Classic Annotated: 151 books

  Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida was a Valencian Spanish artist, outshined in the painting of portraits, landscapes, and monumental works of social and historical themes. His most characteristic paintings are described by a skilful depicting of the people in bold landscape under the sunlight...

Tiziano Vecellio was the greatest artist of the Venetian School, recognized as immense genius in his own time and his reputation as one of the giants of art has never been sincerely questioned. Lomazzo described him as the 'sun amidst small stars not only among the Italians but all the painters of...

  William Merritt Chase was an American painter, notorious as an supporter of Impressionism and also fonder of the Chase School. He worked in all media though was most fluent in oil painting and pastel. Chase as well created watercolour paintings and etchings but is perhaps best known...

Willard Metcalf was an American artist born in Lowell, Massachusetts. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and later attended Académie Julian, Paris. After early figure-painting and illustration, he became prominent as a landscape painter. He was one of the Ten American...

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel is as a rule observed among the Russian artists of the Symbolist movement. Indeed, he obviously stood isolated from modern art tendencies; therefore the source of his atypical way should be finding in Byzantine and Early Renaissance art. Even in his first works, he demonstrated...

  Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones was a British painter and designer closely associated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, the greatest of the second generation Pre-Raphaelites. He was also strongly involved in the rebirth of the practice of stained glass art in Britain....

Joshua Reynolds was English portrait painter who dominated English artistic life in the middle and late 18th century. His art, frequently based on the Old Masters or antique sculpture, were intended to raise classical standards. His rich colour, strong lighting and free handling of paint greatly influenced...

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones was a British painter and designer closely associated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. He worked in a variety of crafts; including designing ceramic tiles, jewellery, tapestries, mosaics and book illustration. He considered that art should be valued...

Gustave Doré was a French artist, engraver, illustrator and sculptor, best known for his illustrations of epic literature, such as those by Dante, Cervantes, Hugo, and Milton, as well as contemporary texts, such as those by Balzac. Doré worked primarily with wood engraving. He rarely...

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...

George Stubbs was marvellous English animal painter and anatomical draftsman, famous for his paintings of horses. Stubbs also painted a wide range of other animals, including the lion, tiger, giraffe, monkey, and rhinoceros, which he was able to observe in private menageries. According to the Ozias...

Benjamin West was a British and American painter of historical pictures around the time of the American War of Independence, the president of the Royal Academy in London and the first American artist to achieve an international reputation. When West visited England in 1763, his paintings caused a...

Jean Frédéric Bazille was a French Impressionist artist. Many of his paintings are examples of figure compositions in which Bazille placed the subject figure within a landscape. His work is of interest for its exploration of the effects of light on flesh tones. Much of his work retained...

  John William Waterhouse was an English painter famous for working in the Pre-Raphaelite style. His early works were not Pre-Raphaelite in nature, but were of classical themes in the spirit of Alma-Tadema and Frederic Leighton. He painted several decades after the break-up of the Pre-Raphaelite...