El Greco is one of the not many old masters who benefit from extensive fame. Like few others, he was rediscovered from darkness by an enthusiastic faction of 19-century collectors and critics, and became one of the chosen members of the contemporary pantheon of great artists. For many later admirers, El Greco was both the archetypal Spaniard and a intellectual artist of the spirit. It was as a master who "felt the spiritual inner creation."

Fra Angelico was Florentine painter and Dominican friar originally named Guido di Pietro. Vasari, who referred to Fra Giovanni as a simple and most holy man, popularized the use of the name Angelico for him, but he says it is the name by which he was always known, and it was certainly used as early as 1469. Angelico combined the influence of the elegantly decorative International Gothic style of Gentile da Fabriano with the more realistic style of Renaissance masters as Masaccio, Donatello and Ghiberti, all of whom worked in Florence. Angelico was also aware of the theories of perspective...

Jean-Honore Fragonard was a French Rococo painter and print-maker whose style was remarkable by cheerfulness and hedonism. His most popular artworks are genre paintings conveying an atmosphere of intimacy and veiled eroticism. Fragonard has been ranked with Watteau as one of the two great lyrical painters of the 18th century in France. An extraordinary active artist, he produced more than 550 paintings, several thousand drawings, and 35 etchings. His style, based primarily on that of Rubens, was express, forceful, and effortless, never tensed or fussy like that of so many of his...

Francesco Hayez was the leading painter of Italian Romanticism in mid-19th-century. He lived long and was prolific. His work spanned both historic paintings, including those that would have appealed to the patriotic sensibility of his patrons. Others reflect the desire to accompany a Neoclassic style to grand themes, either from biblical or classical literature. He also painted scenes from theatrical presentations of his day. Corrado Ricci describes him as starting as a classicist but then evolving to a style of emotional tumult. His portraits have the intensity seen with Ingres and the...

Ferdinand Hodler was one of the famous Swiss painters of the 19th century. His early maturity paintings were landscapes, figure compositions, and portraits, treated with a strong realism. He made a voyage to Basel in 1875, where he studied the paintings of Hans Holbein. In the last decade of the 19th century his work progressed to combine influences from several genres including symbolism and art nouveau. He developed a style which he called "Parallelism," characterized by groupings of figures symmetrically arranged in poses suggesting ritual or dance. Hodler's work in his final phase took on...

Evelyn De Morgan (1855 - 1919) was an English Pre-Raphaelite painter. During her lifetime Evelyn De Morgan produced approximately 102 oil paintings and over 300 drawings. At first glance, works like Flora (1894), Cadmus and Harmonia (1877), Eos (1895) and Night and Sleep (1878) appear to be that of a typical mid-century literary painter influenced by the work of Spencer Stanhope, Watts and Burne-Jones. Consequently, this was the way in which most contemporary critics assessed her paintings: Many do reflect the usual conventions and literary themes of late Victorian art with its Pre-Raphaelite...

Georges de La Tour was a French Baroque artist, who painted mostly religious scenes in chiaroscuro style, lit by pale candlelight. La Tour's s early paintings shows influences from Caravaggio, and probably also from Jacques Bellange, but unlike Caravaggio his religious paintings lack dramatic effects. He painted using chiaroscuro, careful geometrical compositions, and very simplified depicting of forms. His painting method moves during his career towards greater simplicity and stillness. La Tour often painted several variations on the same subjects, and his surviving production is relatively...

Thomas Gainsborough was the most versatile English painter of the 18th century, inventive and original, always prepared to experiment with new ideas and techniques. He alone among the great portrait painters of the era devoted serious attention to landscapes. Unlike Reynolds, he was no great believer in an academic tradition and laughed at the fashion for history painting; an instinctive painter, he delighted in the poetry of paint. In his letters Gainsborough shows a warm-hearted and generous character and an independent mind. His comments on his own work and methods, as well as on some of...

Jean-Louis Andre Theodore Gericault was an influential French painter and lithographer, known for "The Raft of the Medusa" and other paintings. Although he died young, he was one of the pioneers of the Romantic Movement. His stormy career lasted little more than a decade and in that time he displayed a meteoric and many-sided genius. His love of thrilling action, his sense of swirling movement, his energetic conduct of paint, and his taste for the horrid were all to become features of Romanticism. Gericault was, at the same time avant-garde in his realism: he made studies from corpses and...

George Frederic Watts was a admired English Victorian artist related with the Symbolist movement. He became famous his allegorical works "Love and Life" and "Hope." These paintings were in which the emotions and aspirations of life would all be represented in a universal symbolic language. Watts was a hard-working artist who twice refused a baronetcy and other honors, including an offer to become president of the Royal Academy. His declared aims were clear: to paint pictures that appealed 'to the intellect and refined emotions rather than the senses': "I paint ideas, not things. I paint...