Rembrandt produced etchings for most of his career, from 1626 to 1660, when he was forced to sell his printing-press and virtually abandoned etching.. He took easily to etching and, though he also learned to use a burin and partly engraved many plates, the freedom of etching technique was fundamental to his work. He was very closely involved in the whole process of printmaking, and must have printed at least early examples of his etchings himself. Rembrandt was as well one of the greatest ...

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...

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...

Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), Italian engraver and architect, is best known for his etchings of ancient and baroque Rome and grandiose architectural constructions of his own imagination. Throughout most of his adult life Piranesi made etchings of views of the city; not only its antiquities, such as the Pantheon, but also its contemporary masterpieces such as the Capitoline and Piazza Navona. The scenes are animated with tiny, frail, fluttering figures. Long before he died his pri...

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...

Winslow Homer was American painter, illustrator and etcher, one of the two most admired American late 19th-century artists and is considered to be the greatest pictorial poet of outdoor life in the United States and its greatest watercolorist. Nominally a landscape painter, in a sense carrying on Hudson River school attitudes, Homer was an artist of power and individuality whose images are metaphors for the relationship of Man and Nature. A careful observer of visual reality, he was at the...

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Peter Paul Rubens was a Flemish Baroque painter, and proponents of an exaggerated Baroque style that emphasised movement, colour, and sensuality. He is well known for his altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and history paintings of mythological and allegorical subjects.The majority of Rubens's drawings served as a step toward a final work of art in another medium. Rubens kept his drawings close by as studio material to be used by his assistants and collaborators. It was often with the help...

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...

Are you the smart enough? Do you know the answers to these questions:Who was George Orwell?Why did George Orwell start writing?What is the primary, most significant, occupation and source of livelihood of George Orwell?What best describes the plot of George Orwell's book "1984"?Who did Orwell join in the early years of World War II?Why did George Orwell write Animal Farm?Do you know that:Orwell was a socialist.Orwell had a r...

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...

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 ...