PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: painting
Dutch artist
Rembrandt was a Dutch Baroque painter and printmaker, one of the greatest storytellers in the history of art, possessing an exceptional ability to render people in their various moods and dramatic guises....
Italian artist, engineer, and scientist
Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer whose skill and intelligence, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal....
Italian painter
Caravaggio was a leading Italian painter of the late 16th and early 17th centuries who became famous for the intense and unsettling realism of his large-scale religious works. While most other Italian...
Italian artist
Michelangelo was an Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, and poet who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art. Michelangelo was considered the greatest living artist...
British writer and artist
William Blake was an English engraver, artist, poet, and visionary, author of exquisite lyrics in Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) and profound and difficult “prophecies,” such...
Spanish artist
Pablo Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer. He was one of the greatest and most-influential artists of the 20th century and the creator (with Georges...
Italian painter
Titian was the greatest Italian Renaissance painter of the Venetian school. He was recognized early in his own lifetime as a supremely talented painter, and his reputation has in the intervening centuries...
French artist
Edgar Degas was a French painter, sculptor, and printmaker who was prominent in the Impressionist group and widely celebrated for his images of Parisian life. Degas’s principal subject was the human—especially...
Flemish artist
Peter Paul Rubens was a Flemish painter who was the greatest exponent of Baroque painting’s dynamism, vitality, and sensuous exuberance. Though his masterpieces include portraits and landscapes, Rubens...
Dutch painter
Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch painter, generally considered one of the greatest of the Post-Impressionists. Van Gogh started his artistic career rather late, beginning at age 27. In the decade that followed...
Spanish painter
Diego Velázquez was the most important Spanish painter of the 17th century, a giant of Western art. Velázquez is universally acknowledged as one of the world’s greatest artists. The naturalistic style...
Italian painter
Giotto was the most important Italian painter of the 14th century, whose works point to the innovations of the Renaissance style that developed a century later. For almost seven centuries, Giotto has been...
Greek artist
El Greco was a master of Spanish painting, whose highly individual dramatic and expressionistic style met with the puzzlement of his contemporaries but gained newfound appreciation in the 20th century....
Italian painter
Tintoretto was a great Italian Mannerist painter of the Venetian school and one of the most important artists of the late Renaissance. His paintings include Vulcan Surprising Venus and Mars (c. 1555),...
American painter
Georgia O’Keeffe was an American painter who was among the most influential figures in Modernism, best known for her large-format paintings of natural subjects, especially flowers and bones, and for her...
Dutch painter
Piet Mondrian was a painter who was an important leader in the development of modern abstract art and a major exponent of the Dutch abstract art movement known as De Stijl (“The Style”). In his mature...
French painter
Nicolas Poussin was a French painter and draftsman who founded the French Classical tradition. He spent virtually all of his working life in Rome, where he specialized in history paintings—depicting scenes...
French artist
Paul Cézanne was a French painter, one of the greatest of the Post-Impressionists, whose works and ideas were influential in the aesthetic development of many 20th-century artists and art movements, especially...
Italian painter and architect
Raphael was a master painter and architect of the Italian High Renaissance. Raphael is best known for his Madonnas and for his large figure compositions in the Vatican. His School of Athens in the Stanza...
German artist
Albrecht Dürer was a painter and printmaker generally regarded as the greatest German Renaissance artist. His vast body of work includes altarpieces and religious works, numerous portraits and self-portraits,...
French painter
Claude Monet was a French painter who became the initiator, leader, and unswerving advocate of the Impressionist style. In his mature works, Monet developed his method of producing repeated studies of...
French artist
Honoré Daumier was a prolific French caricaturist, painter, and sculptor especially renowned for his cartoons and drawings satirizing 19th-century French politics and society. His paintings, though hardly...
French artist
Camille Pissarro was a painter and printmaker who was a key figure in the history of Impressionism. Pissarro was the only artist to show his work in all eight Impressionist group exhibitions; throughout...
French artist
Henri Matisse was an artist often regarded as the most important French painter of the 20th century. He was the leader of the Fauvist movement about 1900, and he pursued the expressiveness of color throughout...
Italian artist
Andrea Mantegna was a painter and engraver, the first fully Renaissance artist of northern Italy. His best known surviving work is the Camera degli Sposi (“Room of the Bride and Groom”), or Camera Picta...
French painter
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a painter and icon of cultural conservatism in 19th-century France. Ingres became the principal proponent of French Neoclassical painting after the death of his mentor,...
Russian-born artist
Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian-born artist, one of the first creators of pure abstraction in modern painting. After successful avant-garde exhibitions, he founded the influential Munich group Der Blaue...
English artist
William Hogarth was the first great English-born artist to attract admiration abroad, best known for his moral and satirical engravings and paintings—e.g., A Rake’s Progress (eight scenes,1733). His attempts...
American filmmaker, painter, musicologist, ethnographer, collector, and mystic
Harry Smith was an American filmmaker, painter, musicologist, ethnographer, collector, and mystic. Smith is best known as the compiler of the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), which served as a...
Swiss-German artist
Paul Klee was a Swiss-German painter and draftsman who was one of the foremost artists of the 20th century. Klee’s mother, née Ida Maria Frick of Basel, and his German-born father, Hans Klee, were both...
Italian painter
Sandro Botticelli was one of the greatest painters of the Florentine Renaissance. His Birth of Venus and La Primavera are often said to epitomize for modern viewers the spirit of the Renaissance. Botticelli’s...
Italian painter
Fra Angelico was an Italian painter, one of the greatest 15th-century painters, whose works within the framework of the early Renaissance style embody a serene religious attitude and reflect a strong Classical...
French painter
Jacques-Louis David was the most celebrated French artist of his day and a principal exponent of the late 18th-century Neoclassical reaction against the Rococo style. David won wide acclaim with his huge...
French painter
Paul Gauguin was a French painter, printmaker, and sculptor who sought to achieve a “primitive” expression of spiritual and emotional states in his work. The artist, whose work has been categorized as...
American painter
Thomas Eakins was a painter who carried the tradition of 19th-century American Realism to perhaps its highest achievement. He painted mainly portraits of his friends and scenes of outdoor sports, such...
Flemish painter
Anthony van Dyck was, after Peter Paul Rubens, the most prominent Flemish Baroque painter of the 17th century. A prolific painter of portraits of European aristocracy, he also executed many works on religious...
French artist
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist who broke down the boundaries between works of art and everyday objects. After the sensation caused by Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912), he painted few other...
English painter
J.M.W. Turner was an English Romantic landscape painter whose expressionistic studies of light, color, and atmosphere were unmatched in their range and sublimity. Turner was the son of a barber. At age...
Dutch painter
Frans Hals was a great 17th-century portraitist of the Dutch bourgeoisie of Haarlem, where he spent practically all his life. Hals evolved a technique that was close to Impressionism in its looseness,...
Italian painter
Masaccio was an important Florentine painter of the Early Renaissance whose frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel of the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence (c. 1427) remained influential throughout...
French painter
Antoine Watteau was a French painter who typified the lyrically charming and graceful style of the Rococo. Much of his work reflects the influence of the commedia dell’arte and the opéra ballet (e.g.,...
French painter
Édouard Manet was a French painter who broke new ground by defying traditional techniques of representation and by choosing subjects from the events and circumstances of his own time. His Le Déjeuner sur...
Italian painter
Duccio was one of the greatest Italian painters of the Middle Ages and the founder of the Sienese school. In Duccio’s art, the formality of the Italo-Byzantine tradition, strengthened by a clearer understanding...
English painter
Thomas Gainsborough was a portrait and landscape painter, the most versatile English painter of the 18th century. Some of his early portraits show the sitters grouped in a landscape (Mr. and Mrs. Andrews,...
French artist
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a French artist who observed and documented with great psychological insight the personalities and facets of Parisian nightlife and the French world of entertainment in the...
Italian artist
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was a great Italian painter of the 18th century. His luminous, poetic frescoes, while extending the tradition of Baroque ceiling decoration, epitomize the lightness and elegance...
Austrian painter and writer
Oskar Kokoschka was an Austrian painter and writer who was one of the leading exponents of Expressionism. In his early portraits, gesture intensifies the psychological penetration of character; especially...
Flemish artist
Pieter Bruegel, the Elder was the greatest Flemish painter of the 16th century, whose landscapes and vigorous, often witty scenes of peasant life are particularly renowned. Since Bruegel signed and dated...
British artist
John Constable was a major figure in English landscape painting in the early 19th century. He is best known for his paintings of the English countryside, particularly those representing his native valley...
Belorussian-born French artist
Marc Chagall was a Belorussian-born French painter, printmaker, and designer who composed his images based on emotional and poetic associations, rather than on rules of pictorial logic. Predating Surrealism,...