphic designers in the world. He has his own design firm – Sagmeister & Walsh Inc.—in New York City. Sagmeister studied graphic design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. He later received a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Pratt Institute in New York. He moved to Hong Kong to work with Leo Burnett’s Hong Kong Design Group. In 1993, he returned to New York to work with Tibor Kalman’s M&Co design company. Stefan Sagmeister proceeded to form the New York based Sagmeister Inc. in 1993 and has since designed branding, graphics, and packaging for clients as diverse as the Rolling Stones, HBO, the Guggenheim Museum and Time Warner.