BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES

Agostini, Jules (1859-1930)

Agostini was a colonial engineer and amateur photographer who traveled extensively in the Far East. He was an acquaintance of Paul Gauguin’s and stayed at the artist’s house in Moorea with another photographer, Henri Lemasson.  He is known for his photograph of Gauguin’s spacious reed and thatch house and studio at Puna’auia near Papeete which he took in 1896. In 2015, a rare photo of Gauguin and some of his Tahitian female models was discovered in Agostini’s personal archives.

Antony, Maurice (1883-1963)

Antony was a Belgian photographer whose work provided an eyewitness account of the First World War and subsequent years of the interbellum. With his brother Robert, he created a body of documentary photography of the destruction of Ypres and the surrounding area during the First World War.  Maurice’s  studio became the best known in Ostend in the interwar period; it specialized in news and documentary work and did not operate a portrait studio although he did take some photographs of the artist James Ensor.

Aubert, François (1829-1906)

Aubert, born in Lyons, France,  graduated from the local art academy, studied under Hippolyte Flandrin, and by 1864 was active as a photographer in Mexico. In addition to his private work, he also served as court photographer to the Emperor Maximilian. Aubert’s most notable work comprises a series of photographs of the execution of Maximilian in 1867, including his executioners, slain body, and bloodied shirt.

Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich (1895-1975)

Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher whose writings on literature, language, ethics, authorship, carnival, time and the theory of culture have shaped thinking in criticism and the social sciences. His name is identified with the concept of dialogue, which he applied to language and numerous other aspects of culture and the psyche. Bakhtin viewed literary genres as implicit worldviews, concrete renditions of a sense of experience. Strongly objecting to the idea that novelists simply weave narratives around received philosophical ideas, he argued that very often significant discoveries are made first by writers and are then “transcribed”, often with considerable loss, into abstract philosophy.

Baldus, Édoaurd-Denis (1813-1889)

Baldus, originally from Prussia. was a French landscape, architectural and railway photographer. He was originally trained as a painter and had also worked as a draughtsman and lithographer before switching to photography in 1849.

Balzac, Honoré de (née Honoré Balssa) (1799-1850)

Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. Owing to his keen observation of detail and his unfiltered representation of society, he is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. Renowned for his multi-faceted characters, even his lesser characters are complex, morally ambiguous, and fully human.

Barraud, Henry (1811-1874)

Barraud was a British Victorian artist known for his portraits, animal paintings, and genre scenes. He collaborated with his brother William on a book entitled Sketches of Figures and Animals published by H. Graves and Co. in 1850.  He exhibited his portraits of horses and dogs and historical scenes at the Royal Academy and was also commissioned to paint several royal portraits.

Baudelaire, Charles Pierre (1821-1867)

Buadelaire was a French poet, essayist, and art critic, known for his controversial and groundbreaking writing. A leading figure in the French literary scene, his most famous work, “Les Fleurs du Mal” (The Flowers of Evil), challenged conventional morality as it explored themes of beauty, desire, and decadence. His poems exhibit mastery in the handling of rhyme and rhythm and contain an exoticism inherited from the Romantics, but are based on observations of real life. As an art critic, he championed the work of artists such as Eugène Delacroix and Constantin Guys.

Bazille, Jean Frédéric (1841-1870)

Bazille came from a family of art patrons who supported early avant-garde artists, including the Impressionists with whom Bazille would become affiliated.  He studied at the Gleyre studio in Paris, where he met Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Monet introduced him to outdoor painting, first in the Fontainebleau Forest, following in the footsteps of the Barbizon painters, and then in Normandy. Many of Bazille’s major works are plein air paintings of figures set within luminous landscapes.

Beardsley, Aubrey Vincent (1872-1898)

Beardsley was an English illustrator and author whose black ink drawings, influenced by Japanese woodcuts, depicted the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the aesthetic movement alongside Oscar Wilde and James McNeil Whistler. Beardsley’s contribution to the development of Art Nouveau and poster styles was significant.

Begas, Carl Joseph (1794-1854)

Begas was a German painter who played an important role in the transition from Romanticism to Realism. He traveled to Paris in 1812 where he studied in the atelier of Antoine Jean Gros. He was known for historical works and representations of scenes from the Bible, but his main focus was portraiture. He was the first in a multi-generational ‘dynasty’ of artists.

Bell, Charles (1774-1842)

Bell was a Scottish surgeon, anatomist, physiologist, neurologist, artist, and philosophical theologian. He is noted for discovering the difference between the spinal cord’s sensory and motor nerves. Bell published detailed studies of the nervous system in 1811, in his privately circulated book An Idea of a New Anatomy of the Brain. His research into nerve disorders and their impact on facial expression and paralysis (palsy) now bears his name.

Bell, Currer (nom de plume of Charlotte Bronte) (1816-1855)

Bronte was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Bronte sisters whose novels became classics of English literature. The Bronte sisters admitted to their pseudonyms in 1848 and were celebrated in London literary circles. Of the decision to use the pseudonym Currer Bell, Bronte said, “Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell; the ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because – without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’ – we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise.”

Benoist, Philippe (1813-1905)

Benoit, born in Geneva, was a painter, draughtsman, and lithographer, especially of landscapes and buildings. He worked in Paris where he was a pupil of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and was best known as a lithographer, specializing in topographical views.

Béraud, Jean (1849-1935)

Béraud was a French painter renowned for his numerous paintings depicting the life of Paris and the nightlife of Paris society. Pictures of the Champs-Élysées, cafés, Montmartre and the banks of the Seine are precisely detailed illustrations of everyday Parisian life during the Belle Époque. He also painted religious subjects in contemporary settings.

Berend-Corinth, Charlotte (1880-1967)

Berend-Corinth was a German painter and one of only two female artists in the Berliner Secession. Her work  demonstrates modern, radical subject matter. In her early work she captured the permissive mood of the Berlin art and theatre scene during the 1910s and 1920s. Her later works comprise self-portraits, still lifes, and landscape scenes. In 1933 she was compelled to leave Germany and emigrate to the United States due to her Jewish ancestry.

Bernard, Émile Henri (1868-1941)

Bernard was a French Post-Impressionist painter and writer who trained in Paris at the Atelier Cormon where he developed friendships with Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Eugène Boch, and at a later time, Paul Cézanne. Most of his notable work was accomplished at a young age, in the years 1886 through 1897. He is associated with Cloisonnism and Synthetism, two markedly innovative and anti-traditional styles which emphasized flat shapes, dark outlines and the use of emotionally expressive, non-naturalistic color.

Bernhardt, Sarah (née Henriette-Rosine) (1844-1923)

Bernhardt, the greatest French actress of the later 19th century, is one of the best-known figures in the history of the stage. She was an expressive actress with a wide emotional range who was capable of great subtlety in her interpretations and the grace, beauty, and charisma of her commanding stage presence. Her career was helped by her relentless self-promotion and her unconventional behaviour both on and off the stage. In 1880 Bernhardt formed her own traveling company and soon became an international idol who  spent her time acting with her own company, managing the theatres it used, and going on long international tours.

“Bertall” (née Charles Constant Albert Nicolas) (1820-1882)

Bertall was the pseudonym of the draughtsman, wood engraver, lithographer and illustrator Vicomte Albert d’Arnoux, Comte de Limoges-Saint-Saëns. He took the name – an approximate anagram of his forename – at the suggestion of Honoré de Balzac with whom he collaborated from 1842 to 1855 on illustrating Balzac’s complete works. In April 1871, during the Paris Commune, he founded the satirical journal Le Grelot, which attacked the Communards and further expressed his reactionary views in the illustrated Types de la Commune (Paris, 1871).

Beyeren, Abraham Hendriksz van (c. 1620-1690)

Beyerem, a Dutch Baroque painter of still lifes, little recognized in his day, was initially active as a marine painter. He is now considered one of the most important painters of still lifes of fish and pronkstillevens, distinguished by large, complex compositions and elaborate colouring.

Biard, François-Auguste (née François Thérèse Biard) (1799-1882)

Biard was a French painter known for his adventurous travels and the works depicting his experiences. He was among the first European painters to meet and depict the native populations of the Amazon and is also known for his representations of the Atlantic slave trade.  In 1862, he published the travelogue Deux Années au Brésil with Hachette.

Blanc, Charles (1813-1882)

Blanc was a critic and historian of French and Italian art; chair in the history of art at the Collège de France (1878); and  first editor of the Gazette des beaux-arts. He began writing a fourteen-volume history of painters, entitled Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles (1849–69), which was translated into English and German. While continuing to publish his Histoire, Blanc issued Grammaire des arts du dessin in 1867, a book that merged developments in science with aesthetics that influenced Vincent Van Gogh and the  Neo-Impressionists.

Blake, William (1757-1827)

Blake was an English engraver, artist, poet, and visionary and author of lyrics and “prophecies,” writings he etched, printed, coloured, stitched, and sold, with the assistance of his wife, Catherine. His life and works were intensely spiritual and he produced a diverse and symbolically rich collection of works, which embraced the imagination as the “body of God” or “human existence itself.”

Block, Josef (1863-1943)

Block was a German painter who founded the Society of Visual Artists of Munich in 1892, which became the basis of the Munich Secession. This was a movement of artists who felt that art was not sufficiently contemporary and open. This happened in preparation for the World Columbian Exposition 1893 in Chicago.

Bonaparte, Charles Louis-Napoléon (1808-1873)

Bonaparte was the first President of France from 1848-1852 and the last monarch of France as Emperor of the French from 1852-1870. Napoleon III commissioned Baron Haussmann’s renovation of Paris, expanded and consolidated the French railway system, modernized the banking system, promoted the building of the Suez Canal, established modern agriculture in France, and negotiated free trade agreements with European trading partners. Social reforms included giving French workers the right to strike and organize, and women the right to higher education. 

Bonheur, Marie-Rosalie “Rosa” (1822-1899)

Bonheur was a French painter and sculptor famed for the remarkable accuracy and detail of her pictures featuring animals. By the time Bonheur was in her teens, her talent for sketching live animals had manifested itself, and—rejecting training as a seamstress—she began studying animal motion and forms on farms, in stockyards, and at animal markets, horse fairs, and slaughterhouses, observing and sketching them and gaining an intimate knowledge of animal anatomy. Her sketching visits to those public places that were largely the domain of men, as well as her work in the studio, prompted her in  the early 1850s to eschew traditional female clothing for the trousers and loose blouse of a male peasant; and she continued to dress in masculine attire for the rest of her life. In the 1870s she began to study and sketch lions and to master the characteristics of their movement as she had horses and many other animals; as an aid to her observation and in appreciation of their spirit, she even raised some lions on her estate. Bonheur, cited as ‘the first lesbian artist’, was someone who defied gender conventions for the time and saw themselves as occupying a masculine role, so it is also possible that Bonheur may have understood themselves to be trans, non-binary, or genderqueer. 

Bonnet, Charles (1720-1793)

Bonnet, a Swiss naturalist and philosophical writer, discovered parthenogenesis (reproduction without fertilization) and developed the catastrophe theory of evolution. In Philosophical Palingesis, or Ideas on the Past and Future States of Living Beings (1770), he argued that females carry within them all future generations in a miniature form. He believed these miniature beings, sometimes called homonculi, would be able to survive even great cataclysms such as the biblical Flood; he predicted, moreover, that these catastrophes brought about evolutionary change, and that after the next disaster, men would become angels, and mammals would gain intelligence.

Bosch, Hieronymus (née Jheronimus van Aken) (ca. 1450-1516)

Bosch was a prolific painter who straddled the period from the late Middle Ages to the Protestant Reformation. Drawing from the religious beliefs, language and folklore of the day, his disturbingly vivid, dream-like paintings depict a pessimistic view of human folly and sin, particularly the vices of promiscuity, gluttony, drunkenness and laziness. His work influenced Pieter Brueghel the Elder and is considered to have inspired 20th century Surrealism.

Botticelli, Sandro, née Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi (1445-1510)

Botticelli was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance whose paintings represent the pinnacle of the cultural flourishing of the Medici’s Florence, a prosperous society that encouraged the progress of art, philosophy and literature. Throughout his long career he was commissioned to paint different subjects, but at the heart of his work he always strove towards beauty and virtue, the qualities represented by the goddess Venus, who is the subject of many of his most famous paintings.

Boucher, François (1703-1770)

Boucher, a French artist, is associated with the formulation of the mature Rococo style and its dissemination throughout Europe. Among the most prolific of his generation, he is known for his idyllic and voluptuous paintings of Classical themes, decorative allegories, and pastoral scenes which he worked in virtually every medium and every genre, creating a personal idiom that found wide reproduction in print form.

Boudin, Eugène Louis (1824-1898)

Boudin was one of the first French landscape painters to paint outdoors. Largely self-taught, he was influenced by the Barbizon painters and followed Camille Corot’s example in his preference for working directly from nature. His best-known paintings are small landscapes of the harbours and beaches along the northern French coast which reflected his sharp eye for social detail. In 1858 he met Claude Monet and persuaded him to become a landscape painter, helping to instill in him a love of bright hues and the play of light on water evident in Monet’s Impressionist paintings.

Bouguereau, William-Adolphe (1825-1905)

Bouguereau, working predominantly within the academic tradition, earned a strong reputation in his lifetime as a painter of classic subjects, primarily that of the female nude. He  attracted a wide following with his mythological and allegorical paintings, characterized by a highly finished, technically impeccable realism and a sentimental interpretation of his subject matter. As the quintessential salon painter of his generation, he was reviled by the Impressionist avant-garde.

Boulanger, Gustave Clarence Rodolphe (1824-1888)

Boulanger was a noted French painter, recognized for his paintings of historical subjects, as well as compositions taken from Greek and Roman mythology, Neoclassism and Oriental (particularly Middle-Eastern) subjects.

Boutet de Monvel, Louis-Maurice (1850-1913)

Boutet de Monvel was a French painter and illustrator best known for his watercolours for children’s books. He was a major figure in children’s book illustration.

Brady, Mathew B. (1822-1896)

Brady was a well-known 19th-century American photographer who was celebrated for his portraits of politicians and his photographs of the American Civil War.  In 1845 at Brady’s first New York portrait studio he  attempted to photograph as many famous people of his time as he could, including Daniel Webster, Edgar Allan Poe, and James Fenimore Cooper, and compiled such portraits in A Gallery of Illustrious Americans (1850), an album of lithographs based on his daguerreotypes. At the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, he decided to make a complete record of that conflict. He hired g a staff of about twenty photographers, the best known of whom were Alexander Gardner and Timothy H. O’Sullivan, and dispatched them throughout the war zones. Brady’s main activities in the endeavour involved organizing and supervising the operation of his employees and studios; he himself probably photographed only occasionally on such battlefields as Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg.

Breton, Jules Adolphe Aimé Louis (1827-1906)

Breton was a French naturalist painter who had a respect for tradition and love for his native province of Artois. The Gleaners (1854) a work inspired by seasonal field labor and the plight of the less fortunate who were left to gather what remained in the field after the harvest received a third class medal at the Paris Salon, which launched Breton’s career. His numerous subjects may be divided generally into four classes: labour, rest, rural festivals and religious festivals. His poetic renderings of single peasant female figures in a landscape, posed against the setting sun, were very popular, especially in the United States.

Brouillet, Pierre Aristide André (1857-1914)

Brouillet was a French academic painter specializing in genre painting, portraits and landscapes. He is best known for his painting A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière (1887) which represents the neurologist Jean Martin Charcot examining the hysterical patient Marie Wittman, during one of these famous “Tuesday lessons”. Charcot is represented with a large number of his students and collaborators, including Théodule-Armand Ribot, Paul Richer and Gilles de La Tourette and the neurologist Joseph Babinski. Influenced by  Jean-Léon Gérôme, he devoted himself to Orientalist painting, thanks also to the discovery that his wife, Emma Isaac was daughter of a rich Constantine Jewish merchant.

Brücke, Ernst Wilhelm Ritter (1819-1892)

Brücke, a German physician and physiologist, is credited with contributions made in many facets of physiology. In 1845 he founded the Physikalische Gesellschaft (Physical Society) in Berlin, together with Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Hermann von Helmholtz and others, in the house of physicist Heinrich Gustav Magnus. Later on, this became known as the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft (German Society of Physics).

Bruegel “the Elder”, Pieter (ca. 1525-1530-1569)

Bruegel “the Elder” had a formative influence on Dutch Golden Age painting as one of the first generation of artists to grow up when religious subjects had ceased to be the natural subject matter of painting. His art reinvigorated medieval subjects such as marginal drolleries of ordinary life in illuminated manuscripts, and the calendar scenes of agricultural labours set in landscape backgrounds, and put these on a much larger scale, and in expensive medium of oil painting. He did the same with the fantastic and anarchic world developed in Renaissance prints and book illustrations.

Cabanel, Alexandre (1823-1889)

Cabanel, a French painter of  historical, Classical and religious subjects in the academic style was also  well known as a portrait painter. His important commissions included works for Napoleon III and Ludwig II, the King of Bavaria. He was a bitter opponent of the Impressionists and represented exactly the kind of academic art that they despised.

Caillebotte, Gustave (1848-1894)

Caillebotte was a French painter who combined aspects of the academic and Impressionist styles in a unique synthesis. He met Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet in 1874 and showed his works at the Impressionist exhibition of 1876 and its successors. He became the chief organizer, promoter, and financial backer of the Impressionist exhibitions for the next six years, and he used his wealth to purchase works by avant-garde artists, notably Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, and Berthe Morisot.

Cameron, Julia Margaret (née Pattle) (1815-1879)

Cameron, a British photographer, is considered one of the greatest portrait photographers of the 19th century. Cameron made allegorical and illustrative studio photographs, posing and costuming family members and servants in imitation of the popular Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite paintings of the day. She is known for soft-focus close-ups of famous Victorian men and women, illustrative images depicting characters from mythology, Christianity and literature, and sensitive portraits of men, women and children.

Canova, Antonio (1757-1822)

Canova was an Italian Neoclassical sculptor famous for his marble sculptures. Often regarded as the greatest of the Neoclassical artists, his work was inspired by the Baroque and the Classical Revival, and has been characterized as having avoided the melodramatics of the former, and the cold artificiality of the latter.

Carabin, François-Rupert (1862-1932)

Carabin was a French cabinetmaker, photographer and sculptor. Between 1889 and 1919, Carabin sculpted many furniture pieces, mainly constructed from oak, pear, or walnut wood. His sculptures and designs of the female form tended towards the Decadent style. He worked in the artistic milieu of Montmartre and made a series of photographic studies of prostitutes.

Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881)

Carlyle, a leading Scottish writer of the Victorian era, profoundly influenced 19th-century art, literature and philosophy. His innovative writing style, known as Carlylese, helped shape Victorian literature and anticipated techniques of postmodern literature. While not adhering to any formal religion, he asserted the importance of belief and developed his own philosophy of religion. He preached “Natural Supernaturalism,” the idea that all things are “Clothes” which at once reveal and conceal the divine, that “a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one,” and that duty, work and silence are essential. He postulated the Great Man theory, a philosophy of history which contends that exceptional individuals shape history.

Cassatt, Mary Stevenson (1844-1926)

Cassatt,  an American painter and printmaker living in Paris, was part of the group of Impressionists. She took as her subjects almost exclusively the intimate lives of contemporary women, especially in their roles as the caretakers of children. She particularly admired the work of Degas, based on their common visual sensibilities, including an interest in bold compositional structure, asymmetry high vantage point of Japanese prints, and contemporary subject matter.

Castagnary, Jules-Antoine (1830-1888)

Castagnary, a French liberal politician, journalist and progressive and influential art critic, embraced the new term “Impressionist” in his positive and perceptive review of the first Impressionist show, in Le Siècle, April 29, 1874.

Cézanne, Paul (1839-1906)

Cézanne was a French painter whose works and ideas were influential in the aesthetic development of 20th-century artists and art movements, especially Cubism. His art, misunderstood and discredited by the public during most of his life, grew out of Impressionism and eventually challenged conventional values of painting in the 19th century because of his insistence on personal expression and on the integrity of the painting itself, regardless of subject matter.

Cicéri, Étienne Eugène (1813-1890)

Cicéri, a French painter, illustrator, engraver, theatrical designer, presented scenes in the Realist style. A few of his works were done in North Africa, gaining him a reputation as an Orientalist.

“Cham” (née Charles Amédée de Noé) (1818-1879)

Cham was a French caricaturist and lithographer for Le Charivari, a satirical magazine. He was known for his racist portrayal of people of colour, specifically targeting Black women. 

Champaigne, Philippe de (1602-1674)

Champaigne, a French Baroque era painter, was a major exponent of the French school. He was a founding member of the Académie de peinture et de sculpture in Paris, the premier art institution in France in the eighteenth century.

“Champfleury” (née Jules-François-Félix Fleury-Husson) (1821-1889)

Champfleury was a French art critic, novelist, and prominent supporter of the Realist movement in painting and fiction. He was one of the first to promote the work of Gustave Courbet, in an article appearing in an issue of Le Pamphlet in 1848. His novels, of which the best known is Les Bourgeois de Molinchart (1854), were among the earliest Realist literary works.

“Chanteclair” (née Lucien Émery) (1874-1965)

Chanteclair was a French cartoonist and the principal caricaturist of the antisemitic journal La Libre Parole Illustrée.

Charcot, Jean-Martin (1825-1893)

Charcot was a French neurologist and professor of anatomical pathology who was interested in hypnosis and hysteria, particularly with his hysteric patient Louise Augustine Gleizes.

Chéret, Jules (1836-1932)

Chéret was a French Art Nouveau painter and lithographer who became a master of Belle Époque poster art. His success inspired an industry that saw the emergence of a new generation of poster designers and painters such as Charles Gesmar and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. 

Chevreul, Michel Eugène (1786-1889)

Chevreul was a French chemist whose work influenced several areas of science, medicine, and art. As the director of dyes at the national Gobelins textile factory in Paris, he identified a fundamental law of the simultaneous contrast of colors which detailed the effects that proximity between two colors has on what the eye sees. His colour model represented the complete range of shades, tones and tints of every hue, but his concept of tone confounded lightness (value) and saturation.

Chodowiecki, Daniel Niklaus (1726-1801)

Chodowiecki, a German painter and printmaker of Huguenot and Polish ancestry, is well known as an etcher. He spent most of his life in Berlin and became the director of the Berlin Academy of Art.

Christiani, Henri (18- -1921)

Christiani was a French composer and  author of Petits Rats (Durand, 1907).

Clairin, George Jules Victor (1843-1919)

Clairin, a French Orientalist painter and illustrator, was influenced by Eastern imagery and Moorish architecture, which he saw in his many visits to North Africa, particularly Algeria, Morocco and Egypt. In Paris he befriended the actress Sarah Bernhardt, his friend for fifty years. Today he is best known for his ‘in costume’ and informal, intimate portraits of her.

Clarkson, Thomas (1760-1846)

Clarkson was an English abolitionist, and a leading campaigner against the slave trade in the British Empire. He helped to found The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade and to achieve passage of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which ended British trade in enslaved people.

Clonney, James Goodwyn (1812-1867)

Clonney was an English-born American genre painter and lithographer who focused on rural subjects. Several of Clonney’s  paintings are subtle political and social commentaries, notably those showing white and black men interacting as equals and friends.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

Coleridge was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. His critical work, especially on William Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he also helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking cultures. Coleridge who coined many familiar words and phrases, including the “suspension of disbelief” had a significant influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson and American transcendentalism.

Colin, Héloïse Suzanne Leloir (1819-1873)

Colin was a painter and fashion illustrator during the Second French Empire who painted watercolours, miniatures, and illustrations for novels. She and her sisters Anaïs Toudouze and Laure Noël were best known for their work as illustrators of Parisian fashion of the mid-nineteenth century.

Constable, John (1776-1837)

Constable, a major figure in English landscape painting in the early 19th century, is best known for his paintings of the English countryside, particularly those representing his native valley of the River Stour, an area that came to be known as “Constable country.”  His oeuvre was unique in that he usually did not elect to paint places popular with the touring public or other artists, but rather concentrated on sites with which he had family connections, or where, for personal reasons, he happened to be. His landscapes represent a sometimes astonishing capacity to represent natural appearances—particularly, in his later years, the fleeting and dramatic effects of stormy skies—as well as a profound and prolonged meditation on the rural realities of a Britain undergoing a bewildering socioeconomic transformation.

Corréard, Alexandre (1788-1857)

Corréard was a French engineer and geographer. He is famous for escaping  the Medusa shipwreck and describing his experience to Théodore Géricault whose most well-known painting is The Raft of the Medusa (1819).

Corot, Jean-Baptise-Camille (1796-1875)

Corot, a French painter, noted primarily for his landscapes, inspired and to some extent anticipated the landscape painting of the Impressionists. His oil sketches, remarkable for their technical freedom and clear colour, have come to be as highly regarded as the finished pictures that were based upon them. Corot preferred to sit outdoors, rather than in studios, sketching what he saw and learning by firsthand experience. In 1825 Corot went to Italy for three years where he painted scenes of Rome and the Campagna, the countryside around Rome. He was made a trip to Naples and Ischia and returned to Paris by way of Venice.

Costa (Acosta), Uriel da (1585-1640)

Acosta was a Portuguese philosopher and skeptic who became an example among Jews of one martyred by the intolerance of his own religious community. The son of an aristocratic family of Marranos (Spanish and Portuguese Jews forcibly converted to Roman Catholicism),  he returned to Judaism and after converting his mother and brothers to his beliefs, he and the family fled to Amsterdam and embraced Judaism. Acosta soon discovered, however, that the prevailing form of Judaism was not a biblical one but, rather, an elaborate structure based on rabbinic legislation. He was excommunicated and humiliated, and, after writing a short autobiography, Exemplar Humanae Vitae (1687; “Example of a Human Life”), he shot himself. Acosta’s Exemplar depicted religion as disruptive of natural law and a source of hatred and superstition;  in contrast, he advocated a faith based on natural law and reason.

Couché, François-Louis (1782-1849)

Couché  was a French illustrator and engraver who  captured the Napoleonic legend. He created a series of portraits of Napoleon and his brothers, battle scenes of the First Empire, and illustrations for L’Histoire de Napoléon  by Jacques de Norvins (1827).

Courbet, Jean Désiré Gustave (1819-1877)

Courbet was a French painter who led the Realism movement in 19th-century French painting and who as a socialist, was active in French politics. Committed to painting only what he could see, he rejected academic convention and the Romanticism of the previous generation of visual artists. His paintings of the late 1840s and early 1850s challenged convention by depicting unidealized peasants and workers, often on a grand scale traditionally reserved for paintings of religious or historical subjects.

Cranach “the Elder”, Lucas Maler (1472-1553)

Cranach was a German Renaissance painter and printmaker specializing in woodcut prints and engravings. He was court painter to the Electors of Saxony for most of his career and is known for his portraits of German princes as well as of leaders of the Protestant Reformation, whose cause he embraced. He was a close friend of Martin Luther.

Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé (1787-1851)

Daguerre was a French artist and photographer recognized for his invention of the eponymous daguerreotype process of photography. Though he is most famous for his contributions to photography, he was also an accomplished painter, scenic designer, and developer of the diorama theatre.

Darwin, Charles Robert (1809-1882)

Darwin was an English naturalist, geologist and biologist widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended from a common ancestor is now generally accepted and considered a fundamental scientific concept.

Daubigny, Charles-François (1817-1878)

Daubigny was a French painter of the Barbizon landscape school who is considered an important precursor of Impressionism. A prolific printmaker, mostly in etching, he was one of the leading artists to use cliché verre, also known as the glass print technique.

Daumier, Honoré-Victorin (1808-1879)

Daumier was a prolific French caricaturist, painter, and sculptor especially renowned for his cartoons and drawings satirizing 19th-century French politics and society. After working briefly for several short-lived journals, Daumier in 1831 was engaged by a publicist, Charles Philipon, as cartoonist for a newly founded journal of political satire, La Caricature. The initial target of his attacks was the government of King Louis-Philippe, which he ridiculed with a corrosive wit that brought him to the notice of the press police and earned him a jail term of six months in 1832. When a tightening of censorship in 1835 put an end to La Caricature, Daumier shifted to politically unobjectionable social satire for Philipon’s other journal, Le Charivari; in hundreds of lithographs, published serially, two or three a week, he turned a sharp eye on the characteristic look and demeanor of every segment of Parisian society, ranging from attitudes  of the urban middle class with which he fondly empathized (Les Bons Bourgeois), to the frauds of speculators (Robert Macaire), the pomposities of lawyers (Gens de justice), the self-delusions of artists, the rapacity of landlords, and the vanity of bluestockings. 

David, Jacques-Louis (1748-1825)

David, a French painter in the Neoclassical style, is considered to be the preeminent painter of the era. In the 1780s his cerebral brand of history painting marked a change in taste away from Rococo frivolity toward Classical austerity and severity and heightened feeling, harmonizing with the moral climate of the final years of the Ancien Régime. He later became an active supporter of the French Revolution but after Robespierre’s fall from power, he aligned himself with Napoleon I and developed his Empire style, notable for its use of warm Venetian colours.

Degas, Hilaire-Germain-Edgar (1834-1917)

Degas was a French Impressionist painter, sculptor, and printmaker,  renowned for his images of Parisian life which centered on the human figure. He explored the female figure in representations of laundresses, cabaret singers, milliners, prostitutes, and ballet dancers. His also painted portraits, noted for their psychological complexity.  Degas experimented with a wide variety of media, from oil and pastel to lithographs, etchings and photography.

Delacroix, Ferdinand Victor Eugène (1798-1863)

Delacroix, a French Romantic artist, was regarded from the outset of his career as a leading figure of the  Romantic movement in France. In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres, he found inspiration in the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, which emphasized colour and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modelled form.

Delaroche, Hippolyte-Paul (1797-1856)

Delaroche was a French painter who achieved his more significant successes painting historical scenes. He became famous in Europe for his melodramatic depictions that often portrayed subjects from English and French history. The emotions emphasized in Delaroche’s paintings appeal to Romanticism while the detail of his work, along with the deglorified portrayal of historic figures, follow the trends of Academicism and Neoclassicism. Delaroche aimed to depict his subjects and history with pragmatic realism, painting all his subjects the same whether they were historical figures or people of his time.

Demachy, Pierre-Antoine (1723-1807)

Demachy, a French Rococo artist, was one of the leading exponents of architectural painting during the Ancien Régime. He specialized in painting ruins, trompe-l’œil architectural decorations and imaginative scenes of Paris.

Derussy, Philippe (DOB unknown, active 1845-1852)

Derussy was a 19th-century French photographer.

Dewhurst, Wynford (1864-1941)

Dewhurst was an English Impressionist painter and notable art theorist. He spent considerable time in France and Claude Monet profoundly influenced his work.

Dickens, Charles John Huffam (1812-1870)

Dickens was an English writer and social critic who created some of the world’s best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. He left school at twelve to work in a boot-blacking factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors’ prison. He campaigned vigorously for children’s rights, education, and other social reforms. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime.

Diderot, Denis (1713-1784)

Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer, best known as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor of ca. 7000 articles  to the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Encyclopedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts). Better known as Encyclopédie, this was a general encyclopedia published between 1751 and 1772, with later supplements, revised editions, and translations.  In the article “Encyclopédie”, Didreot  wrote that the Encyclopédie‘s aim was “to change the way people think” and for people (bourgeoisie) to be able to inform themselves and to know things. He and the other contributors, representing the thought of the Enlightenment, advocated for the secularization of learning and the democratization of knowledge.

Disdéri, André-Adolphe-Eugène (1819-1889)

Disdéri was a French photographer who started his photographic career as a daguerreotypist but gained greater fame for patenting and promoting his version of the carte de visite, a small photographic image which was mounted on a card.  Each photograph, the size of a visiting card, were commonly traded among friends and visitors in the 1860s, and albums for the collection of these cards became a common fixture in Victorian parlors. The immense popularity of these card photographs led to the publication of photographs of prominent persons.

Dollingen, Zacharias (1808-1878)

Dollingen was a 19th-century French editor who collaborated with Disdéri on Galerie des Contemporains (1860-1862). For two francs a week, subscribers would receive two mounted carte-de-visite (cdv) portraits of celebrities with short, four-page biographies by writers hired by Dollingen. Disdéri eventually produced some 125 cdvs in this series, including images of the Imperial family and court, Sir Robert Peel, Benjamin Disraeli, the Baron de Rothschild, Giuseppe Verdi, the Italian patriot Count Cavour, and various members of the aristocratic and artistic world in Europe during the Second Empire.

Dornac, Paul Marsan (Pol Marsan), née Paul François Arnold Cardon (1858-1941)

Dornac was a French photographer, specializing in portraits of personalities photographed at home or work. He was the artist of a series of photographic portraits from 1887 to 1917 entitled Nos contemporains chez eux (‘Our contemporaries at home’) which appeared in Le Monde, either as engravings after his photographs or directly reproduced. Tired of making portraits in the traditional manner in his photography studio, as Nadar had done before him for several of the same subjects, he decided instead to visit them, chez eux, with his camera.

Douglass, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey (1817-1895)

Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, famous for his oratory and incisive anti-slavery writings. He considered photography very important in ending slavery and racism, and believed that the camera would not lie, even in the hands of a racist white person, as photographs were an excellent counter to many racist caricatures, particularly in blackface minstrelsy. Douglass was the most photographed American of the 19th century, consciously using photography to advance his political views.

Dubourg (Fantin-Latour), Victoria (1840-1926)

Dubourg was a French Realist still-life painter. She married the painter Henri Fantin-Latour in 1876, whom she collaborated with on floral paintings but she also produced works under her own name that she signed “V. Dubourg.”

Ducreux, Joseph (1735-1802)

Ducreux was a French noble, portrait painter, pastelist, miniaturist, and engraver. He was a portraitist at the court of Louis XVI of France and resumed his career after the French Revolution. His less formal portraits reflect his fascination with physiognomy and show an interest in expanding the range of facial expressions beyond those of conventional portraiture.

Dührkoop, Rudolf Johannes (1848-1918)

Dührkoop, a German portrait photographer, was one of the leading early representatives of Pictorialism.

Duncanson, Robert Seldon (1821-1872)

Duncanson was an American landscapist of African and European ancestry. Inspired by American landscape artists like Thomas Cole, he created renowned landscape paintings and is considered a second-generation Hudson River School artist.

Durand-Ruel, Paul (1831-1922)

Durand-Ruel was a French art dealer associated with the Impressionists and the Barbizon School. Being the first to support artists such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, he is known for his innovations in modernizing art markets. Considered the most important art dealer of the 19th century, he played a role in the decentralization of art markets in France, which the Salon system dominated before the mid-19th century.

Duranty, Louis Edmond (1833-1880)

Duranty was a prolific French novelist and art critic who supported the Realist cause and later the Impressionists. In 1876, he wrote a thirty-eight page pamphlet on the second group show of the Impressionist painters, La nouvelle peinture: à propos du groupe dàrtistes qui expose dans les galeries Durand-Ruel, the first serious attempt to write an insightful analysis of Impressionism.  Duranty avoided the term “Impressionism” popularized by the press and initially a satirical term, preferring to call it  the “new painting.”

Duval, Eugène Emmanuel Amaury Pineux (Amaury-Duval) (1808-1885)

Duval, a French painter, was one of the first students in Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s studio. He began his career as a portraitist and was later inspired by Italian Renaissance art.

“El Greco” (née Domễnikos Theotokópoulos) (1541-1614)

El Greco was a painter, sculptor, and architect in Toledo, Spain.  Influenced by Mannerism and Venetian Renaissance art, his expressive style and haunting, exaggerated forms, which privileged subjectivity over realism, dramatically reflected the passion of Counter-Reformation Spain. El Greco is regarded as one of the precursors of Expressionism and Cubism.

Emmett, Daniel Decateur (1815-1904)

Emmett was an American songwriter, entertainer, and founder of the first troupe of the blackface minstrel tradition, the Virginia Minstrels. He is most remembered as the composer of the song “Dixie,” which was adopted as the de facto national anthem of the Confederacy during the American Civil War.

Ensor, James Sidney (1860-1949)

Ensor was a Belgian painter and printmaker whose works are known for their bizarre fantasy and sardonic social commentary. When Ensor’s works were rejected by the Brussels Salon in 1883, he joined a group of progressive artists called Les Vingt (The Twenty). During this period, in such works as his Scandalized Masks (1883), he began to depict images of grotesque fantasy—skeletons, phantoms, and hideous masks. Ensor’s interest in masks probably began in his mother’s curio shop. His Entry of Christ into Brussels (1888), filled with carnival masks painted in smeared, garish colours, provoked such indignation that he was expelled from Les Vingt. As criticism increased his paintings became more abusive, cynical and misanthropic with nightmarish visions as in Masks (Intrigues) (1890) and Skeletons Fighting for the Body of a Hanged Man (1891).

Expilly, Jean-Charles-Marie (1814-1886)

Expilly, a French novelist and historian, spent much time in South America. He wrote The Truth concerning the Conflict involving Brazil, Buenos Ayres, Montevideo, and Paraguay in Presence of Civilization (1866); The Political and Commercial Consequences of the Opening of the Amazon (869); and several novels, including The Black Pirate (1838) and The Sword of Damocles (1843).

Fairchild MacMonnies Low, Mary (1858-1946)

Fairchild was an American painter who specialized in landscapes, genre paintings, and portraits. In 1885, she won a three-year scholarship to study in Paris, where she enrolled in the Académie Julian and was a leading figure among American women artists in Paris. She was commissioned to paint the mural, Primitive Women, which adorned one tympanum in the Women’s Building of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Fantin-Latour, Ignace Henri Jean Théodore (1836-1904)

Fantin-Latour was a French painter and lithographer best known for his flower paintings and group portraits of Parisian artists and writers. He shared some of the Impressionists’ ideals, but specialized in still lifes and quasi-Symbolist works rather than contemporary subjects. He also produced a number of imaginative, often mythological scenes inspired by music and opera, many reproduced as lithographs; much of his later career was devoted to this medium.

Feyen, Jacques-Eugène ( 1815-1908 )

Feye, a French artist had a notable career at the Paris Salon from 1841 to 1882. He set up studio and settled in the summer in the town of Cancale. He spent several months every year painting views of Cancale, the oyster-picking Cancalaises and the bay of Mont Saint-Michel.

Foster, Stephen Collins (1826-1864)

Foster, known as “the father of American music”, was an American composer known primarily for his parlour and minstrel music. He wrote more than 200 songs, including “Oh! Susanna”, “Hard Times Come Again No More”, “Camptown Races”, “Old Folks at Home” (“Swanee River”), “My Old Kentucky Home”, “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair”, “Old Black Joe”, and “Beautiful Dreamer”. Mmany of his compositions remain popular today.

Franz, Ettore Roesler (1845-1907)

Franz was an Italian watercolour painter and photographer. His most well-known work is a series of 120 aquarelles (watercolours) titled Roma Sparita (disappeared Rome), which realistically depict parts of Rome that were in danger of disappearing as the city became more urbanized and modern.  He was also one of the first artists to paint scenes in the Roman Ghetto.

Gallicelo, Louis (1860-1915)

Gallicelo was a French lithographic artist.

Garnier, Jean-Louis Charles (1825-1898)

Garnier was a French architect who won the competition for the new Paris Opera House in 1860. One of the most famous buildings of the century, the Opéra, completed in 1875, became a symbol of Second Empire taste, and its eclectic neo-Baroque style became characteristic of late 19th-century Beaux-Arts design. He also influenced the style of resort architecture for the wealthy with his small theatre for the casino of Monte-Carlo (1878), the casino and baths at Vittel, and the villas he built in Bordighera, notably his own.

Gauguin, Eugène Henri Paul (1848-1903)

Gauguin, a French artist, was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist, and writer. His expression of the inherent meaning of the subjects in his paintings paved the way for Primitivism and the return to the pastoral. He is well known for his relationship with Vincent and Theo van Gogh.  His work influenced French avant-garde and many modern artists, such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. In the 21st century, Gauguin’s Primitivist representations of Polynesian cultures and peoples, the artist’s sexual relationships with teenage Tahitian girls, and the legacy of European colonialism in his work have been a subject of renewed scholarly debate and controversy.

Georget, Étienne-Jean (1795-1828)

Georget was a pioneer in psychiatric medicine, with an enlightened view of patients as individuals. In the early 1820s, he commissioned Théodore Géricault, a former patient, to paint a series of portraits so that his students could study the facial traits of “monomaniacs”, as he preferred using such images to having patients in the classroom. He distinguished several types of monomania such as “theomania” (religious obsession), “erotomania” (sexual obsession), “demonomania” (obsession with evil) and “homicidal monomania” (obsession with murder).

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749-1832)

Goethe was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic whose works include plays, poetry, literature, aesthetic criticism, and treatises on botany, anatomy, and colour. In 1810, he published his Theory of Colours, wherein he characterized colour as arising from the dynamic interplay of light and darkness through the mediation of a turbid medium. After being translated into English by Charles Eastlake in 1840, his theory became widely adopted by the art world, most notably  Turner. In France, however, Goethe’s theory of colors remained unknown for a long time, even though the technical and scientific point of view, faithful to Isaac Newton, predominated through Michel-Eugène Chevreul. French painters, from Impressionists to Robert Delaunay, continued to make reference to Chevreul and his disciples, while never mentioning Goethe.

Gérard, François Pascal Simon (1770-1837)

Gérard was a  French Neoclassical painter best known for his portraits of celebrated European personalities, particularly the leading figures of the First Empire and Restoration periods.  A favourite of the revolutionaries, he was also acclaimed by Napoleon I and his circle, executing portraits (e.g., Josephine Bonaparte, 1799) and historical pieces (e.g., Battle of Austerlitz, 1808). After Napoleon’s fall he became court painter to Louis XVIII and later, patronized by Charles X, painted the ceiling murals for the Panthéon in Paris (1830).

Géricault, Jean-Louis André Théodore (1791-1824)

Géricault, a French painter and lithographer,  exerted a seminal influence on the development of Romantic art in France. His masterpiece is the large painting entitled The Raft of the Medusa (ca. 1819) which depicts the aftermath of a contemporary French shipwreck, whose survivors embarked on a raft and were decimated by starvation before being rescued at sea. The portrayal of the dead and dying, developed within a dramatic, carefully constructed composition, addressed a contemporary subject with unprecedented passion.

Gérôme Ferris, Jean Léon (1863-1930)

Gérôme was a French painter and sculptor in the style now known as Academicism. His  paintings were so widely reproduced that he was arguably the world’s most famous living artist by 1880. The range of his oeuvre included historical painting, Greek mythology, Orientalism, portraits and other subjects, bringing the academic painting tradition to an artistic climax.

Gerschel, Aron (1832-1907)

Gerschel was a French portrait photographer.

Gibson, James F. (1828-1905)

Gibson, one of the lesser-known Civil War photographers, is recognized for images of General McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign, Seven Days Battles, Battles of Gaines’ Mill and Battle of Malvern Hill.

Gill, André (née Louis-Alexandre Gosset de Guînes) (1840-1885)

Gill was a French caricaturist who  adopted the pseudonym “André Gill” in homage to his hero, British caricaturist James Gillray. His style, subsequently much imitated, was noted for the enlargement of his subjects’ heads, which sat upon undersized bodies.  His caricatures, in the form of large hand-colored, lithographic portraits, were considered very accurate and not very cruel.

“Giorgione” (née Giorgio da Castelfranco) (1477-1510)

Giorgine, an Italian painter, is known for the elusive poetic quality of his work, though only about six surviving paintings are firmly attributed to him.  He was a key artist of the Venetian School which  emphasized colorito, or using color to create forms, in contrast to the Florentine Renaissance emphasis on disegno, or drawing the forms and filling them in the colour.

Giraud, Sébastien-Charles (1819-1892)

Giraud, a French painter and draughtsman, took part in the military expedition that King Louis Philippe sent to Tahiti in 1846, in order to support Queen Pōmare IV. He participated in military operations but above all he took the time and the care to make many sketches of the island: the vegetation, the people, and their homes.

Goltzius, Hendrick (1558-1617)

Goltzius, a German-born Dutch printmaker, draughtsman and painter, was the leading Dutch engraver of the early Baroque period, or Northern Mannerism. He was lauded for his sophisticated technique, technical mastership and elaborate composition. He brought to an unprecedented level the use of the “swelling line”, where the burin is manipulated to make lines thicker or thinner to create a tonal effect from a distance. He was also a pioneer of “dot and lozenge” technique, where dots are placed in the middle of lozenge shaped spaces created by cross-hatching to further refine tonal shading.

Gonin, Guido (1833-1906)

Gonin was a French painter and illustrator. Most of his known works display contemporary women’s fashion of the late 19th century.

Gottlieb, Maurycy (1856-1879)

Gottlieb was an Orthodox Polish Jewish realist painter of the Romantic period. Inspired by the dramatic national historical paintings of Jan Matejko, he depicted scenes from Poland’s past and also executed several paintings in the popular Orientalist fashion. He also painted a number of works with overtly Jewish subject matter, including a scene of a Jewish wedding, two paintings of the Jewish heterodox philosopher Uriel da Costa, illustrations to Gotthold Lessing’s play Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise), portraits of several prominent contemporary Jewish figures, and depictions of famous Jewish literary figures (Shylock and his daughter Jessica from William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, and Jankiel the musician from Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz).

Goya y Lucientes, Francisco José de (1746-1828)

Goya was a Spanish artist whose paintings, drawings, and engravings influenced  important 19th- and 20th-century painters such as Édouard Manet, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali. From 1775 to 1792 he was engaged in producing more than 60 cartoons (preparatory paintings) of contemporary life scenes  and aristocratic and popular pastimes for the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Bárbara. In response to the Napoleonic invasion of Spain his series of etchings The Disasters of War (1810–14) rejected the bombastic heroics of most previous Spanish war art to record the horrific effect of conflict on individuals.

Graetz, Heinrich (1817-1891)

Graetz was a German historian and professor and among the first historians to write a comprehensive history of the Jewish people from a Jewish perspective. He became a teacher at the Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland)  seminary in 1854 where Conservative Judaism compatible with his belief that a Jewish theology should attempt to moderate between Orthodox literalism and Reform liberalism was emphasized. His influential and widely translated Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart (1853–76) (History of the Jews) presents a picturesque and heroic account of the entire history of the Jewish people, emphasizing Jewish suffering and nationalistic aspirations.

Grandville, Jean-Jacques (née Jean Ignace Isidore Gerard) (1803-1847)

Grandville was a French illustrator, designer, and caricaturist. He became well known with Les Métamorphoses du jour (1829), a series of seventy-five scenes which portray characters with human bodies and animal faces. Along with Honoré Daumier and Paul Gavarni, he illustrated  Les Français peints par eux-mêmes  (180-1842), a moral encyclopedia, with texts by Honoré de Balzac, Alphonse Karr, and Charles Nodier.

Grünewald, Matthias (ca. 1470-1528)

Grünewald was a German Renaissance painter of religious works. Some of his works include The Mocking of Christ (1503), the Isenheim Altarpiece (1512- 1516), Stuppach Madonna (1514 – 1519), and Christ Carrying the Cross (1523 – 1524). The angst-laden expressionism and vivid colours of his paintings appealed to both German nationalists and modernists.

Guibert, Maurice (1856-1922)

Guilbert was a French photographer known today as a friend of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Little is known of him other than his self-portraits and photograph of Toulouse-Lautrec’s At the Café La Mie (1891) based on a staged photograph in which Guibert played the role of a sleazy low-life type in the company of an unidentified woman.

Gutekunst, Frederick (1831-1917)

Gutekunst was an American photographer from Philadelphia who grew to national prominence during the American Civil War. He is known as the “Dean of American Photographers” due to his high-quality portraits of dignitaries and celebrities. He gained international recognition for his photographs of the Gettysburg battlefield.

Guth, Jean-Baptiste (1855-1922)

Guth, a French portrait artist, worked primarily in watercolour and pastel. Much of his work was as an illustrator of magazines, especially L’Illustration and Vanity Fair.

Haan, Meijer (Meyer) Isaac de (1852-1895)

Haan was a Dutch painter of Jewish genre works. He remained in Amsterdam until 1888, where he produced chiefly portraits and representations of working class Jew inspired by Dutch masters David Teniers and Rembrandt. In 1888, De Haan left for Paris and from 1889 to 1890 painted alongside Paul Gauguin in Brittany and under his influence produced Impressionist works.

Hahn, Karl (c. 19th century)

Hahn, a German professional photographer, was frequently hired by Franz von Lenbach to photograph Lenbach’s portrait sitters in the studio.

Halévy, Léon (1802-1883)

Halévy was a French civil servant, historian, and dramatist, of Jewish descent, but brought up Protestant. He wrote a book, Degas parle…. (My Friend Degas, published in English in 1964), based on his journal notes as a teenager and man in his 20s. Degas was a close friend of his father Ludovic and also a family friend.

Halévy,  Ludovic  (1834-1908)

Halévy was a French author and playwright best known for his collaborations with Henri Meilhac on Georges Bizet’s Carmen and on the works of Jacques Offenbach. Ludovic was known for his parodies and light comedies of Parisian life. Degas, an anti-Semite and virulent anti-Dreyfusard, terminated his long friendship with Halévy during the Dreyfus Affair.

Hals, Frans (the Elder) (1582-1666)

Hals was a Dutch Golden Age painter, chiefly of individual and group portraits and  genre works, He lived and worked in Haarlemwhere he played an important role in the evolution of 17th-century portraiture.  His portraits,known for their loose painterly brushworkare not idealized but clearly distinguishable, with  personalities revealed in a variety of poses and facial expressions.

Hawker, Henry Samuel (DOB Unknown-1889)

Hawker, a watercolourist, was a member of the British Royal Navy and colonel of the 3rd Dragoon Guards. He was a lieutenant on the H.M. Sloop Pearl when the slave ship Diligente with 600 slaves on board was seized in 1838 for engaging in the illegal slave trade.

Helmholtz, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand (1821-1894)

Helmholtz was a German physicist and physician known for his mathematics concerning the eye, theories of vision, ideas on the visual perception of space, colour vision research, and  perception of sounds. Helmholtz, turning to the intricate problems of colour vision in 1852, demonstrated the important distinction between additive and subtractive colour mixtures.

Hetzel, Pierre-Jules (1814-1886)

Hetzel, a leading republican, was a French editor and publisher of Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo and Émile Zola. He founded the Nouveau magazine des enfants (“New Children’s Magazine”) and the Bibliothèque illustrée des Familles (The Family Illustrated Library), which was renamed Le Magasin d’éducation et de récréation (Education and Entertainment Magazine) in 1864. His first major success was the Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux (1842) with numerous illustrations of animals by J.J. Grandville, and writings by Hetzel, Balzac, George Sand, Charles Nodier, and Louis Viardot which offered a witty and telling commentary on contemporary politics and personalities. His fame comes mostly for his editions of the Voyages extraordinaires (Extraordinary Journeys) by Jules Verne, originally published in biweekly chapters as a series in his  Le Magasin.

Hiroshige I, Utagawa (née Ando Tokutaro) (1797-1858)

Hiroshige, a Japanese ukiyo-e artist, is considered the last great master of that tradition. He is best known for his horizontal-format landscape series The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō and his vertical-format landscape series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. The subjects of his work were atypical of the ukiyo-e genre, whose focus was on beautiful women, popular actors, and other scenes of the urban pleasure districts of Japan’s Edo period. Subtle use of colour was essential in Hiroshige’s prints, often printed with multiple impressions in the same area and with extensive use of bokashi (colour gradation).

Hodler, Ferdinand (1853-1918)

Hodler was a Swiss Symbolist painter whose figural compositions and landscapes  focused on the symmetric unity of nature and mystery of human life. By the mid-1880s, a tendency to self-conscious linear stylization was visible in his subject pictures, which dealt increasingly with the symbolism of youth and age, solitude, and contemplation. These pictures are notable for their strong linear and compositional rhythms and their clear, flat, decorative presentation. His firmly drawn nudes express Hodler’s mystical philosophy through grave, ritualized gestures.

Hoffbauer, Theodor Josef Hubert “Feodor/Fédor” (1839-1922)

Hoffbauer was a German-born French architectural historian and painter who created several historic city plans depicting Medieval and Renaissance urban layouts. Notably, he was responsible for multiple dioramas and booklets on the historical development of Paris.

Hogarth, William (1697-1764)

Hogarth was an English painter, engraver, pictorial satirist, social critic, editorial cartoonist and occasional writer on art. His work ranges from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures which he called “modern moral subjects.” He created a series of paintings satirising contemporary customs,  of which the first was The Harlot’s Progress (1731), and perhaps the most famous The Rake’s Progress (1732-1774).

Hogg, James (1770-1835)

Hogg was a Scottish engraver, poet, novelist and essayist who wrote in Scots and English. As a young man, Hogg worked as a shepherd and a farmhand and was largely self-educated through reading. He became widely known as the “Ettrick Shepherd,” a nickname under which some of his works were published.

Hokusai, Katsushika (1760-1849)

Hokusai was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist of the Edo period, active as a painter and printmaker. Innovative in his compositions and exceptional in his drawing technique, he is best known for the woodblock print series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, which includes the iconic print The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Hokusai was instrumental in developing ukiyo-e from a style of portraiture primarily focused on courtesans and actors into a much broader style of art focused on landscapes, plants, and animals.

Holbein “the Younger,” Hans (1497-1543)

Holbein was a German-Swiss painter and printmaker renowned for the precise rendering of his drawings and the compelling realism of his portraits. He also produced religious art, satire and Reformation propaganda, and significantly contributed to the history of book design in his woodcuts for title pages and  illustrations.

Homer, Winslow (1836-1910)

Homer was an American landscape painter and illustrator, best known for his marine subjects. As a commercial illustrator working for Harper’s Weekly  he was sent to the front lines of the American Civil War, where he sketched battle scenes and  camp life. Homer’s paintings of Blacks during the Civil War and the Reconstruction years are invested with sympathy, tension, and ambiguity, and the same realism he displayed in painting white subjects.

Humbert, Alphonse Jean Joseph (1844-1922)

Humbert was a French journalist and political activist. An active member in the Paris Commune, a revolutionary working-class government that seized power in Paris from 18 March to 28 May 1871, he was exiled to New Caledonia after “La semaine sanglante” (The Bloody Week).

Hunt, William Wolman (1827-1910)

Hunt was an English painter and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood whose paintings were notable for their attention to detail, vivid colour and elaborate symbolism. A man of strong, some would say pious, Christian beliefs, Hunt was fastidious in his attention to detail. He used actual locations – many in the middle-East – to restage biblical parables and rituals in his canvases. Falling under the influence of the writings of John Ruskin, Hunt was invested in the principle of a spiritual truth and, like Ruskin, he believed that the duty of the artist was to depict things truthfully while using art to promote and uphold moral integrity.

Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique (1780-1867)

Ingres, French painter and icon of cultural conservatism, was  the principal proponent of French Neoclassical painting after the death of his mentor, Jacques-Louis David. His cool, meticulously drawn works constituted the stylistic antithesis of the emotionalism and colourism of the contemporary Romantic school. As a monumental history painter, Ingres sought to perpetuate the Classical tradition of Raphael and Nicolas Poussin.

Jackson, William Henry (1843-1942)

Jackson, an American photographer, was a Civil War veteran, painter, and explorer famous for his images of the American West.

Janet, Ange-Louis (1815-1872)

Janet, also known under the pseudonym Janet-Lange, was a French painter, illustrator, lithographer and engraver.

Jeanron, Philippe-Auguste (1809-1877)

Jeanron was a French painter, curator, and writer, and passionate Republican. His genre pictures typically depicted common people. When the provisional government took power after the February Revolution of 1848, Jeanron became head of National Museums and Director of the Louvre from 1848 to 1850 where he introduced important innovations in the preservation, classification and arrangement of the collection.

Jiang, Yuan (1644-1746)

Jiang was a Chinese landscape painter who served at the imperial palace during the Yongzheng era (1722–1735). He painted landscapes and garrets, as well as bird-and-flower paintings and paintings of beasts.

Johnson, Jonathan Eastman (1824-1906)

Johnson, an American artist, was a Unionist whose art addressed the civil war, the abolition of slavery, and scenes of rural life in New England. He is best known for his genre paintings and portraits of both ordinary people and prominent Americans. He was also an active board member on progressive arts institutions, including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which he co-founded,

Jouvin, Hippolyte (1825-1889)

Jouvin was a French photographer who pioneered street photography in Paris and produced stereoscopic images. His work included photographs from the Paris Commune.

Jumeau, Émile-Louis (1843-1910)

Jumeau was a French doll-maker and son of doll-maker Pierre-François Jumeau.  He won a bronze medal at the Paris Exhibition of 1849, and was invited to take part in the London World’s Fair in 1851, where he won a gold medal, mainly due to the dolls’ dresses. In 1877, he created the “Unbreakable Baby”, with a girl’s face and a fully articulated body. The Jumeau dolls often had mature forms and a line of clothing and accessories that followed the latest fashion.

Klimt, Gustav (1862-1918)

Klimt was an Austrian symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. His primary subject was the female body, marked by frank eroticism. He was strongly influenced by Japanese art and its methods.

Knaus, Ludwig (1829-1910)

Knaus was a German genre painter of the Dusseldorf school of painting. Engravings of his work were especially popular among the German peasantry.

Krafft, Johann Peter (1780-1856)

Krafft was a German-born Austrian painter specializing in portraits, history subjects and genre scenes. He was also employed as an expert on the preservation of monuments.

Kuniaki II, Utagawa (1835-1888)

Kuniaki II was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist.  He was the younger brother of, or perhaps the same person as, the artist known as Utagawa Kuniaki I and  prints are sometimes attributed to one or the other. His genre included  images of wrestlers (sumo-e), actors (yakusha-e), beauties (bijin-ga) and westerners (Yokohama-e). While considered a minor artist of his time, his print The Wrestler Onaruto Nadaemon of Awa Province became famous, as it is pictured in Manet’s 1868 portrait of Emile Zola.

Latour-Marliac, Joseph Bory (1830-1911)

Latour-Marliac was a French lawyer and horticulturist noted for breeding water lily hybrids. He founded a water lily nursery at Le Temple-sur-Lot in 1875. A display of his plants in 1898 at the Universal Exhibition in Paris attracted the attention of the painter Claude Monet who purchased water lilies for his garden in Giverny from him.

Launay “le Jeune”, Robert de (1749-1814)

Launay was a French engraver practicing intaglio. His works include portraits, vignettes, interpretive genre pieces and illustrations. He frequently signed his prints “Delaunay le J. [eune]” to distinguish him from his older brother.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar (Jean Gaspar) (1741-1801)

Lavater was a Swiss poet, writer, philosopher, physiognomist and theologian. In 1769 he took Holy Orders in Zurich’s Zwinglian Church, officiating until his death as deacon or pastor in churches in his native city. Lavater introduced the idea that physiognomy (a field of study by which one could judge character from facial characteristics) related to the specific character traits of individuals rather than general types. Lavater used about 150 silhouettes among the illustrations in his monumental work Physiognomische Fragmente (Zurich, 1775 -76) and is credited with developing the silhouette machine.

Le Bon, Charles-Marie Gustave (1841-1931)

Le Bon was a leading French polymath whose areas of interest included anthropology, psychology, sociology, medicine, invention, and physics. He is best known for his 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, considered one of the seminal works of crowd psychology. He was ignored or maligned by sections of the French academic and scientific establishment during his life due to his politically conservative and reactionary views. Le Bon was critical of democracy and socialism.

Le Brun, Charles (1619-1690)

Le Brun, a French painter, physiognomist, art theorist, and director of several art schools of his time, became the arbiter of artistic production in France during the last half of the 17th century. Possessing both technical facility and the capacity to organize and carry out many vast projects, Le Brun personally created or supervised the production of most of the paintings, sculptures, and decorative objects commissioned by the French government for three decades during the reign of Louis XIV. Under his direction French artists created a homogeneous style that came to be accepted throughout Europe as the paragon of academic and propagandistic art.

Le Gray, Jean-Baptiste Gustave (1820-1884)

Le Gray, a French painter, draughtsman, sculptor, print-maker, and photographer is known as one of the most important French photographer of the nineteenth century because of his technical innovations and his instruction of other noted photographers such as Charles Nègre, Henri Le Secq, Nadar, Olympe Aguado, and Maxime Du Camp. His first daguerreotypes included portraits, scenes of nature such as Fontainebleau Forest and buildings such as châteaux of the Loire Valley. In 1851, he became one of the first five photographers hired for the Missions Héliographiques to document French monuments and buildings.  He helped found the Société Héliographique, the first photographic organization in the world, and published a treatise on photography, which went through four editions, in 1850, 1851, 1852, and 1854.

Le Nain, Louis (ca. 1603-1648)

Louis Le Nain, a French artist, was one of three painter brothers, along with Antoine Le Nain (ca. 1600-1648) and Mathieu Le Nain (1607-1677), in 17th century France. They produced genre works, portraits and portrait miniatures. Because of their similarity in style and the difficulty of distinguishing works by each brother, who all signed their paintings only with their surname, they are commonly referred to as a single entity, Le Nain.

Le Nôtre, André (1613-1700)

Le Nôtre, a French landscape architect and the principal gardener of King Louis XIV of France, designed the gardens of the Palace of Versailles which represents the height of the French formal garden style, or jardin à la française. Prior to working on Versailles, he collaborated with Louis Le Vau and Charles Le Brun on the park at Vaux-le-Vicomte. His other works include the design of gardens and parks at Chantilly, Fontainebleau, Saint-Cloud and Saint-Germain. His contribution to planning was also significant: at the Tuileries he extended the westward vista, which later became the avenue of the Champs-Élysées.

Le Petit, Alfred (1841-1909)

Le Petit, also known under the pseudonyms “Alfred Le Grand,” “Caporal” and “Zut” was a French caricaturist, painter, and photographer who lampooned and criticized political figures of his time. After studying drawing, painting and photography, he began cartooning in Rouen, then in Paris contributing to La Lune and L’Éclipse. In 1870, he founded La Charge, a periodical that attacked Napoleon III with ferocity; later he also founded the publications Le Pétard and Le Sans-Culotte which also focused on political commentary of the ruling powers.

Le Vau, Louis (1612-1670)

Louis Le Vau was part of a trio of Baroque architects – the others being Jules Hardouin Mansart and André Le Notre – who, along with the decorator Charles Le Brun. He helped to create the Louis XIV style of architecture at the Palace of Versailles, where he  transformed a hunting lodge into the most celebrated royal palace in the world. Among his other contributions to Baroque architecture are the Chateau of Vaux-le-Vicomte, the Palais du Louvre (with Claude Perrault), the Church of Saint-Sulpice and the Hotel Lambert.

Lefèvre, Camille (1853-1933)

Lefèvre was a French sculptor. In 1878 won the second Prix de Rome in sculpture,  in 1893 he exhibited at the Chicago World Fair, in 1900 he became a member of the New Society of Painters and Sculptors and in 1901 he was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour. From 1903 to 1906 he was professor at the National School of Decorative Arts. Throughout his career, Lefevre remained concerned with social issues, participating in charitable works and maintaining relations with the middle left-liberals such as the artist Eugène Carrière and journalist Jules Lermina.

Lefebvre, Jules Joseph (1836-1911)

Lefebvre, a French figure painter, educator and theorist, combined a modern, scientific concern for recording physical reality with a knowledge of traditional techniques of the European masters. Between 1855 and 1898, he exhibited seventy-two portraits in the Paris Salon. Many of his paintings are single figures of beautiful women; he also excelled at painting female nudes.

Lemaire (née Coll), Madeleine (1845-1928)

Lemaire was a French painter who specialized in elegant genre works and flowers. She exhibited her work at the Palace of Fine Arts and The Woman’s Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Lenbach, Ritter von (née Franz von Lenbach) (1836-1904)

Lenbach was a German painter, known primarily for his portraits of prominent personalities from the nobility, the arts, and industry. He changed his approach to portrait painting after 1876, eliminating the formal atelier pose in favor of the artist’s observation of the model seated informally and even moving slightly around the studio.  What distinguished Lenbach’s method was  his use of photographs of movement and his decision to “flesh out” these photographs rather than slavishly copy them. By the early 1880s he regularly hired professional photographers such as Friedrich Wendling, Adolf Baumann, and Karl Hahn to photograph his sitters, an effort made easier by the dry plates that had recently come on the market, and by the box camera.

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729-1781)

Lessing, a German philosopher, dramatist, publicist and art critic was a representative of the Enlightenment era whose plays and theoretical writings substantially influenced the development of German literature. He is widely considered by theatre historians to be the first dramaturg in his role at Abel Seyler’s Hamburg National Theatre. Lessing’s friendship with  German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn sparked his interest in popular religious debates of the time. He began publishing heated pamphlets on his beliefs which were eventually banned; it was this banishment that inspired him to return to theatre to portray his views and to write Nathan the Wise (1779) a fervent plea for religious tolerance,  never performed during Lessing’s lifetime.

Lévy, Émile (1826-1890)

Lévy was a French genre and portrait painter.  He won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1854 and on his return from Italy he settled in Paris, devoted himself to mainly to portrait painting.  Among the more important of his genre works are: Noah Cursing Canaan (1855); Supper of the Martyrs (1859); Death of Orpheus (1866);  Love and Folly (1874); and Infancy (1885).

Lewis, Mary Edmonia (aka “Wildfire”) (1844-1907)

Lewis was an American sculptor who worked for most of her career in Rome. She is the first woman of African-American and Native American heritage to achieve international fame and recognition as a sculptor; and by the end of the 19th century was the only black woman who had participated in and been recognized to any degree by the American artistic mainstream. Her work is known for incorporating themes relating to black and American Indian people into Neoclassical style sculpture.

Lewis, John Frederick (1804-1876)

Lewis was an English Orientalist painter who specialized in Oriental and Mediterranean scenes in detailed watercolours or oils, often repeating the same composition in a version in each medium. His careful representation of Islamic architecture, furnishings, screens, and costumes set new standards of realism, which influenced other artists, including the leading French Orientalist painter Jean-Léon Gérôme in his later works. Unlike many other Orientalist painters who took a salacious interest in the women of the Middle East, he did not paint nudes, and his wife modelled for several of his harem scenes.

Lhullier, Charles Marie (1824-1898)

Lhullier was a French painter and caricaturist. He taught at the École des beaux-arts du Havre,  and was head of the commission for the purchase of works of art for the city’s museums.

Liebermann, Max (1847-1935)

Liebermann, German painter and printmaker and foremost proponent of Impressionism in Germany, is known for his naturalistic studies of the life and labour of the poor.  In 1899 Liebermann founded the Berliner Sezession, a group of artists who supported the academically unpopular styles of Impressionism and Art Nouveau. Despite his association with the anti-establishment Sezession, he became a member of the Berlin Academy, and in 1920 he was elected its president. In 1932 the Nazis forced him to resign from his position because he was Jewish.

Lombroso, Cesare Ezechia Marco (1835-1909)

Lombroso was an Italian criminologist, phrenologist, physician and founder of the Italian School of Positive Criminology. He rejected the established Classical school which held that crime was a characteristic trait of human nature. Instead, using concepts drawn from physiognomy, degeneration theory, psychiatry, and Social Darwinism, Lombroso’s theory of anthropological criminology essentially stated that criminality was inherited, and that someone “born criminal” could be identified by physical (congenital) defects, which confirmed a criminal as savage or atavistic.

Lorrain, Claude (1600-1682)

Lorrain, a French artist, was best known for, and one of the greatest masters of, ideal landscape painting. His landscapes which often contains Classical ruins and pastoral figures in Classical dress, was inspired by the countryside around Rome—the Roman Campagna—a countryside haunted with remains and associations of antiquity. His special contribution, the poetic rendering of light, was influential, not only during his lifetime but from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century.

Loti, Pierre (1850-1923)

Pierre Loti, pseudonym of Louis-marie-julien Viaud, was a French naval officer and novelist, known for his exotic novels and short stories. His career as a naval officer took him to the Middle and Far East, thus providing him with the alluring settings of his novels and reminiscences. Gauguin’s romantic image of Tahiti as an untouched paradise derived in part from Loti’s novel Le Mariage de Loti (1880).

Louÿs, Pierre Félix (1870-1925)

Louÿs was a French poet and writer, most renowned for lesbian and Classical themes. He had an early literary friendship with the poet Paul Valéry; both young men were also members of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s circle. In 1895 he published what is today his best-known work, Les chansons de Bilitis (1895), which exemplifies the type of eroticism that his work is noted for.

Manet, Édouard (1832-1883)

Manet was a French painter who broke new ground by defying traditional techniques of representation and by choosing subjects from the events and circumstances of his own time. His Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), exhibited in 1863 at the Salon des Refusés, aroused the hostility of critics and the enthusiasm of the young painters who later formed the nucleus of the Impressionist group. His critics were offended by the presence of a naked woman in the company of two young men clothed in contemporary dress. Rather than seeming a remote allegorical figure, the woman’s modernity made her nudity seem vulgar and even threatening. Other notable works include Olympia (1863) and A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882). Although he was friendly with Claude Monet and the other Impressionists, Manet would not participate in their independent exhibitions.

Mann, Sally (1951-Present)

Mann is an American photographer whose powerful images of childhood, sexuality, and death were often deemed controversial. Her photographs created a stir because they focused on her three children, who often appeared nude and in postures, situations, and settings that some viewers found disturbing. Some questioned whether Mann had exploited her children, while others debated whether the images constituted a variety of child pornography; still others lavishly praised the collection as an honest exploration of the complexities of childhood.

Manuel, Henri (1874-1947)

Manuel was a French photographer renowned  for his photographer of people from the worlds of politics, arts, and sports. He was also a photographer of art and architecture.

Marville, Charles François Bossu (1813-1879)

Marville was a French photographer who mainly photographed architecture, landscapes and the urban environment. He is best known for taking pictures of Parisian quarters before they were destroyed and rebuilt during the “Haussmannization” of Paris,  a vast public works program commissioned by  Emperor Napoleon III to modernize Paris, under the direction of his prefect of Seine George-Eugene Haussman, between 1853 and 1870.

Marx, Karl Heinrich (1818-1883)

Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and social revolutionary. The main themes of his writings include his philosophical anthropology, his theory of history, his economic analysis, his critical engagement with contemporary capitalist society (raising issues about morality, ideology, and politics), and his prediction of a communist future. His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the four-volume Das Kapital (1867-1883). Marx’s political and philosophical thought enormously influenced subsequent intellectual, economic, and political history.

Matejko, Jan Alojzy (1838-1893)

Matejko, a Polish painter, was a leading exponent of history painting, known for depicting nodal events from Polish history. He also painted numerous portraits, a gallery of Polish monarchs in book form, and murals in St. Mary’s Basilica, Kraków. He is considered by many as the most celebrated Polish painter, and sometimes as the national painter of Poland. 

Maupassant, Henri René Albert Guy de (1850-1893)

Maupassant was French author, remembered as a master of the short story form and a representative of the naturalist school, who depicted human lives, destinies and social forces in disillusioned and often pessimistic terms. His stories are characterized by an economy of style and efficient, seemingly effortless denouements. Many are set during the Franco-Prussian War (July 19, 1870- January 28, 1871), describing the futility of war and the innocent civilians who, caught up in events beyond their control, are permanently changed by their experiences.

Mauve, Anthonij “Anton” Rudolf (1838-1888)

Mauve, a Dutch realist painter, was a leading member of the Hague School. His best-known paintings depict peasants working in the fields. He had a significant early influence on his cousin-in-law Vincent van Gogh.

Mauzaisse, Jean-Baptiste (1784-1844)

Mauzaisse was a French painter and lithographer known for his military and royalty portraiture, as well as his decorative fresco painting. Among his larger commissions were paintings for cathedrals in Nantes and Bourges, and a portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte done first in oils and then in a lithographic edition published by the Galerie du Palais Royal in 1825.

Mayer, Louis Frédéric (1822-1913)

Mayer was a French photographer and artist whose focus was society and theatrical portraits. Pierre Pierson and Léopold and Ernest Mayer joined forces in Paris in 1855 and became the Mayer & Pierson firm. Previously, the Mayer brothers had produced coloured photographs for which they received awards and exhibited numerous portraits and cartes-de visite at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851.

McPherson (1833-1867) & Oliver, J. (DOD unknown -DOD unknown)

McPherson and Oliver were southern photographers, active in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana in the 1860s, whose business was exclusively Confederate, until Union forces occupied Baton Rouge in May 1862. They are probably best known for “The Scourged Back”, their sensational, widely published portrait of “Gordon”, an escaped slave from a Louisiana plantation, who came into the Union lines at Baton Rouge.

Méaulle, Fortuné Louis (1844-1916)

Méaulle was a French wood-engraver for numerous newspapers and journals including France L’Illustration, Le Tour du monde, Le Magasin picturesque, L’Univers illustré, Harper’s Magazine and The Graphic.

Meissonier, Jean-Louis-Ernest (1815-1891)

Meissonier was a French painter and illustrator of military and historical subjects, especially of Napoleonic battles. Meissonier’s minute and scrupulous technique was largely derived from the study of Dutch painters of the 17th century, but the documentary approach of his preparatory studies of costume and armour and  his detailed observation of nature (such as his systematic analysis of the movements of horses) links him with the 19th century. Among his major works are Napoleon III at Solferino (1863) and 1814 (1864), both of which celebrate heroic military campaigns. He also captured the horrors of conflict in works such as Remembrance of Civil War (1848–49), which depicts the moment when the Parisian insurgents of 1848 were slaughtered on barracades by the Republican Guard. 

Mélandri, Achille (1845-1905)

Mélandri was a French photographer, writer, and journalist. He photographed the actress Sarah Bernhardt and the artist Auguste Renoir.

Meurent, Victorine-Louise (1844-1927)

Meurent was a French painter and a model for painters. Although she is best known as the favourite model of Édouard Manet, modelling for his famous Olympia and Déjeuner sur l’herbe, she was an artist in her own right. At the age of thirty-one she decided to become a painter, took art classes, and regularly exhibited at the Paris Salon. Critics of her time described her as poor woman who descended into alcoholism, yet the truth is that Meurent kept painting and teaching guitar until the age of eighty-four. Unlike other successful women painters of her time, such as Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, and Rosa Bonheur, whose families helped to support them, Meurent had no moral or financial support.

Mesmer, Franz Anton (1734-1815)

Mesmer was a German physician whose system of therapeutics, known as mesmerism, was the forerunner of the modern practice of hypnotism. Mesmer’s dissertation at the University of Vienna (M.D., 1766), which borrowed heavily from the work of the British physician Richard Mead, suggested that the gravitational attraction of the planets affected human health by affecting an invisible fluid found in the human body and throughout nature. In 1775 Mesmer revised his theory of “animal gravitation” to one of “animal magnetism,” wherein the invisible fluid in the body acted according to the laws of magnetism and then devised various therapeutic treatments to achieve a harmonious fluid flow.

Meyer,  Jacques (known as Henri Meyer and Reyem) (1841-1899)

Meyer was a French caricaturist and illustrator best known for his work with the publishing firm Hetzel, where he produced engravings for the works of Jules Verne. He also designed numerous illustrations for periodicals including a large number of covers for the Supplément illustré of Le Petit Journal, which were engraved by Fortuné Méaulle.

Millet, Jean-François (1814-1875)

Millet was a French painter renowned for his peasant subjects which made their first appearance at the Salon of 1848 with The Winnower, later destroyed by fire. In 1849, Millet left Paris to settle in Barbizon, a small hamlet in the forest of Fontainebleau where he became one of the leaders of the Barbizon School. While most artists of the Barbizon school concentrated on  landscapes, Millet preferred to depict the life of ceaseless toil required of the peasant class, in the same manner that earlier artists reserved for more exalted subjects. As a result, his shepherds and farm laborers occupied large spaces on the canvas formerly occupied by historic or Biblical figures, or mythological heroes. His paintings of peasants resulted in him periodically facing the charge of being a socialist despite his letters which defended the fundamental Classical nature of his approach to painting.

Modersohn-Becker, Paula (1876-1907)

Modersohn-Becker was a German painter who helped introduce into modern German art the French artists who inspired her, namely Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh. A prolific artist in her short life producing more than 700 paintings and over 1000 drawings, she is recognized as the first known woman painter to paint nude self-portraits, including nude images of herself pregnant. She is the first female artist to have a museum devoted exclusively to her art.

Monet, Oscar-Claude (1840-1926)

Monet was a French painter and key figure in  the Impressionist movement. His paintings are known for their vibrant colors, naturalistic style, and bold, short brushstrokes which he employed to spontaneously capture the essence of everyday scenes. His series of water lilies, haystacks, and Rouen Cathedral paintings are experiments in the transformative pictorial power of light and colour. Inspired by the natural world, he often painted en plein air as he experienced the changing light and atmosphere. The term “Impressionism” is derived from the title of his painting Impression, soleil levant, which he showed in the exhibition of the Société Anonyme des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, (an alternative to the Paris Salon) in 1874.

Montméja, Arthur de (1841-DOD unknown)

De Montméja was a French ophthalmologist at Paris Hospital Saint Louis who began photographing patients in 1865. The first photographic surgical textbook, Traité des Operations qui se Pratiquent sur l’Oeil (1871) by Edouard Meyer and de Montméja concluded with an atlas of 22 photographs and photo-montages, taken by Montméja as prints on albumen paper from collodion glass negative. A. Hardy and de Montméja’s Clinique Photographique des Maladies de la Peau (1872, second edition) was illustrated with sixty images, some of them coloured, on letterpress pages showing different skin diseases. 

Moreau, Gustave (1826-1898)

Moreau was a French Symbolist painter known for his erotic paintings of mythological and religious subjects. Moreau’s Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864), The Apparition (Dance of Salome) (ca. 1876) and Dance of Salome (ca. 1876) show his work becoming increasingly concerned with exotic eroticism and violence. These richly crowded canvases were made with greater use of dramatic lighting to heighten the brilliant, jewel-like colours. He painted nonfigurative works, done in a loose manner with thick impasto, have led him to be called a herald of Abstract Expressionism.

Morisot, Berthe Marie Pauline (1841-1895)

Morisot was a French painter and printmaker who exhibited regularly with the Impressionists. Morisot’s insistence on design aligns her work closer to Édouard Manet than to that of her fellow Impressionists, whose interests in colour-optical experimentation she never assumed. Her paintings, delicate, subtle, and exquisite in colour, often with a subdued emerald glow, frequently depicted private moments (e.g., Woman at Her Toilette, 1875/80) and included members of her family, particularly her sister, Edma (e.g., Reading, 1873; and The Artist’s Sister Edma and Their Mother,1870).

Moronobu, also called Kichibē, Hishikawa (1618-1694)

Moronobu was a Japanese artist, the first great master of ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”), a genre depicting entertainment districts and other scenes of urban life. About the middle of the 17th century he moved to Edo, where he became an illustrator of storybooks using wood-block prints, and developed a technique for the mass reproduction of paintings to make them accessible to a large public. Both his paintings and  prints depicted the customs and manners of the Edo people, especially of courtesans and Kabuki theatre actors, and like his fellow ukiyo-e painters, he  also drew many pictures of pornographic scenes known as shun-ga.

Morse, Samuel Finley Breese (1791-1872)

Morse was an American painter and inventor who developed an electric telegraph (1832–35); and with friend Alfred Vail developed the Morse Code (1838). After graduating from Yale in 1810, Morse became a clerk for a Boston book publisher  but painting continued to be his main interest, and in 1811 his parents helped him go to England in order to study art with American painter Washington Allston. When, on his return home in 1815, Morse found that Americans did not appreciate his historical canvases, he reluctantly took up portraiture, combining technical competence and a bold rendering of his subjects’ character with a touch of the Romanticism he had imbibed in England.

Mount, William Sidney (1807-1868)

Mount was an American genre painter who mainly depicted rustic life in his native Long Island. His paintings often commented on American social and political issues, as seen in his exploration of temperance and slavery. The recognizable situations and detailed, representational character of Mount’s paintings struck a responsive chord in Victorian America and now serve as a valuable record of a bygone, agrarian age.

Munch, Edvard (1863-1944)

Munch was a Norwegian painter and printmaker whose flowing, tortuous use of line was similar to that of contemporary Art Nouveau, but he used line not as decoration but as a vehicle for profound psychological revelation. The violent emotion and unconventional imagery of his paintings, especially their daringly frank representations of sexuality, created a bitter controversy. Critics were also offended by his innovative technique, which to most appeared unfinished.

“Nadar” (née Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) (1820-1910)

Nadar was a French writer, caricaturist, and photographer is mainly remembered for his photographic portraits. By 1853, although he still considered himself primarily a caricaturist, Nadar had become an expert photographer and had opened a portrait studio in Paris which he lent in 1874 to the painters later known as Impressionists for their first exhibition. He was a tireless innovator; in 1858 he made a successful aerial photograph—the world’s first—from a balloon and began to photograph by electric light, making a series of photographs of Paris sewers.

Nadar (née Tournachon), Paul (1856-1939)

Paul Nadar, son of celebrated photographer Nadar, became manager of his father’s Paris studio in 1874. The father and son collaborated on what scholars believe to be the first photo-interview; it was of the  101-year old chemist and color theorist Michel-Eugène Chevreul. That same year, Paul Nadar began experimenting with photographing from a hot-air balloon and presented his results at the Société française de la photographie. An innovative experimenter throughout his career, Paul Nadar investigated artificial lighting and patented a projection system for animating still pictures.

Nast, Thomas (1840-1902)

Nast was a German-born American caricaturist and editorial cartoonist often considered to be the “Father of the American Cartoon.” With the outbreak of the American Civil War, Nast vigorously supported the cause of the Union and opposed slavery from his drawing board at Harper’s Weekly. His cartoons After the Battle (1862), attacking Northerners opposed to an energetic prosecution of the war, and Emancipation (1863), showing the evils of slavery and the benefits of its abolition, were so effective that President Abraham Lincoln called him “our best recruiting sergeant.” During Reconstruction, Nast’s cartoons portrayed President Andrew Johnson as a repressive autocrat and characterized Southerners as vicious exploiters of helpless blacks, revealing his bitter disappointment in postwar politics.

Nicolay, Nicolas de (1517-1583)

Nicolay was a French soldier and geographer. Quatre premiers livres des navigations (Travels in Turkey) (1567) recorded Nicolay’s observations about the Ottoman court and peoples from his 1551 mission to Istanbul on behalf of the French government. The book served as the first comprehensive survey of customs and costumes in the Ottoman world, and is hailed as one of the earliest and most accurate depictions of the Islamic world to appear in Europe. The widespread popularity of the book contributed to the proliferation of costume books throughout Europe at the end of the 16th century, and continued to influence Orientalist artists well into the 19th century, such as Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.

Oppenheim, Moritz Daniel (1800-1882)

Oppenheim,  a German Jewish painter and printmaker, is considered the first Jewish painter  to gain acceptance in the non-Jewish German society. From the 1830s to the 1850s, Oppenheim was the official portraitist of the Rothschild family, thus he is sometimes referred to as the “Painter of the Rothschilds and the Rothschild of Painters.” His later work explored the encounter between Jewish traditions and the modern world, as experienced by post-emancipation German Jewry.

Oppler, Ernst (1867-1929)

Oppler was a German Jewish  painter and etcher who joined the Berlin Secession, a group of artists championing the new German Impressionist style. He gained renown as a portraitist and chronicler of daily life through his drawings, etchings, painted cityscapes and genre scenes. He stopped participating in exhibitions of the Berlin Secession when controversies around expressionism erupted, but remained a prominent member of the avant-garde.

Orlik, Emil (1870-1932)

Orlik was an Austro-Hungarian painter, etcher, and lithographer who experimented with various printmaking processes. He spent most of 1898 travelling through Europe, visiting the Netherlands, Great Britain, Belgium, and Paris. During this time he became aware of Japanese art, and the impact it was having in Europe, and visited Japan to learn woodcut techniques.

Pao, Adrienne Keahi (DOB Unknown-Present)

Paol is an American photographer. From installations to portraiture, she creates imagery that explores identity, culture, and society, and communicates with a sense of humor.

Parent du Châtelet, Alexandre Jean-Baptiste (Parent-Duchâtelet) (1790-1836)

Parent du Châtelet, a French medical hygienist, gained recognition  in 1824 with the publication of Essai sur les cloaques ou égouts de la ville de Paris, a book about his experiments in waste dump sites, and his quest to define the extent to which the fumes from open dump sites could be harmful to health. He is best known for a monumental work published posthumously in 1836, entitled Distribution des prostituées dans chacun des 48 quartiers de la Ville de Paris. The book, a result of nearly eight years of investigation of documents taken from police archives as well as field interviews and statistical measurements, is considered a major work on the history of prostitution and one of the first  examples  of empirical sociology in that it is based on observed and measured phenomena and derives knowledge from actual experience rather than from theory or belief.

Parmigianino (née Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola) (1503-1540)

Parmigianino was an Italian painter who was one of the first artists to develop the elegant and sophisticated version of Mannerist style that became a formative influence on the post-High Renaissance generation. After the summer of 1524 Parmigianino moved from Parma to Rome, taking with him three specimens of his work to impress the Pope, including the famous self-portrait that he had painted on a convex panel from his reflection in a convex mirror. He is also well known for Vision of St. Jerome (1527) and the Madonna of the Long Neck (1534), which are characterized by his distinctive elongated figures and use of light and shadow. 

Passmore, John (1914-2004)

Passmore was an Australian philosopher and historian of ideas. He contributed widely to topics in the history of philosophy, philosophy of education, philosophy of science and philosophy of the environment, and was one of the pioneers of what has come to be called applied philosophy. Passmore argued that there is an urgent need to change our attitude to the environment, and that humans cannot continue unconstrained exploitation of the biosphere.

Pesme, Paul-Émile (1826-1877)

Pesme was a French photographer who primarily depicted full-length portraits. 

Petit, Léonce Justin Alexandre (1839-1884)

Petit was a French caricaturist, engraver, illustrator and painter. He  drew caricatures for Journal amusant, Hanneton, L’Éclipse, and Bouffon. He is best remembered for his comic serial Les Mésaventures de M. Bêton (1867-1868), which led to comparisons with the Swiss cartoonist Rodolphe Topffer. 

Petit, Pierre Lanith (1832-1909)

Petit, a French photographer, was the official photographer of the International Exposition of 1867. He also went to New York City several times to report on the construction of the Statue of Liberty, made many photographs of the Siege of Paris (1870–71), and in 1898 attempted underwater photography. He is known for his Galerie des hommes de jour (1861), a series of photographs of famous French men of his day, and l’Episcopat français, clergé de Paris, a series of photographs of the clergy of Paris, which he began in 1860. 

Pierson, Pierre-Louis (1822-1913)

Pierson, a portrait photographer,  became interested in photography while the medium was in its infancy in the early 1840s. Initially using the daguerreotype, the Pierson & Mayer firm, established in 1855 by combining the interests of Pierson with those of Léopold Ernest Mayer and his brother Louis Frédéric, specialized in portraiture. The firm became the most sought-after studio of the Second Empire and people of all types came to have their pictures taken there, including the imperial court, the aristocracy, powerful businessmen, actresses and musicians.

Piloty, Karl Theodor von (1826-1886)

Piloty was German painter noted for his historical subjects and recognized as the foremost representative of the realistic school in Germany. The painter gained membership in the Munich Academy with his Seni at the Dead Body of Wallenstein (1855) and  became a professor at the academy in 1856. Piloty executed a number of mural paintings for the royal palace in Munich.

Pinel, Philippe (1745-1826)

Pinel was a French physician who pioneered the humane treatment of the mentally ill. Discarding the long-popular equation of mental illness with demoniacal possession, Pinel regarded mental illness as the result of excessive exposure to social and psychological stresses and, in some measure, of heredity and physiological damage. In Nosographie philosophique (1798; Philosophical Classification of Diseases) he distinguished various psychoses and described, among other phenomena, hallucination, and withdrawal. In his Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale ou la manie (1801) and Medico-Philosophical Treatise on Mental Alienation or Mania he discussed his psychologically oriented approach.

Pissarro, Jacob Abraham Camille (1830-1903)

Pissarro, a Danish-French painter and printmaker, born in St. Thomas in the Danish West Indies (now the US Virgin Islands), was a key figure in the history of Impressionism. In his early years in France, he painted scenes of the West Indies from memory; then his paintings often depicted the French countryside and urban landscapes. Pissarro experimented with many styles, including a period when he adopted Georges Seurat’s pointillist approach. A supportive friend and mentor to influential artists such as Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, he was described by many who knew him as “Father Pissarro.”

Pleydenwurff, Wilhem (1460-1494)

Pleydenwurff was a German painter, woodcutter, and illustrator who co-owned a large workshop in Nuremburg with his stepfather, Michael Wolgemut. In 1493 the workshop of Wolgemut and Pleydenwurff illustrated the Nuremberg Chronicle at a time when the new industry of book printing reached its zenith in Nuremberg. This book, written, by Hartmann Schedel, recounts the history of the world from Creation to the early 1490s with lessons in religion and geography intermingled with unusual and interesting facts and phenomena. The 1,500 copies of the book in Latin and an additional 1,000 in German contained 1809 prints taken from 645 woodcuts.

Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849)

Edgar Allan Poe was an American short-story writer, poet, critic, and editor who is famous for his cultivation of mystery and the macabre. His tale “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) initiated the modern detective story, and the atmosphere in his tales of horror is considered to be unrivaled in American fiction. His “The Raven” (1845) numbers among the best-known poems in American literature.

Pontillon (Morisot), Edma (1839-1921)

Pontillon was a French artist and Berthe Morisot’s elder sister. They trained together, receiving private instruction and sharing a studio space. In 1864 they were both admitted to the Paris Salon. Pontillon exhibited there each year until 1868 when a year later she married a marine officer and subsequently moved to a small village on the Atlantic coast. She ceased artistic activity, but she regularly corresponded with Berthe and modeled for a number of her paintings.

Pradier, James (née Jean-Jacques) (1790-1852)

Pradier was a Genevan-born French sculptor whose career began with two works exhibited at the Salon in 1819, that he executed in Rome, the plaster Bacchante and Centaur (lost) and the marble Bacchante, which earned him the gold medal for sculpture that year. He garnered some of the most important public commissions of the Restoration and July Monarchy. He executed portrait statues, busts, and statuettes of the royal family and many contemporary luminaries in the political and cultural arenas.

Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1809-1865)

Proudhon was a French libertarian socialist and journalist whose doctrines became the basis for later radical and anarchist theory. In his first significant book, Qu’est-ce que la propriété? (1840; What Is Property?, 1876) he did not attack property in the generally accepted sense but only the kind of property by which one man exploits the labour of another, which he regarded as essential for the preservation of liberty. His principal criticism of Communism, whether of the utopian or the Marxist variety, was that it destroyed freedom by taking away from the individual control over his means of production. In 1846 when Proudhon published his Système des contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la misère (1846; System of Economic Contradictions: or, The Philosophy of Poverty, 1888), Karl Marx attacked him bitterly in a book-length polemic La misère de la philosophie (1847; The Poverty of Philosophy, 1910). This was the beginning of a historic rift between libertarian and authoritarian Socialists and between anarchists and Marxists which, after Proudhon’s death, was to rend Socialism’s First International apart in the feud between Marx and Proudhon’s disciple Mikhail Bakunin and which has lasted to this day.

Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre Cécile (1824-1898)

Puvis de Chavannes was the leading French mural painter of the later 19th century. He was largely independent of the major artistic currents of his time and was much admired by a diverse group of artists and critics, including Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Charles Baudelaire, and Théophile Gautier. Although he exhibited regularly at the Paris Salons from the 1860s on, Puvis is best remembered for the huge canvases he painted for the walls of city halls and other public buildings throughout France. He developed a style characterized by simplified forms, rhythmic line, and pale, flat, fresco-like colouring for allegorical pieces and idealizations of themes from antiquity.

Raimondi, Marcantonio (1470-1534)

Raimondi was an Italian Renaissance master of engraving whose production of more than 300 prints did much to disseminate the style of the High Renaissance throughout Europe. Raimondi profited from studies of Albrecht Dürer’s energetic line and his use of crosshatching in modeling. He copied more than seventy of Dürer’s woodcuts and engravings, causing Dürer to bring a suit against him in 1506. In about 1510 Raimondi went to Rome where his activity was almost entirely limited to reproducing works of Raphael, Michelangelo, and their followers.

“Raphael” (née Raffaelo Sanzio da Urbino) (1483-1520)

Raphael, an Italian painter and architect, though influenced by Leonardo da Vinci’s chiaroscuro and sfumato  in his early works developed  figure types  that were his own creation, as in his Madonnas’ round, gentle faces that reveal human sentiments raised to a sublime serenity. The frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican are probably his greatest work; the most famous, The School of Athens (1510–11), is a complex allegory of secular knowledge showing Greek philosophers in an architectural setting. The Madonnas he painted in Rome show him turning away from his earlier work’s serenity to emphasize movement and grandeur, partly under Michelangelo’s High Renaissance influence. He became the most important portraitist in Rome, designed ten large tapestries to hang in the Sistine Chapel, assumed the direction of work on St. Peter’s Basilica at the death of Donato Bramante, and took charge of virtually all the papacy’s projects in architecture, painting, and the preservation of antiquities.

Regnault, Alexandre Georges Henri (1843-1871)

Regnualt, a French Orientalist painter,  came into contact with the modern Hispano-Italian school, a school highly materialistic and inclined to regard even the human subject only as one amongst many sources of visual amusement. The vital, if narrow, energy of this school took hold on Regnault with ever-increasing force during the few remaining years of his life.

“Rembrandt,” (née Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn) (1606-1669)

Rembrandt was a 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 is also known as a painter of light and shade and as an artist who favoured an uncompromising realism that would lead some critics to claim that he preferred ugliness to beauty. Early in his career and for some time, Rembrandt painted mainly portraits but the core of his oeuvre, consists of biblical and—to a much lesser extent—historical, mythological, and allegorical history pieces, which he painted, etched, or sketched in pen and ink or chalk. 

Renard, Édouard-Antoine (1802-1857)

Renard was a French Romantic painter and illustrator. He specialized in architectural views and depictions of interiors. He produced illustrations with lithographer Adrien Provost for Le Paris romantique : panorama des grands boulevards (1845) and contributed to periodicals such as L’Illustration and  Musée des familles.

Renoir, Pierre-Auguste (1841-1919)

Renoir was a French painter originally associated with the Impressionist movement whose early works were typically snapshots of real life, full of sparkling colour and light. By using small, multi-coloured strokes, he evoked the vibration of the atmosphere, the sparkling effect of foliage, and especially the luminosity of a young woman’s skin in the outdoors. By the mid-1880s  he had broken with the movement to apply a more disciplined, formal technique. Renoir obtained several orders for portraits and was introduced, thanks to the publisher Georges Charpentier and his wife Marguerite, to upper-middle-class society, from whom he obtained commissions for portraits, most notably of women and children.

Reutlinger, Charles (1816-1898)

Reutlinger, a German Jewish photographer who lived in Paris, founded one of the most prominent Parisian photographic establishments, Reutlinger Studios, which operated from 1850 to 1937. The studio became famous for its portraits of actors, artists, musicians, composers, opera singers and ballet dancers of the period. In 1880, Charles handed over the studio to his brother, Emile Reutlinger.

Reutlinger, Léopold-Émile (1863-1937)

Reutlinger was a French photographer who came from a successful German Jewish family of photographers. His uncle Charles Reutlinger founded the family’s photography business; his father was the photographer Émile Reutlinger; and his son Jean Reutlinger was also a prominent photographer. Like his uncle he took photos of popular actresses and opera singers. He also took fashion and advertising photos and photographed stars of the entertainment venues like the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergère which were either sold to magazines and newspapers or reproduced as postcards.

Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)

Reynolds was a portrait painter and aesthetician who dominated English artistic life in the middle and late 18th century. Through his art and teaching, he attempted to lead British painting away from the indigenous anecdotal pictures of the early 18th century toward the formal rhetoric of the continental Grand Style. With the founding of the Royal Academy in 1768, Reynolds was elected its first president and knighted by King George III. Reynolds’s Discourses Delivered at the Royal Academy (1769–91), among the most important art criticism of the time, outlined the essence of grandeur in art and suggested the means of achieving it through rigorous academic training and study of the old masters of art.

Rimbaud, Jean Nicolas Arthur (1854-1891)

Rimbaud was French poet and adventurer who won renown in the Symbolist movement and markedly influenced modern poetry. The Franco-German War which began in July 1870 served to intensify Rimbaud’s rebelliousness; the elements of blasphemy and scatology in his poetry grew more intense, the tone more strident, and the images more grotesque and even hallucinatory. In his attempts to communicate his visions to the reader, Rimbaud became one of the first modern poets to shatter the constraints of traditional metric forms and rules of versification, letting his visions determine the form of his poems, and if the visions were formless, then the poems would be too.

Rivière, Georges Eugène (1855-1943)

Rivière was a painter and art critic whose collaboration with artists from the French Impressionist circle developed when he founded the newspaper L’Impressionniste on the occasion of the third Impressionist exhibition in 1874. He wrote several monographs devoted to the main representatives of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist movements, including those on Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas. Rivière, a close friend of the Renoir, whom he met at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874.

Robert-Fleury, Tony (1837-1911)

Robert-Fleury was a French painter and prominent art teacher, known primarily for historical scenes. He painted Pinel, Releasing Lunatics from their Chains at the Salptêtrière Asylum in Paris in 1795 (1876) which depicts the famed “Father of Modern Psychiatry” among the inmates of the asylum. Philippe Pinel had been named chief doctor at the asylum in 1795, and had instituted more charitable and rational treatments.

Rocher, Henry (1826-1887)

Rocher was a German-American photographer in Chicago who originally learned photography in Germany. Like others who aspired to the title artistic photographer, he generated pastels and crayons as well as portraits on albumin paper. A versatile photographer who did scenic views, celebrity portraiture, and genre pictures, he took a central part in the consolidation of a national community of photographers  and in 1880 was one of the founders of the Photographers Association of America.

Rogers, John (1829-1904)

Rogers was an American sculptor who produced very popular, relatively inexpensive figurines. He became famous for his mass-produced  small genre sculptures, popularly termed Rogers Groups, which at the height of their popularity, graced the parlors of American homes. Instead of working in bronze and marble, he sculpted in more affordable plaster, painted the color of putty. Rogers was inspired by popular novels, poems and prints as well as the scenes he saw around him.

Rothschild, Charlotte von (1819-1884)

Charlottte von Rothschild, a German-born British socialite, philanthropist  and artist, was a member of the Rothschild banking family of Naples. Because endogamy within the Rothschild family was an essential part of their strategy to ensure that control of their wealth remained in family hands, she married Lionel Freiherr de Rothschild, her first cousin from the English branch of the family. She was instrumental in developing their art collection and because she had the resources to develop her artistic talents, was probably the first female Jewish artist. 

Rousseau, Étienne Pierre Théodore (1812-1867)

Rousseau, a French painter, was a leader of the Barbizon school of landscape painters whose direct observation of nature made him an important figure in the development of landscape painting. He first visited the Fontainebleau area in 1833 and, in the following decade, finally settled in the village of Barbizon, where he worked with a group of landscape painters, including Jean-François Millet, Jules Dupré, Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de La Peña, and Charles-François Daubigny. Rousseau’s paintings represent in part a reaction against the calmly idealized landscapes of Neoclassicism; his small, highly textured brushstrokes presaged those of the Impressionists. 

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (John James) (1712-1778)

Rousseau, a Swiss philosopher, writer and composer, was one of the most influential thinkers during the Enlightenment. His first major philosophical work, A Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (1750) argues that the progression of the sciences and arts has caused the corruption of virtue and morality. The central claim of The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754) is that human beings are basically good by nature, but were corrupted by the complex historical events that resulted in present day civil society. Rousseau’s praise of nature is a theme that continues throughout his later works as well, the most significant of which include his comprehensive work on the philosophy of education, On Emile and his major work on political philosophy, The Social Contract, both published in 1762.

Royer, Lionel-Noel (1852-1926)

Royer was a portraitist and painter of historical scenes whose best-known works are Vercingétorix Throwing his Weapons at the Feet of Caesar (1899), and the decoration of the Basilica of Domrémy dedicated to Joan of Arc. In illustrated supplements of newspapers of the era, he was a commentator on current affairs, in particular supplying drawings of Alfred Dreyfus in his prison.

Runge, Phillipp Otto (1777-1810)

Runge was a German Romantic painter, draftsman, and art theorist known for his expressive portraits and symbolic landscapes and for his groundbreaking colour theory, expounded in Farben-Kugel (1810; Colour Sphere). Runge was influenced by Romantic ideals of subjectivity and emotional expression and actively ventured away from the more rational and harmonious Neoclassical style in which he had been trained. He was particularly impressed by Ludwig Tieck’s ideas on mysticism and the divine energy found in nature, and with that in mind he began working on his cycle of drawings titled Times of Day in 1803, a series of four allegorical works that represent morning, midday, evening, and night as well as the four seasons and the life cycle—birth, maturity, decline, death.

Sabatier-Blot, Jean-Baptiste (1801-1881)

Sabatier-Blot was a French miniaturist and photographer who was among the most sought after Parisian portraitists of the daguerreotype. He was at first a miniaturist, exhibiting at the Salon on several occasions, always showing portraits of women. From the early 1840s, after studying with Louis Daguerre, he became one of many painters of miniature attracted by the new medium of daguerreotype. 

Saenredam Jan Pieterszoon (1565-1607)

Saenredam was a Dutch Northern Mannerist painter, printmaker in engraving, and cartographer. He is noted for the many allegorical images he created from Classical mythology and the Bible. He produced prints after Hendrick Goltzius, Abraham Bloemaert, Cornelis van Haarlem, Polidoro da Caravaggio, and his own invention.

Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy (1760-1825)

Saint-Simon was a French social theorist and one of the chief founders of Christian socialism. In his major work, Nouveau Christianisme (1825), he proclaimed that a brotherhood of man must accompany the scientific organization of industry and society. Before the publication of Nouveau Christianisme, Saint-Simon had not concerned himself with theology, but in this work, beginning with a belief in God, he tries to resolve Christianity into its essential elements, and he finally propounds this precept: that religion “should guide the community toward the great aim of improving as quickly as possible the conditions of the poorest class.” During the July 1830 revolution the Saint-Simonians in France issued a proclamation demanding the ownership of goods in common, the abolition of the right of inheritance, and the enfranchisement of women.

Sarto, Andrea del (1486-1530)

Sarto was an Italian painter and draftsman whose interest in effects of colour and atmosphere, sophisticated informality, natural expression of emotion and craftmanship were instrumental in the development of Florentine Mannerism. Sarto’s art, rooted in traditional Quattrocento (15th-century) painting, combined Leonardo’s sfumato with Raphael’s compositional harmony in a style that was typical of the Cinquecento (16th century). His work which include the series of frescoes on the life of St. John the Baptist in the Chiostro dello Scalzo (ca. 1515–1526) consist chiefly of altarpieces (Madonna of the Harpies, 1517), small religious paintings and an occasional portrait.

Savigny, Jean-Baptiste Henri (1793-1843)

Savigny was a French surgeon, botanist, naturalist, and professor of botany at the University of Montpellier. He was aboard the frigate Medusa, which ran aground off the coast of Mauritania on July 2,1816 and on the raft which inspired Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819) painting.  One of the fifteen survivors he would later testify about the atrocities committed on the drifting raft, including acts of anthropophagy. He wrote Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816: Undertaken by Order of the French Government, Comprising an Account of the Shipwreck of the Medusa, the Sufferings of the Crew, And the Various Occurrences On Board the Raft, In the Desert of Zaara, At St. Louis, And At the Camp of Daccard. To Which Are Subjoined Observations Respecting the Agriculture of the Western Coast of Africa, From Cape Blanco to the Mouth of the Gambia (London: H. Colburn, 1818), first published in French in 1817.

Schedel, Hartmann (1440-1514)

Schedel was a German historian, physician, humanist, and one of the first cartographers to use the printing press. He is best known for writing the text for the Nuremberg Chronicle, known as Schedelsche Weltchronik (English: Schedel’s World Chronicle), published in 1493 in Nuremberg. Maps in the Chronicle were the first ever illustrations of many cities and countries. With the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1447, it became feasible to print books and maps for a larger customer basis; because they had to be handwritten, books had previously been rare and very expensive.

Schelling (née Schelling), Frederich Wilhelm Joseph von (1775-1854)

Schelling was a German philosopher and educator, a major figure of German idealism, in the post-Kantian development of German philosophy. Schelling believed that art mediates between the natural and physical spheres insofar as in artistic creation the natural (or unconscious) and the spiritual (or conscious) productions are united. This philosophy of nature, the first independent philosophical accomplishment of Schelling, made him known in the circles of the Romanticists.

Schongauer, Martin (1448-1491)

Schongauer, a painter and printmaker, was the finest German engraver before Albrecht Dürer.  According to contemporary sources, Schongauer was a prolific painter whose panels were sought in many countries but few paintings by his hand survive and it is as an engraver that he stands without rival in northern Europe in his time.  The artist’s engraved work, consisting of about 115 plates, all signed with his monogram, is a  highly refined and sensitive manifestation of the late Gothic spirit. Technically he brought the art of engraving to maturity by expanding its range of contrasts and textures, thus introducing a painter’s viewpoint into an art that had been primarily the domain of the goldsmith.

Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860)

Schopenhauer, a German philosopher, often called the “philosopher of pessimism,” was primarily important as the exponent of a metaphysical doctrine of the will in immediate reaction against Hegelian idealism. His writings influenced later existential philosophy and Freudian psychology. The fundamental idea of his main work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819; The World as Will and Idea) is developed in four books composed of two comprehensive series of reflections that include successively the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of nature, aesthetics, and ethics. 

Schuffenecker, Claude-Émile (1851-1934)

Schuffenecker was a French Post-Impressionist artist, painter, art teacher and art collector. A friend of Paul Gauguin and Odilon Redon, and one of the first collectors of works by Vincent van Gogh, Schuffenecker was instrumental in establishing the Volpini Exhibition in 1889. Jean de Rotonchamp, Gauguin’s first biographer, described Schuffenecker’s collection at 14, rue Durand-Claye, in 1906: “Besides paintings by Gauguin such as The Yellow Christ and some of his ceramics, there were works by Cézanne, including a female portrait, and several works by Vincent van Gogh, a Postman, an Olive Orchard in Provence, The Good Samaritan, an Arlésienne and a version of the Sunflowers,  some works by Redon and ukiyo-e prints.”

Schulz, Wilhelm (1865-1952)

Schulz was a German painter and caricaturist who was part of the Berliner Secession art movement (Lithographische Anstalt Berlin). He was a contributor to magazines like Jugend and Simplicissimus, for which he mainly contributed political cartoons. 

Seurat, Georges Pierre (1859-1891)

Seurat was painter and founder of the French school of Neo-Impressionism whose technique for portraying the play of light using tiny brushstrokes of contrasting colours became known as Pointillism. Using this technique, he created huge compositions with tiny, detached strokes of pure colour too small to be distinguished when looking at the entire work but making his paintings shimmer with brilliance. Works in this style include Bathers at Asnières (1883-84) and A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884 (1884-86). 

Sher-Gil, Amrita (1913-1941)

Sher-Gil was a Hungarian-Indian artist  who concentrated on self-portraits, portraits of friends and classmates, still life, nudes, and Parisian life  from 1929 to1934. Conscious of the limits of her art, she questioned her identity and decided to go back to South India in 1937 to discover and explore her Indian roots. Inspired by the people and the scenery, especially the wall paintings of the Ajanta Caves, she began to meld her Western techniques with the Indian aesthetic, and explored the sadness felt by people, especially women, in 1930s India, giving voice and validity to their experiences.

Sloane, Thomas O’Conor (1851-1940)

Sloane was an American scientist, inventor, author, editor, educator, and linguist, perhaps best known for writing The Standard Electrical Dictionary and as the editor of Scientific American, from 1886 to 1896, and of the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, from 1929 to 1938. Sloane’s best known invention, introduced in 1878, was the self-recording photometer for gas power — the first instrument to mechanically register the illuminating power of natural gas.

Spencer, Herbert (1820-1903)

Spencer,  an English sociologist and philosopher, was an early advocate of the theory of evolution, who  advocated for the preeminence of the individual over society and of science over religion. His magnum opus, The Synthetic Philosophy (1896), was a comprehensive work containing volumes on the principles of biology, psychology, morality, and sociology. He is best remembered for his doctrine of social Darwinism, according to which the principles of evolution, including natural selection, apply to human societies, social classes, and individuals as well as to biological species developing over geologic time. In Spencer’s day social Darwinism was invoked to justify laissez-faire economics and the minimal state, which were thought to best promote unfettered competition between individuals and the gradual improvement of society through the “survival of the fittest,” a term that Spencer introduced.

Spiro, Eugene (1874-1972)

Spiro, a German American Jewish painter was a member of Secessionist groups in Munich and Berlin. He lived for many years in Paris until the outbreak of the First World War which forced him to return to Germany, where from 1915 to 1933 he had a prolific career as a portrait painter, teacher, gallerist, and member of the board of the Berlin Secession. After the Nazi takeover, the sixty-one-year-old Spiro fled to Paris, where he was involved in the founding of the Union des Artistes Allemands Libres, a federation of exiled German artists whose work was defamed by the Nazis. After the German occupation of France in 1940, Spiro emigrated to the United States where he worked as an art teacher at the Wayman Adams School in Elizabethtown, New York, and remained an active painter until his late years, with several exhibitions in New York as well as Europe.

Solomon, Simeon (1840-1905)

Solomon was a British painter associated with the Pre-Raphaelites who was noted for his depictions of Jewish life and same-sex desire. In addition to the literary paintings favoured by the Pre-Raphaelite school, Solomon’s subjects often included scenes from the Hebrew Bible and genre paintings depicting Jewish life and rituals. His career was cut short as a result of public scandal following his arrests and convictions for attempted sodomy in 1873 and 1874.

Stanton, Edwin McMasters (1814-1869)

Stanton, an American lawyer and politician who served as U.S. Secretary of War under the Lincoln Administration during most of the American Civil War, was an early advocate for an emancipation proclamation. Stanton wanted black soldiers not just because he needed more soldiers; he understood the ways in which serving in the Union Army would change the lives of the former slaves.  Stanton also pressed Congress for legislation, ultimately passed in early 1865, to create within the War Department a Freedmen’s Bureau, because he believed that the federal government could not just free the slaves and leave them on their own to cope, without resources and without education.

Steichen, Edward Jean (1879-1973)

Steichen, an American photographer, utilized his training as a painter, to persuade the public that photography was a fine art by producing photographs that emulated the mood, manner, or attitude of paintings and prints. In his early photographs in a strategy known as Pictorialism he frequently used the gum-bichromate process in conjunction with platinum or iron-based emulsions, which allowed him a very high degree of control over the image and tended to produce pictures with a superficial resemblance to mezzotints, wash drawings, and other traditional media.  He went on to gain fame as a commercial photographer in the 1920s and 1930s, when he created stylish and convincing portraits of artists and celebrities, and was also a prominent curator, organizing the hugely influential Family of Man exhibition in 1955.

Steuben, Charles Auguste Guillaume (1788-1856)

Steuben was a German-born French Romantic painter and lithographer active during the Napoleonic Era. He was a close friend to Eugène Delacroix, the leader of the French Romantic school of painting which replaced Classicism in French painting. He  was praised for his deliberate compositions, excellent brush stroke and impressive colour effects but his dramatic approach was criticized at times for his pronounced tendency toward the histrionic.

Stevens, Alfred Émile Léopold (1823-1906)

Stevens was a Belgian painter in Paris, known for his paintings of elegant modern women. In their realistic style and careful finish, his works reveal the influence of 17th-century Dutch genre painting. After gaining attention early in his career with Ce qu’on appelle le vagabondage (What is called vagrancy) (1854), a social realist painting depicting the plight of a vagrant mother and her children, he achieved critical and popular success with his scenes of upper-middle class Parisian life.

Stieglitz, Alfred (1864-1946)

Alfred Stieglitz, an American living in New York, was an art dealer, publisher, advocate for the modernist movement in the arts, and, arguably, the most important photographer of his time. From 1892 to 1902 he was editor of Camera Notes, the publication of the Camera Club of New York, a position that allowed him to advance the photographers and policies he favoured.  In 1902 Stieglitz announced the existence of a new organization called the Photo-Secession, a group whose name was an allusion to the secessionist artist groups formed in Germany and in Austria in the 1890s and that, like its European counterparts, was designed to break away from stodgy and conventional ideas. Photo-Secessionist photographers were committed in greater or lesser degrees to what was called the Pictorialist style, meaning they favoured traditional genre subjects that had been sanctified by generations of conventional painters and techniques that tended to hide the intrinsic factuality of photography behind a softening mist.

Stowe, Harriet Elisabeth Beecher (1811-1896)

Stowe, an American writer and philanthropist,  was the author of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852) which contributed so much to popular feeling against slavery that it is cited among the causes of the American Civil War. Stowe lived for eighteen years in Cincinnati, separated only by the Ohio River from a slave-holding community. She came in contact with fugitive slaves and learned about life in the South from friends and from her own visits there. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an immediate sensation was taken up eagerly by abolitionists while, along with its author, it was vehemently denounced in the South, where reading or possessing the book became an extremely dangerous enterprise. In 1853 she published A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a compilation of documents and testimonies in support of disputed details of her indictment of slavery and in 1856 she published Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, in which she depicted the deterioration of a society resting on a slave basis.

Struck, Hermann (1876-1944)

Struck, a German Jewish artist, known for his etchings, joined the Berlin Secession  in 1902. In 1908 he published Die Kunst des Radierens (The Art of Etching), a seminal work on the subject that offered both theory and practical instruction. A Zionist, Jewish activist and founder of the Mizrachi Religious Zionist movement, he was at the same time a German patriot who volunteered for military service in World War I serving as a translator, liaison officer and military artist. Struck immigrated to Palestine in 1922, taught at Bezalel Academy and helped establish the Tel Aviv Museum of Art but visited Berlin every summer until the Nazis rose to power.

Tanner, Henry Ossawa (1859-1937)

Tanner was an expatriate American painter, living in Paris, who gained international acclaim for his depiction of landscapes and biblical themes. In 1880 Tanner began two years of study under Thomas Eakins at Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he was the only African American and in 1891 he traveled to Paris in 1891 to enroll at the Académie Julian. After touring the Holy Land in 1897–1898, Tanner painted Nicodemus Visiting Jesus (c. 1898), The Annunciation (1898), Abraham’s Oak (1905), and The Two Disciples at the Tomb (c. 1905). In 1923 the French government made Tanner a chevalier of the Legion of Honour, and in 1927 he became the first African American to be granted full membership in the National Academy of Design in New York.

Tarnowsky, Pauline (ca. 19th century)

Tarnowsky, one of the first female medical doctors in Russia, was well-known for her work in psychiatry and craniology. She published two books, Étude anthropométrique sur les prostituées et les voleuses (Anthropological Study of Prostitutes and Female Thieves, 1889) and Les Femmes homicides (Women Who Kill, 1908), never translated into English, which documented the facial anomalies of prostitutes with photographs, and studied what she called atavistic regression as a kind of fall down the evolutionary ladder. Today she is known mainly through Cesare Lombroso’s  book, La donna delinquente (Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman) originally published in Italian in 1893, the first and most influential book ever written on women and crime, to which Tarnowsky contributed data and photographs of female offenders.

Temple, William (1628-1699)

Temple was an English statesman and diplomat who formulated the pro-Dutch foreign policy employed intermittently during the reign of King Charles II. Temple’s thought and prose style in his essays had a significant influence on many 18th-century writers, particularly Jonathan Swift who was employed as his secretary. Upon retiring to the country and occupying himself with gardening and writing he wrote Upon the Gardens of Epicurus where he describes sharawadgi or sharawaggi,  a style of landscape gardening or architecture in which rigid lines and symmetry are avoided to give the scene an organic, naturalistic appearance. Supposedly this was a concept in the Chinese garden that he had never actually seen and which may have been influential in English landscape gardening in the 18th century.

Thibault, Charles François (19th century)

Thibault  a photographer, on Sunday June 25, between 7 am and 8 am, took what are considered the first two photos of an insurrectionary barricade. In June 1848, a workers’ revolt broke out in Paris following the decision taken by the government to close the National Workshops, a state organization which provided work for the unemployed. The Faubourg-du-Temple, where workers and peasants came to seek their fortune in new industries had dozens of barricades including what is seen in Thibault’s photo.

Tilborgh, Gillis van (ca. 1625-ca. 1678)

Van Tilborgh was a Flemish painter whose works encompassed portraits, tavern scenes, village feasts, merry companies, picture galleries and guardroom scenes. He became the keeper of the picture collection of the governor of the Habsburg family in Netherlands and travelled in England where he painted group portraits.

Tinayre, Louis (1861-1942)

Tinayre was a French illustrator and painter who began his career as an illustrator for the French press. He did panoramas and dioramas of Madagascar and paintings of Albert I, Prince of Monaco, on his hunts around the world.

Tissot, Jacques Joseph (James) (1836-1902)

Tissot was a French painter, engraver, and enameler noted for modern genre paintings and stylish portraits of late Victorian society. In the aftermath of the Paris Commune he fled to London (May 1871) and during that period  until 1882 when he returned to Paris he made many etchings, dry-points, and mezzotints, as well as paintings; and also became interested in the craft of cloisonné enameling. In 1885, after a mystical experience, determined to illustrate a life of Christ, he took several trips to the Holy Land and produced some 350 watercolours of New Testament subjects, which were published in two volumes.

“Titian” (née Tiziano Vecelli/Vecellio) (1488-1576)

Titian, an Italian Renaissance painter of the Venetian school, was one of the most versatile of Italian painters, equally adept with portraits, landscape backgrounds, and mythological and religious subjects. His painting methods, particularly in the application and use of colour, exercised a profound influence not only on painters of the late Italian Renaissance, but on future generations of Western artists. In his portraits he searched and penetrated human character and recorded it in canvases of pictorial brilliance; in his religious compositions he covered the full range of emotion from the charm of his youthful Madonnas to the tragic depths of the late Crucifixion (1558) and the Entombment (1559); in his mythological pictures he captured the gaiety and abandon of the pagan world of antiquity; and in his paintings of the nude Venus (Venus and Adonis, 1550s) and Danae (Danae with Nursemaid, 1553-1554) he set a standard for physical beauty and sumptuous eroticism.

Toudouze, Adele-Anaïs Colin (1822-1899)

Toudouze was a  French fashion illustrator for magazines, journals, and books. She worked closely with her sister Héloïse on many projects but the majority of her work was for La Mode Illustrée which was distributed weekly and highlighted Victorian fashion trends of the time including accessories to go with the piece. All of the prints for the magazine were hand-colored – the artist would either etch, engrave, or lithograph the image and then colour it in by hand- and were then inserted with text descriptions explaining the fashions being showcased.

Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Marie Raymond de (1864-1901)

Toulouse-Lautrec was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, caricaturist, and illustrator whose immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of Paris in the late 19th century allowed him to produce a collection of enticing, elegant, and provocative images of the cabaret performers, dancers, and prostitutes, capturing the energy and decadence of Parisian bohemian culture. His use of free-flowing expressive line, often becoming pure arabesque, resulted in highly rhythmical compositions while the simplification in outline and movement and the use of large colour areas make his posters of Moulin Rouge and other Parisian nightclubs some of his most powerful works. He also created about a hundred drawings and fifty paintings inspired by the life of women in brothels.

Tristàn y Moscoso, Flore (Flora) Célestine Thérèse (1803-1844)

Tristán y Moscoso better known as Flora Tristan was a French-Peruvian socialist writer and activist. She made important contributions to early feminist theory, and argued that the progress of women’s rights was directly related with the progress of the working class. She wrote several works, the best known of which are Peregrinations of a Pariah (1838), Promenades in London (1840), and The Workers’ Union (1843). Tristan was the grandmother of the painter Paul Gauguin.

Tuke, Samuel (1784-1857)

Tuke was an English Quaker philanthropist and mental-health reformer who greatly advanced the cause of the amelioration of the condition of the insane. Devoting himself largely to the York Retreat he described  the methods of treatment pursued there in his Description of the Retreat near York (1813). In this work Tuke referred to the Retreat’s methods as moral treatment, borrowed from the French “traitement moral” being used to describe the work of Jean-Baptiste Poussin and Philippe Pinel in France.  Tuke also published Practical Hints on the Construction and Economy of Pauper Lunatic Asylums (1815).

Turner, Joseph Mallord William (1775-1851)

Turner was an English Romantic landscape painter whose expressionistic studies of light, colour, and atmosphere were unmatched in their range and sublimity. Turner was elected an associate of the Royal Academy, and in 1802 he became a full academician, a dignity he marked by a series of large pictures in which he emulated the achievements of the Old Masters, especially the 17th-century painters Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Aelbert Cuyp, and Willem van de Velde the Younger. The Shipwreck (1805) suggests that at this time Turner was developing his original approach to landscape—emphasizing luminosity, atmosphere, and Romantic, dramatic subjects. Turner’s travels in Italy in 1819  resulted in drawings and paintings advanced in the matter of colour, which became purer and more prismatic, with a general heightening of key and an iridescent treatment resembling the transparency of a watercolour.

Uhde, Friedrich ‘Fritz’ Hermann Carl von (1848-1911)

Uhde, a German painter of genre and religious subjects, once known as the outstanding Impressionist of Germany, became one of the first painters to introduce plein air painting in his country. Uhde along with Max Slevogt, Ludwig Dill and Lovis Corinth, was one of the founding members of the Verein Bildender Künstler (Society of Fine Artists), better known as the Munich Secession; later he also joined the Berlin Secession. In  his indoor and outdoor settings, Uhde often depicted the ordinary lives of peasants, fishermen, seamstresses, children,  and women. He frequently depicted Jesus Christ as visiting families in country settings.

Ury, Leo Lesser (1861-1931)

Ury was a German Jewish Impressionist painter and printmaker. One of the first artists in Germany to depict modern city life,  his favoured subjects, associated with the city of Berlin, were diverse: rainy street scenes, bustling cafes, theatres, horse-drawn carriages, automobiles, women sewing, and floral still-lifes. Ury also painted landscapes, including a series of pastoral scenes from the Dutch countryside and Italy and quite a few works with Old Testament subjects. Much of Ury’s art because he was Jewish  was destroyed during the Third Reich.

Utamaro I, Kitagawa (1753-1806)

Utamaro, Japanese woodblock printmaker and painter, was one of the greatest artists of the ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) movement; he is known especially for his masterfully composed portraits of sensuous female beauties. In about 1791 Utamaro gave up designing prints for books and concentrated on making half-length single portraits of women rather than prints of women in groups as favoured by other ukiyo-e artists. Among his best known works are his bijin ōkubi-e, “large-headed pictures of beautiful women,”  and his three print series, Fu ninsōgaku jittai (Ten Physiognomies of Women), Seirō jūni-toki  (Twelve Hours at the Gay Quarters), Seirō nanakomachi (The Seven Beauties of the Gay Quarters), and Kasen koi no fu (Women in Love).

Valenciennes, Pierre-Henri de (1750-1819)

Valenciennes, a French painter, was influential in elevating the status of plein air painting. He worked in Rome from 1778 to 1782, where he made a number of landscape studies directly from nature, sometimes painting the same set of trees or house at different times of day. He theorized on this idea in his 1800 treatise Reflections and Advice to a Student on Painting, Particularly on Landscape, developing a concept of a “landscape portrait” in which the artist paints a landscape directly while looking upon it, taking care to capture its particular details such as the scene’s architecture, the dress of the people, the agriculture, and so on. He encouraged artists to  paint directly onto canvas within the landscape, and to paint the same view at multiple times of day, to capture the fleeting changes of a landscape due to light and weather.

Valentine, George Dobson (1852-1890)

Valentine was a Scottish photographer who emigrated to New Zealand in 1884 with the hope that the climate would improve his health. Beginning with views of Nelson where he initially settled, he then turned his attention to views of the Pink and White Terraces and Lake Rotomahana, and the  pre and post- eruption of the Mount Tarawera volcano in 1886. Moving to Auckland he broadened his coverage, making a series photographs of Tahiti, Tonga and the Cook Islands based on a summer cruise in the Pacific Islands. Valentine produced many of what were to become the classic iconic images of early New Zealand, including geyser studies in the thermal region and studies of New Zealand bush and waterfalls.

Vallou de Villeneuve, Julien (1795-1866)

Vallou de Villeneuve was a French painter, lithographer and photographer. He opened a photographic studio where his subjects were ‘academic studies’, small prints of nudes as models for artists. Gustave Courbet was introduced to his photographs by Alfred Bruyas and used them as source material for his paintings, in particular L’Atelier (1855) and Les Baigneuses (1853).

Van Gogh, Vincent Willem (1853-1890)

Van Gogh, a Dutch painter, considered the greatest Dutch painter since Rembrandt, in a short career of ten years, created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of which date from the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits, and are characterized by bold colours and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art. In 1886, upon joining his brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris, he met members of the avant-garde, including Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec,  Georges Seurat, and Paul Gauguin, who were reacting against the Impressionist sensibility. Not commercially successful in his career, he struggled with severe depression and poverty, which eventually led to his suicide at age thirty-seven.

Velàzquez, Diego Rodríguez de Silva (1599-1660)

Velázquez was the most important Spanish painter of the 17th century.  Inspired by the study of 16th-century Venetian painting, he developed from a master of faithful likeness and characterization into the creator of masterpieces of visual impression unique in his time.

Vermersch, Eugène (1845-1878)

Vermersch, a socialist polemicist and pamphlet-maker, was a prominent figure in the Paris Commune. He collaborated on La Marsellaise (1870), a song that  spread patriotism to the French people during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and became France’s national anthem in 1879. After the Semaine sanglante (Bloody Week),  a weeklong battle in Paris from 21 to 28 May 1871, during which the French Army recaptured the city from the Paris Commune, he sought refuge in Belgium before eventually settling in London, where he joined the French federalist section of L’Internationale, which aimed at uniting a variety of different left-wing socialist, communist and anarchist groups and trade unions that were based on the working class and class struggle. Caricatures of Gustave Courbet appear in several of his publications, for example, Léonce Petit, Courbet from Eugène Vermersch, Les Binettes rimées (Paris, 1868).

Vigée le Brun, Élisabeth Louise (1755-1842)

Vigée-Lebrun, a French portrait painter, was renowned for the freshness,  charm, and sensitivity of her portraits of women. In 1779 when she was summoned to Versailles to paint a portrait of Queen Marie-Antoinette the two women became friends, and in subsequent years she painted more than twenty portraits of Marie-Antoinette in a variety of poses and costumes. She also painted a number of self-portraits, in the style of various artists whose work she admired. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, she left France and lived in Rome, Naples, Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Moscow, London and Switzerland, where she painted portraits and played a leading role in society; she finally returned to Paris ca. 1810.

Vizetelly, Frank (1830-disappeared 1883)

Vizetelly, a British journalist, was employed as a war correspondent and artist by the Illustrated London News, founded by his older brother, Henry. He traveled to Italy, Spain, and America, where he reported from both sides of the Civil War, and Egypt. He disappeared, presumed killed, during the massacre of Hicks Pasha’s army in Sudan.

Vuillaume, Maxime Marie Abel Joseph (1844-1925)

Vuillaume was a French engineer, journalist and pamphleteer. He was involved in the Paris Commune of 1871, on the fall of which he was forced to go into exile. He wrote detailed memoirs of the Commune in Mes cahiers rouges (preface by Lucien Descaves), a series of ten separate publications, originally published in the journal Cahiers de la Quinzaine (Paris, 1908–1914).

Watteau, Jean-Antoine (1684-1721)

Watteau was a French painter who typified the lyrically charming and graceful style of the Rococo which was a reaction against the Classicism of the preceding era.  He was accepted by the Académie as a painter of fêtes galantes—outdoor entertainments in gardens in which the courtiers often dressed in rural costumes. One major influence on his art was the commedia dell’arte, in which words count significantly less than gestures, in  a theatre linked to the actor, who brings his own routines with him; another was the opéra ballet, with its grand display of fleeting images embodied by dance, singing, costumes, and decorations. The 19th century marked a  resurgence of interest in Watteau, among the French poets, namely Victor Hugo, Gérard de Nerval, Théophile Gautier and especially Baudelaire who presented a profound and precise interpretation of the artist, placing him among the “beacons” of mankind in one of his most famous poems (“Les Phares,” 1855).

Watts, George Frederic (1817-1904)

Watts was a British painter and sculptor associated with the Symbolist movement. His paintings such as Hope (1886, further versions 1886–1895)  were meant to form part of an epic symbolic cycle called the “House of Life”, in which the emotions and aspirations of life would all be represented in a universal symbolic language. In the 1860s, Watts’s paintings, influenced by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Aesthetic movement often emphasized sensuous pleasure and rich colour. His work, altered during the 1870s, as he increasingly combined Classical traditions with a deliberately agitated and troubled surface to suggest the dynamic energies of life and evolution as well as the tentative and transitory qualities of life. His portraits of the most important men and women of the day, which evoke a tension between disciplined stability and the power of action, were intended to form a “House of Fame”.

Whately, Richard (1787-1863)

Whately, an Anglican archbishop of Dublin, was an educator, logician, and social reformer. In 1829 he supported the removal of political disabilities suffered by English Catholics, and together with the Catholic archbishop of Dublin attempted to devise a nonsectarian program of religious instruction as part of an Irish national school curriculum for both Protestant and Roman Catholic children. He took an interest in social questions and served as president (1835–36) of the royal commission on the Irish poor, which called for major improvements in agriculture rather than the introduction of workhouses for the impoverished. He also spoke out in favour of granting civil rights to Jews.

Wheatley, Francis (1747-1801)

Wheatley was an English portrait and landscape painter who produced mainly small landscapes, portraits, and street scenes, in imitation of the French painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze. He painted The Dublin Volunteers on College Green, 4th November 1779, the basis for a print bought by numerous Irish Patriot supporters, the best-known interior of the Irish House of Commons (1780) and several subjects for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery. 

Wiertz, Antoine Joseph (1806-1865)

Wiertz was a Belgian painter, sculptor, lithographer and art writer. He is known for his religious, historical, and allegorical works and portraits. Many of his works from the 1850s have a social or philosophical message, often translated in delirious imagery, like Hunger, Madness and Crime (1853), The Reader of Novels (1853), Suicide (1854), The Premature Burial (1854) and The Last Gun (1855). Some of his works are erotic and macabre and presage Belgian Symbolism.

Willson Peale, Charles (1741-1827)

Peale was an American painter, patriot, scientist, inventor, politician, and naturalist. In 1775, inspired by the American Revolution, Peale moved from his native Maryland to Philadelphia and set up a painting studio. He joined the Sons of Liberty, the Pennsylvania militia, and ultimately the Continental Army under the command of General George Washington, where he participated in active combat against the British Army during the American Revolutionary War. While in combat, he painted miniature portraits of various officers in the Continental Army which he produced as enlarged versions in later years. In 1801, Peale founded what today is the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, one of the first American museums.

Winterhalter, Franz Xaver (1805-1873)

Winterhalter was a German painter and lithographer who painted  German, Austrian, French and British royalty and leading aristocracy. His style was somewhat conservative at first, producing a smooth, enamel-like surface; he then developed a freedom of brushwork that engendered Romantic charm. In later works he often painted directly on the canvas, without making preliminary studies.

Wolfthorn, Julie (née Wolff) (1864-1944)

Wolfthorn, a German Jewish painter, was a co-founder of the Berlin Secession and the Association of Artists and Art Lovers Berlin. She and over 200 female artists petitioned in 1905 to be allowed to join the Prussian Academy of Arts, but their petition was rejected. She was a founder, with Kathe Kollwitz, of the exhibition cooperation Verbindung Bildender Künstlerinnen. Both artists were elected as directors of the “Secession” in 1912, until Wolfthorn was removed in 1933 because she was Jewish.  She continued to work in Berlin with the Cultural Association of German Jews until the Nazis declared the group illegal in 1941. Iin 1942, the 78-year-old Wolfthorn and her sister Luise Wolff were transported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where she is said to have continued drawing until she was murdered in 1944.

Wolgemut, Michael (1434-1519)

Wolgemut, a German painter and printmaker, who ran a workshop in Nuremberg, is best known as having taught the young Albrecht Dürer. In his atelier large altar-pieces and other sacred paintings were executed, and also elaborate carved painted wood retables, consisting of crowded subjects in high relief, richly decorated with gold and colour. Wolgemut’s production of woodcuts was a large part of the work of the workshop, the blocks being cut from Wolgemut’s designs to supply the many publishers in Nuremberg with book illustrations, with the most attractive also being sold separately.

Woodbury, David B. (1839-1866)

Woodbury was arguably the best of the American photographers who stayed with Matthew Brady through the war. In March 1862, Mathew Brady sent Woodbury and Edward Whitney to photograph the 1st Bull Run battlefield and in May, views of the Peninsula Campaign. In July 1863, Woodbury and Anthony Berger photographed the Gettysburg battlefield for Brady, returning on November 19 to take photographs of the crowd and procession..

Zola, Émile Édouard Charles Antoine (1840-1902)

Zola, French novelist, critic, and political activist, was the most prominent French novelist of the late 19th century. He was noted for his theories of naturalism, which underlie his monumental 20-novel series Les Rougon-Macquart, and for his intervention in the Dreyfus Affair through his famous open letter, “J’accuse” in 1898 which accused the French government of antisemitism in the Dreyfus Affair.

In the 1860s and 1870s Zola also defended the art of Cézanne, Manet, and the Impressionists Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir in newspaper articles and was a constant presence at weekly gatherings of the painters at various studios and cafés, where theories about the arts and their potential interrelationships were vociferously debated.