Painters
Painters Encyclopedia Articles
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Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci, (Italian: “Leonardo from Vinci”) Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer whose skill and intelligence, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the...
Biography
El Greco
El Greco, master of Spanish painting, whose highly individual dramatic and expressionistic style met with the puzzlement of his contemporaries but gained newfound appreciation in the 20th century. He also...
Biography
William Blake
William Blake, English engraver, artist, poet, and visionary, author of exquisite lyrics in Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) and profound and difficult “prophecies,” such as Visions...
Biography
Georgia O’Keeffe
Georgia O’Keeffe, American painter who was among the most influential figures in Modernism, best known for her large-format paintings of natural subjects, especially flowers and bones, and for her depictions...
Biography
Caravaggio
Caravaggio, leading Italian painter of the late 16th and early 17th centuries who became famous for the intense and unsettling realism of his large-scale religious works. While most other Italian artists...
Biography
Piet Mondrian
Piet Mondrian, painter who was an important leader in the development of modern abstract art and a major exponent of the Dutch abstract art movement known as De Stijl (“The Style”). In his mature paintings,...
Biography
Johannes Vermeer
Johannes Vermeer, Dutch artist who created paintings that are among the most beloved and revered images in the history of art. Although only about 36 of his paintings survive, these rare works are among...
Biography
John Ruskin
John Ruskin, English critic of art, architecture, and society who was a gifted painter, a distinctive prose stylist, and an important example of the Victorian Sage, or Prophet: a writer of polemical prose...
Biography
Diego Velázquez
Diego Velázquez, the most important Spanish painter of the 17th century, a giant of Western art. Velázquez is universally acknowledged as one of the world’s greatest artists. The naturalistic style in...
Biography
Titian
Titian, the greatest Italian Renaissance painter of the Venetian school. He was recognized early in his own lifetime as a supremely talented painter, and his reputation has in the intervening centuries...
Biography
Giotto
Giotto, the most important Italian painter of the 14th century, whose works point to the innovations of the Renaissance style that developed a century later. For almost seven centuries Giotto has been...
Biography
Michelangelo
Michelangelo, Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, and poet who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art. Michelangelo was considered the greatest living artist...
Biography
Vincent van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh, Dutch painter, generally considered the greatest after Rembrandt van Rijn, and one of the greatest of the Post-Impressionists. The striking colour, emphatic brushwork, and contoured forms...
Biography
Tintoretto
Tintoretto, great Italian Mannerist painter of the Venetian school and one of the most important artists of the late Renaissance. His paintings include Vulcan Surprising Venus and Mars (c. 1555), the Mannerist...
Biography
Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne, French painter, one of the greatest of the Post-Impressionists, whose works and ideas were influential in the aesthetic development of many 20th-century artists and art movements, especially...
Biography
Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas, French painter, sculptor, and printmaker who was prominent in the Impressionist group and widely celebrated for his images of Parisian life. Degas’s principal subject was the human—especially...
Biography
Nicolas Poussin
Nicolas Poussin, French painter and draftsman who founded the French Classical tradition. He spent virtually all of his working life in Rome, where he specialized in history paintings—depicting scenes...
Biography
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso, Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most-influential artists of the 20th century and the creator (with Georges Braque)...
Biography
Peter Paul Rubens
Peter Paul Rubens, Flemish painter who was the greatest exponent of Baroque painting’s dynamism, vitality, and sensuous exuberance. Though his masterpieces include portraits and landscapes, Rubens is perhaps...
Biography
Rembrandt
Rembrandt, Dutch Baroque painter and printmaker, one of the greatest storytellers in the history of art, possessing an exceptional ability to render people in their various moods and dramatic guises. Rembrandt...
Biography