If you are an art lover or just an artistic painting enthusiast, you should explore our in-depth articles about famous artists, movements, painting styles and iconic artworks. Learn about the lives of some of the most famous artists, their inspirations, influences, the record-breaking sales prices of their works, and sometimes even about a specific piece of artwork.
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Also to discover and buy the works of your favorite artists: Famous Artist Prints
London, National Gallery The picture captures those stultifying moments we all experience on a hot summer afternoon. There are occasional cooling flurries of wind — the flag on the ferry hangs limply but there seems to be enough breeze to fill the sails of the larger sailing craft that populate the river, and the smoke … Read more
London, Wallace Collection Fragonard was a pupil of both Chardin and Boucher. With such exalted, but in many ways very different mentors, one would expect that his gifts might blossom in various directions, which is indeed what happened — Fragonard became a virtuoso painter, draughtsman and engraver. He won the Prix de Rome and was … Read more
New York, Neue Galerie This breathtakingly beautiful painting, encrusted with gold leaf like a Byzantine icon, embellished with myriads of swarming devices from his personal lexicon of decorative forms (some raised from the surface in low relief, built up with layers of gesso), is one of Klimt’s most celebrated works, produced at the apogee of … Read more
Paris, Musée du Louvre Not many artists can pack such intense emotion into a few feet of canvas as Caravaggio, the bad boy of Roman art. He was a drinker, a Casanova (some say bi-sexual), a brawler, and after a fight over a tennis match that went bad, a murderer. Yet this man of violent … Read more
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art Often a portrait reveals more than just the sitter’s physiognomy. This double portrait, thought to have been painted for the betrothal or wedding (in 1436) of Lorenzo di Ranieri Scolari (1407–1478) and his bride, Angiola di Bernardo Sapiti, reveals as much about the society that made it as the … Read more
London, National Gallery Ingres was a perfectionist given to compulsively reworking canvases, his unfortunate clients often waiting years for the release of their commissions. An extreme example is his Venus Anadyomene commenced in 1807 but which remained in his studio for over forty years until it was at last deemed complete in 1848. The gestation … Read more
London, Tate Modern To stand in front of a painting by Bonnard is to be assailed by colour, to be enraptured by the profusion of rainbow colours which find a home in his canvases. He is one of the great colourists, not just of the twentieth century but of any century. This canvas is quintessential … Read more
New York, Frick Collection Francis was born Giovanni di Bernardone, the son of a wealthy textile merchant. In his early 20s he famously repudiated his earthly wealth to live the life of a devout ascetic, becoming an itinerant dressed in rags. In 1209, having attracted a small group of adherents, he traveled to Rome and … Read more
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art This painting is full of enigmas relating to its painter, subject and provenance. Signed in Latin in its top right corner ‘G. de La Tour Fecit Luneuilla Lothar’ (made by G. de la Tour, Lunéville Lorraine), this is one of the few daylight paintings by an artist who specialised … Read more
Paris, Musée du Louvre Ingres, the most important representative of 19th-century official French art and a protégé of Napoleon I, had no problem with distorting bodies to preserve what he considered the beauty of the line. Which is exactly what he did in this painting of a harem girl, which was ridiculed when first exhibited … Read more