Maria Peitcheva: 161 books

Jacques Tissot was born to a middle class family. He initially studied art at Beaux-Arts in Paris. He decided to move to London in 1871. Here Tissot started to paint highly finished pictures of London society. The main criticisms were that the pictures were really only painted photographs, and they...

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was a Dutch painter and etcher. He is generally considered one of the greatest painters and printmakers in European art and the most important in Dutch history. His contributions to art came in a period of great wealth and cultural achievement that historians call the...

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) was the most versatile and influential Baroque artist in northern Europe in the seventeenth century. Highly gifted and internationally oriented, the Flemish artist received commissions from almost all of Europe's major courts. His art blends the High Renaissance of Italy,...

Joseph Mallord William Turner was English painter, one of the greatest and most original of all landscape painters. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting. Although renowned...

Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), Italian engraver and architect, is best known for his etchings of ancient and baroque Rome and grandiose architectural constructions of his own imagination. Throughout most of his adult life Piranesi made etchings of views of the city; not only its antiquities,...

Thomas Gainsborough was an English portrait and landscape artist, the most versatile English painter of the 18th century. He was the most inventive and original, always prepared to experiment with new ideas and techniques. Gainsborough alone among the great portrait painters of the era also devoted...

Henry Fuseli is famous for his paintings and drawings of nude figures caught in strained and violent poses suggestive of intense emotion. He also had a affinity for inventing chilling fantasies. His sketches or designs numbered about 800; they have admirable qualities of invention and design, and...

François Boucher was a French painter, a proponent of Rococo taste, known for his idyllic and voluptuous paintings on classical themes, decorative allegories representing the arts or pastoral occupations, intended as a sort of two-dimensional furniture. He was perhaps the most celebrated decorative...

Eugene Delacroix was the greatest French painter of the Romantic Movement. Delacroix's output was enormous. After his death his executors found more than 9,000 paintings, pastels, and drawings in his studio and he prided himself on the speed at which he worked, declaring 'If you are not skilful enough...

With his signature graphic style, embrace of figural distortion, and bold defiance of conventional norms of beauty, Egon Schiele was one of the leading figures of Austrian Expressionism. He was an Austrian painter, a protégé of Gustav Klimt and important figurative painter of the early 20th century....

One of Degas' principal concerns as a draftsman was analyzing the movements and gestures of the female body. On view are several drawings featuring dancers, easily recognizable as the study for the celebrated wax sculpture Little Dancer, Fourteen Years Old, depicting the young dancer Marie van Goethem....

Ilya Yefimovich Repin (1844 – 1930) was a Russian realist painter. He was the most renowned Russian artist of the 19th century, when his position in the world of art was comparable to that of Leo Tolstoy in literature. He played a major role in bringing Russian art into the mainstream of European...

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617 – 1682) was a Spanish Baroque painter. Although he is best known for his religious works, Murillo also produced a considerable number of paintings of contemporary women and children. These lively, realist portraits of flower girls, street urchins, and beggars constitute an extensive and appealing record of the everyday life of his times.

Francisco de Goya was the most potent and creative Spanish artist of his time. Over the course of his long career, Goya moved from cheerful and optimistic to totally pessimistic and searching in his paintings, drawings, etchings, and frescoes. He completed some 500 oil paintings and murals, about...