Classic Annotated: 151 books

Domenico Ghirlandaio was one of the most popular Florentine artists of his time. He received his training in the workshop of Baldovinetti. Later, the work of Verrocchio in particular made an impression on him. Ghirlandaio's compositional representation was simultaneously imposing and respectable....

Lorenzo Lotto was a Northern Italian painter, draughtsman and illustrator, traditionally placed in the Venetian school. He painted mainly altarpieces, religious subjects and portraits. While he was active during the High Renaissance, his nervous and eccentric posing and distortions represent a transitional...

  "Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing." Camille Pissarro Camille Pissarro was French artist, the only painter to show in all eight of the Impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886, and he is frequently...

  William Blake was English Romantic artist, draughtsman, engraver, philosopher, and poet. He possessed visionary powers and in art as in life was an individualist who made a standard of nonconformity. Blake had a prejudice against painting in oils on canvas and experimented with a variety...

Katsushika Hokusai was a brilliant artist, ukiyo-e painter and print maker, best known for his wood block print series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, which contain the prints The Great Wave and Fuji in Clear Weather. These prints are famous both in Japan and overseas, and have left a lasting image...

Jacques-Louis David was an influential French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the greatest painter of the era. In the 1780s his rational brand of history painting marked a change in taste away from Rococo frivolity toward a classical strictness, heightened feeling chiming with...

  John Constable was English artist, considered with Turner as one of the greatest British landscape painters. His most excellent landscapes are of the places Constable knew, mainly Suffolk and Hampstead, where he lived. He worked broadly in the open air, drawing and sketching, but...

Paul Cézanne was French painter, the leading figure in the revolution toward abstraction in modern painting. His influence on the course of modern art, particularly on the development of cubism, is enormous and deep. In his early career, he was strongly influenced by Delacroix and Courbet....

  Toulouse-Lautrec painted quickly, using its neutral tone and conveying action and atmosphere in a few economical strokes. In later years graphic works took precedence and his paintings were often studies for lithographs. In Toulouse-Lautrec’s drawings of dancers and horses,...

Gustav Klimt was an Austrian symbolist artist which paintings, drawings and murals are marked by eroticism and sensuality. Klimt lived a simple, cloistered life, in which he avoided other artists and café society, but he had many discreet love affairs with women, and fathered at least 14 children....

  William Adolphe Bouguereau was a follower of classical art and had no wish for everything like novelty or the avant-garde. William-Adolphe Bouguereau used ancient themes, making new readings of classical myths. He settled his abundant fantasy space with a romanticized selection of...

  Ilya Repin (1844 - 1930) was a Russian painter, master of portrait, historical, and scenes from everyday life. He was also Academician of the Imperial Academy of Arts, memoirist, author of several essays, compiled a book of memoirs "Far close", professor and rector (1898-1899)...

Gustave Caillebotte was a French Impressionist, though he painted in a more realistic style than many other Impressionists. In common with his precursors Millet and Courbet Caillebotte tried to paint reality as it existed and as he saw it. Perhaps because of his close relationship with so many of...

Félix Vallotton was a Swiss painter and printmaker associated with group Les Nabis. By the end of his life he had completed over 1700 paintings and about 200 prints, in addition to hundreds of drawings and several sculptures. His earliest paintings, chiefly portraits, are firmly rooted in the...