Osmora: 685 books

Like the Impressionists, Degas sought to capture fleeting moments in the flow of modern life, yet he showed little interest in painting plain air landscapes, favoring scenes in theaters and cafes illuminated by artificial light, which he used to clarify the contours of his figures, adhering to his Academic...

Antoine Watteau was one of the most brilliant and original artists of the eighteenth century. He had an impact on the development of Rococo art in France and throughout Europe lasting well beyond his lifetime. Living only thirty-six years, and plagued by frequent illness, Watteau nonetheless rose from...

One of America's best landscape artists and the quintessential exponent of Romanticism, the American painter Frederic Edwin Church was an important member of the Hudson River School of landscape painting, a pupil and friend of Thomas Cole, the movement's leader, and an important contributor to Luminism....

James Barry (1741 – 1806) was Irish born painter, best remembered for his six part series of paintings entitled The Progress of Human Culture in the Great Room of the Royal Society of Arts. He is noted for being one of the earliest romantic painters working in Britain, and one of the most important...

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 300...

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, most...

Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (1758 – 1823) was a French Romantic painter and draughtsman best known for his allegorical paintings and portraits. Prud'hon's artistic style contrasted starkly with the dominant version of Neoclassicism under Jacques-Louis David. His paintings were based on classical texts and...

Pieter Bruegel the Elder was a Dutch Renaissance painter and printmaker from Brabant, known for his landscapes and peasant scenes (so called genre painting). He received the nickname "Peasant Bruegel" or "Bruegel the Peasant" for his practice of dressing up like a peasant in order to socialize at weddings...

Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola also known as Parmigianino ("the little one from Parma") was an Italian Mannerist painter and printmaker active in Florence, Rome, Bologna, and his native city of Parma. His work is characterized by elongation of form and includes Vision of Saint Jerome (1527) and the...

François Boucher (1703 – 1770) 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...

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...

Sir Edward Burne-Jones was the greatest of the second generation Pre-Raphaelites. Burne-Jones's aim in art is best given in some of his own words, written to a friend:"I mean by a picture a beautiful, romantic dream of something that never was, never will be - in a light better than any light...

Berthe Morisot (1841 – 1895) was a painter and a member of the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists. She was described by Gustave Geffroy in 1894 as one of "les trois grandes dames" of Impressionism alongside Marie Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt. Morisot painted what she...

August Macke (1887 – 1914) was one of the leading members of the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). He lived during a particularly innovative time for German art he saw the development of the main German Expressionist movements as well as the arrival of the successive avant-garde...