Bushido is the code of moral principles which the knights were required or instructed to observe. It is not a written code; at best it consists of a few maxims handed down from mouth to mouth or coming from the pen of some well-known warrior or savant. More frequently it is a code unuttered and unwritten, possessing all the more the powerful sanction of veritable deed, and of a law written on the fleshly tablets of the heart. It was founded not on the creation of one brain, however able, or on the life of a single personage, however renowned. It was an organic growth of decades and centuries...

Giovanni Antonio Canal, better known as Canaletto, was an Italian painter of landscapes of Venice. He was also an important printmaker in etching. Much of Canaletto's early artwork was painted "from nature," differing from the then customary practice of completing paintings in the studio. Some of his later works do revert to this custom, as suggested by the tendency for distant figures to be painted as blobs of colour - an effect produced by using a camera obscura, which blurs farther-away objects. His early works remain his most coveted and, according to many authorities, his best. One of...

This Art Book with Foreword and annotated reproductions by Maria Tsaneva contains 117 selected paintings and drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. Rossetti's art was characterized by its sensuality and its medieval revivalism. His early poetry was influenced by John Keats. He is considered one of the most unconventional painters of the 19th century. Through his methods, he distinguished himself from the Pre-Raphaelite movement; he showed no interest on the exact representation of details, avoided complicated...

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."

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 Benjamin Luks (1867 - 1933) was an American realist artist and illustrator. His vigorously painted genre paintings of urban subjects are examples of the Ashcan School of American art. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art under Thomas Anshutz and traveled abroad studying from 1885-1895. Luks first met the group of artists known as "The Eight" while working as a newspaper artist in Philadelphia in the 1890s. Luks subject matter generally focused on the everyday immediacy and drama of the working class people. He was able to portray their energy and raw physicality. Luks was...

Frederic Sackrider Remington was an American painter, illustrator, sculptor, and writer who specialized in depictions of the Old American West, specifically concentrating on the last quarter of the 19th-century American West and images of cowboys, American Indians, and the U. S. Cavalry. His style was naturalistic, sometimes impressionistic, and usually veered away from the ethnographic realism of earlier Western artists such as George Catlin. His focus was firmly on the people and animals of the West, with landscape usually of secondary importance, unlike the members and descendants of the...