Francis Barlow (c. 1626 – 1704) was an English painter, etcher, and draughtsman, mainly of animal subjects, known as ‘the father of British sporting painting’. He painted numerous large canvases for decorative schemes and was also a prolific book illustrator, his etchings for an edition of Aesop's Fables published in 1666 being particularly well known. His work is vividly observed, with an almost naive charm.He was born in the county of Lincoln, and received his first instructions i...

Sir Anthony van Dyck is most famous for his portraits of Charles I of England and his family and court, painted with a relaxed elegance that was to be the dominant influence on English portrait-painting for the next 150 years. He also painted biblical and mythological subjects, displayed outstanding facility as a draughtsman, and was an important innovator in watercolor and etching.A list of history paintings produced by van Dyck in England survives, compiled by Van Dyck's biograph...

Francesco Lazzaro Guardi (1712 – 1793) was a Venetian painter of veduta (a highly detailed, usually large-scale painting or, actually more often print, of a cityscape or some other vista), a member of the Venetian School. His early vedutas show influence both from Canaletto and Luca Carlevarijs. Francesco Guardi's most important later works include the Doge's Feasts, a series of twelve canvases celebrating the ceremonies held in 1763 for the election of Doge Alvise IV Mocenigo. In his late...

John Singleton Copley (1738 – 1815) was an American painter, active in both colonial America and England. He was probably born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Richard and Mary Singleton Copley, both Anglo-Irish. He is famous for his portrait paintings of important figures in colonial New England, depicting in particular middle-class subjects. His paintings were innovative in their tendency to depict artifacts relating to these individuals' lives.John Singleton Copley’s portraits of co...

Francesco Allegrini da Gubbio (1587–1663) was an Italian painter of the Baroque period. His children, Flaminio and Angelica Allegrini were also painters. Francesco Allegrini was admired as a battle painter. He was active in Rome, Genoa, Savona, and Naples. In Rome, he painted in the Vatican Loggias. He also painted in the church of San Marco, Rome, and the chapel of San Antonio in the church of Santi Cosimo e Damiano. Allegrini painted for the Casa Durazzo in Genoa. In Savona he painted fo...

Joseph Mallord William Turner was English artist, one of the greatest and most original of all landscape painters. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivaling history painting. Although renowned for his oil paintings, Turner is also one of the greatest masters of British watercolor landscape painting. In 1856 the Court of Chancery awarded all the works remaining in his possession at his d...

Jean-François Millet (1814 – 1875) was a French painter and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France. Millet is noted for his scenes of peasant farmers; he can be categorized as part of the movements of Realism and Naturalism. Millet portrayed the gravity, hardship, and dignity of common agricultural laborers, but, despite being labeled a "Socialist revolutionary," his viewpoint was less political than fatalistic.Millet learned Latin and knowledge of the major work...

Pieter Bruegel the Elder was a Dutch Renaissance painter and printmaker from Brabant, known for his landscapes and peasant scenes (so called genre painting). He received the nickname "Peasant Bruegel" or "Bruegel the Peasant" for his practice of dressing up like a peasant in order to socialize at weddings and other celebrations, thereby gaining inspiration and authentic details for his genre paintings. His drawings and prints made after his designs, while based on traditional sources, are ...

Giovanni Antonio Canal, better known as Canaletto, was an Italian painter of landscapes of Venice. He was also an important printmaker in etching. Much of Canaletto's early artwork was painted "from nature", differing from the then customary practice of completing paintings in the studio. Some of his later works do revert to this custom, as suggested by the tendency for distant figures to be painted as blobs of color – an effect produced by using a camera obscura, which blurs farther-away ...

William Hogarth (1697 – 1764) was an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic, and editorial cartoonist who have been credited with pioneering western sequential art. His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects". Knowledge of his work is so pervasive that satirical political illustrations in this style are often referred to as "Hogarthian". Hogarth was far and away the most important British artist of...

Jacques-Louis David (1748 – 1825) was an influential French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the pre-eminent painter of the era. In the 1780s his cerebral brand of history painting marked a change in taste away from Rococo frivolity toward a classical austerity and severity, heightened feeling chiming with the moral climate of the final years of the Ancien Régime. He later became an active supporter of the French Revolution and friend of Maximilien Robespierre, and was e...

James Abbott McNeill Whistler was The American painter, etcher, and lithographer who created a new set of principles for the fine arts, favored "art for art's sake", and introduced a delicate style of painting in which atmosphere and mood were the main focus. Establishing himself as a painter in Paris and London, Whistler developed his distinctive style, utilizing muted colors and simple forms. His masterpiece is largely credited as "Whistler's Mother" ("Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1...