Maria Peitcheva: 161 books

Paul Sandby (1731 – 1809) was an English map-maker turned landscape painter in watercolors, who, along with his older brother Thomas, became one of the founding members of the Royal Academy in 1768.His skills were applauded by fellow artists such as Thomas Gainsborough: if one wanted "real...

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...

Berthe Morisot was French artist, member of the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists. She was described by Gustave Geffroy as one of "les trois grandes dames" of Impressionism alongside Marie Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt. She formed a close friendship with Manet,...

Maurice Quentin de La Tour was a French Rococo portraitist who worked primarily with pastels. Among his most famous subjects were Voltaire, Rousseau, Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour. In 1737 La Tour exhibited the first of a splendid series of 150 portraits that served as one of the glories of the...

Felicien Rops was a Belgian artist who spent most of his life in Paris. He worked in many mediums and was also a master printmaker utilizing various techniques. Many of Rops’s etchings are deeply erotic and depict an imaginary underworld or subjects of social decadence. His art is dark and surreal,...

Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault (1791 – 1824) 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. Géricault's first major work, The Charging Chasseur, exhibited...

Theodore Clement Steele (1847 – 1926) was an American Impressionist painter known for his Indiana landscapes. Steele was an innovator and leader in American Midwest painting and is considered to be the most important of Indiana's Hoosier Group painters. In addition to painting, Steele contributed...

Adolph Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel (1815 – 1905) was a German artist noted for drawings, etchings, and paintings. Along with Caspar David Friedrich, he is considered one of the two most prominent German artists of the 19th century, and was the most successful artist of his era in Germany. His popularity...

Paul Gauguin was French painter, sculptor, and printmaker. His style developed from Impressionism through a brief cloisonnist phase towards a highly personal brand of Symbolism, which sought within the tradition of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes to combine and contrast an idealized vision of primitive...

Torii Kiyonaga (1752 – 1815) was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist of the Torii school. Originally Sekiguchi Shinsuke, the son of an Edo bookseller, he took on Torii Kiyonaga as an art name. Although not biologically related to the Torii family, he became head of the group after the death of his adoptive...

Thomas Eakins was an American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator. He is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important artists in American art history. He painted several hundred portraits, usually of friends, family members, or prominent people in the arts, sciences,...

Sir Peter Lely (1618 –1680) was a painter of Dutch origin, whose career was nearly all spent in England, where he became the dominant portrait painter to the court. Lely studied painting in Haarlem, where he may have been apprenticed to Pieter de Grebber. He arrived in London in around 1641, which...

Jacques-Louis David was an influential French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the pre-eminent painter of the era. After Napoleon's fall from power and the Bourbon revival, David exiled himself to Brussels in the then-United Kingdom of the Netherlands where he remained until his...

Charles Le Brun was a French painter and art theorist. Declared by Louis XIV "the greatest French artist of all time", he was a dominant figure in 17th-century French art and much influenced by Nicolas Poussin. Le Brun primarily worked for King Louis XIV, for whom he executed large altarpieces...