Painter of languid, elegant, Edwardian beauties and sharply dressed gentlemen, John Singer Sargent was the ultimate society painter. He knew everyone who was anyone and was on personal terms with many of them, including Edward VII and the U.S. presidents Roosevelt and Wilson. This social standing was justified. Sargent was one of the greatest portrait painters ever, able to convey the personality and style of his sitters-comparable to the great Velázquez...

Katsushika Hokusai is the most famous of a sequence of names used by a versatile and long-lived Japanese artist who worked in many genres and schools, evolving a unique style that made him known then as well as now as a true master. He was an unusual and restless man who slipped boundaries and made fresh connections, yet never sought great wealth or position. Hokusai produced over 30,000 different designs, prints, illustrations, paintings, and sketches....

Modigliani's human subjects invariably have almond-shaped eyes with long, slightly twisted noses, small pursed mouths, and elongated necks. The majority of his works are semi-formal portraits that radiate a somewhat sculptural quality, suggesting his early roots as a sculptor. Amedeo Modigliani was an Italian Sephardic Jew, born in the port town of Livorno on the northwestern coast of Tuscany on July 12, 1884. He died young, just on the verge of discovery...

The earliest botanical illustrations are found in ancient herbals-practical works of knowledge, written to pass on crucial information about how to heal the sick. Around the time of the Renaissance, however, flowers began to be more generally appreciated for their beauty, so talented artists set about capturing their magic. Botanical illustration developed into a high art form during the golden era of the 18th and early 19th centuries. From that era,...

Egon Schiele is considered by many to be the greatest draftsman of the 20th century. The undeniable fact, however that a considerable share of his work is of an explicitly erotic nature has blinded many people to his remarkable ability, so much so that he is primarily known as an Austrian Expressionist artist of the erotic. Schiele's full artistic flowering lasted only a little over 10 years. He was cut down at the cruelly early age of 28, just as...

Although an American, Mary Cassatt spent the majority of her life in France and gained most of her fame and success in Europe. Not until after her death on June 14, 1926, at Chateau de Beaufresne, near Paris, did she become a truly celebrated American artist. Cassatt is known most for her paintings and pastels of mothers and their children. Never having been a mother herself, perhaps Cassatt was mesmerized by the familial bond so evident to observers...

Late nineteenth century Paris was a thriving, exciting place for artists, and Alphonse Mucha was the most celebrated artist working in the city. Everywhere you looked his posters and advertisement designs caught the eye and influenced popular culture. He was the favorite artist of the great actress Sarah Bernhardt and she contracted him for six years to design all her posters, costumes, set designs, programs, and more. However he was much more than...

Gustav Klimt was raised in poverty in mid-nineteenth century Vienna but his precocious artistic talent raised him from the gutter to the heights of Austrian society. Initially a generic painter of historical scenes he soon devised his own unique style featuring semi-naked women in mystical, gold-wrapped, abstract landscapes that either completely enchanted or totally outraged his audience. His trademark heavily patterned, exotically beautiful women...

Hieronymus Bosch is a Dutch painter of the late Middle Ages. He died in 1516. His work is known for its use of fantastic, now-viewed as horrific, imagery to illustrate moral and religious concepts and narratives of the Roman Catholic church during that time. Balancing the images of hell and tormented sinners are the bucolic, delicate, and detailed landscapes he painted on the back of his triptychs typically created for display and use in churches....

Albrecht Dürer, who lived from 1471 to 1528, worked during the time of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. Typical of his era, religion was the subject of most of his creative work. We know more about Dürer than many artists of his day, thanks to his proclivity with the pen as well as with his paintbrush. He was also widely known across Europe during his lifetime because much of his work was disseminated by printing. Dürer left a considerable...