George Frederick Watts was a symbolist painter who it might be said painted ideas not things. He often surrounded his forms with a misty or cloudy atmosphere for the purpose of showing that they are visionary or ideal. Later in his life Watts also produced sculptures. Examples of his work can be seen outside Lincoln Cathedral and the Victoria & Albert Museum.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was the most important American artist to that time and would have a profound impact on the course of European and modern art. His colorful personality along with his very unique style would place him at the center of a whole storm of controversies.
Thomas Worthington Whittredge (1820-1910), an important member of the later Hudson River School, specialized in landscapes, although he also painted some portraits and still lifes. His mature style incorporates both European and American influences, and celebrates the Catskill Mountains in New York and the American West, particularly the Great Plains.
Johann-Barthold Jongkind (1819 - 1891), Dutch landscape painter, mainly lived in France where he was highly esteemed by the artistic community and art lovers.
Known as “the painter of Honfleur and Paris streets”, Manet used to call him “the father of the modern landscape”, and young painters such as Monet, who was his pupil at his beginnings and called him his “true master”, were seduced by his stylistic daring and his landscapes which, as soon as 1860, were signs of Impressionism.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519), Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal. His Last Supper (1495-97) and Mona Lisa (1503-06) are among the most widely popular and influential paintings of the Renaissance. His notebooks reveal a spirit of scientific inquiry and a mechanical inventiveness that were centuries ahead of his time.
Jean Francois Millet was born on a farm near Cherbourg. He went to Paris after receiving a municipal grant that enabled him to study at the Beaux-Arts under Paul Delaroche. Millet first had a painting accepted at the Salon in 1844, and became a member of the French Academy in 1847. Millet thus began to take his subjects from the rustic life of peasants and farm laborers. The first of a long series of rural paintings, The Winnower (1848), brought him his first success and the accusation of the critics of socialism. Completely undeterred from his purpose, Millet retired to Barbizon the following year and remained for twenty-two years, painting landscapes and the rural scenes reminiscent of his childhood by which he is best known. Millet’s realistic approach to peasant subjects had an important influence upon later nineteenth-century artists and very particularly upon Van Gogh.
Francois Boucher (1703-1770), was a masterful French painter of the Rococo age, extremely popular then and ever since.
Boucher is the son of an artist. He learned many techniques as a child before receiving his formal art education from Francois Lemoyne. His initial job was as an engraver, producing replicas of Watteau’s drawings. However, he also was a successful painter and one the Prix de Rome in 1723. He then studied throughout Italy and began receiving royal commissions and a position as court artist. Boucher also worked for high profile, Madame de Pompadour, creating portraits and decorating her palace. Because Boucher was primarily painting for others, his work was consistently focused on pleasant, mythological subject matters and scenic landscapes.
Henri Rousseau was best known for his bold pictures of the jungle, teeming with flora and fauna. Yet this painter of exotic locales never left France, notwithstanding stories to the contrary. His paintings were instead the concoctions of a city dweller, shaped by visits to the botanical gardens, the zoo, and colonial expositions as well as images of distant lands seen in books and magazines. A counterpoint to his pictures of a tranquil and familiar Paris, these images of seductive and terrifying faraway places reflected the desires and fears of new modern world.
Jean-Antoine Watteau was a French rococo artist whose charming and graceful paintings show his interest in theater and ballet, he is probably best known for his fetes gallants. Watteau painted scenes of love and intrigue in dreamy parklands that could have come out of medieval tapestries. Their deliberately precious, unreal atmosphere, the most magical concoction of rococo art, is in many ways a reinvention of the medieval culture of courtly love. But in Watteau the longing knights, tamed unicorns and lofty ladies have given way to a mythology at once more personal, less resolved and dangerously erotic.
