Individual Artist category: 1922 books

After a serious illness in 1792, Goya spent five years recuperating and preparing himself for the burst of creativity that was to follow. He read deeply in the French revolutionary philosophers. From Rousseau he evolved the idea that imagination divorced from reason produces monsters, but that coupled...

At the turn of the 16th century, Italy was a turbulent territory made up of independent states, each at war with or intriguing against its neighbor. There were the proud, cultivated, and degenerate Sforzas in Milan, and in Rome, the corrupt Spanish family of the Borgia whose head, Rodrigo, ascended...

A founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Dante Gabriel Rossetti created a visionary body of paintings that defined a new art of sensuality and medieval revivalism. Delphi’s Masters of Art Series presents the world’s first digital e-Art books, allowing digital readers to explore the...

By 1970, artist Salvador Dali had transcended his own past to reinvent himself as the "Divine Dali" - the living embodiment of Surrealism, a master showman, eccentric world traveller, and accumulator of increasingly vast amounts of wealth. One of Dali's favoured haunts at this time was the Hotel Meurice...

Art history comes alive in this captivating investigation of the history and authenticity of van Gogh’s iconic painting Wheat Field with Cypresses**.** Currently on display at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vincent van Gogh’s The**Wheat Field with Cypresses is traditionally...

Born in 1860 in a small Czech town, Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) was an artist on the forefront of Art Nouveau, the modernist movement that swept Paris in the 1910s, marking a return to the simplicity of natural forms, and changing the world of art and design forever. In fact, Art Nouveau was known...

The artistic legacy of Alphonse Maria Mucha (1860–1939), one of the founders of the Art Nouveau style, is both brilliant and bewilderingly diverse. Mucha is most famous for his Sarah Bernhardt posters and his magnificent decorative panels such as "The Seasons," works that continue to grow...

Picasso was born a Spaniard and, so they say, began to draw before he could speak. As an infant he was instinctively attracted to artist’s tools. In early childhood he could spend hours in happy concentration drawing spirals with a sense and meaning known only to himself. At other times, shunning...

A dynamic tale of art and friendship, set between the World Wars, against the backdrop of a rapidly changing world Eric Ravilious is one of the best-known twentieth-century English artists. For many, his watercolors capture the spirit of midcentury England. But while he had a style of his own,...

Camille Pissarro was a key figure in the history of Impressionism, being the only artist to show his work in all eight Impressionist exhibitions, remaining dedicated to the movement’s artistic beliefs. His paintings combine a fascination of rural subject matter with the empirical study of nature...

Mantegna; humanist, geometrist, archaeologist, of great scholastic and imaginative intelligence, dominated the whole of northern Italy by virtue of his imperious personality. Aiming at optical illusion, he mastered perspective. He trained in painting at the Padua School where Donatello and Paolo Uccello...

Raphael was the artist who most closely resembled Pheidias. The Greeks said that the latter invented nothing; rather, he carried every kind of art invented by his forerunners to such a pitch of perfection that he achieved pure and perfect harmony. Those words, “pure and perfect harmony,” express,...

Secluded within cloister walls, a painter and a monk, and brother of the order of the Dominicans, Angelico devoted his life to religious paintings. Little is known of his early life except that he was born at Vicchio, in the broad fertile valley of the Mugello, not far from Florence, that his name...

Jacopo Tintoretto (1518–94) is an ambiguous figure in the history of art. His radically unorthodox paintings are not readily classifiable, and although he was a Venetian by birth, his standing as a member of the Venetian school is constantly contested. But he was also a formidable maverick, abandoning...