Francesco Gioli | Macchiaioli painter

Francesco Gioli (June 29, 1846 - February 4, 1922) was a prominent Italian painter associated with the Macchiaioli movement and Tuscan Naturalism.

Born into a wealthy family in San Frediano a Settimo (Pisa), he became celebrated for his elegant depictions of rural Tuscan life, atmospheric landscapes and intimate portraits.

Gioli initially trained under academic masters like Antonio Ciseri and Enrico Pollastrini, starting his career with traditional historical paintings.

Franz Richard Unterberger | Romantic painter of waterscapes

Austrian painter Franz Richard Unterberger (1838-1902), a Romantic style painter of waterscapes, landscapes, architecture and Genre, was born in Innsbruck, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on 15th August 1838, one of eleven children of a wealthy bourgeois family.

He decided to pursue a career as an artist at a relatively young age and enrolled in the Academy in Munich.

Here he studied with Albert Zimmerman (1808-1888) a professor and landscape painter at the Academy and with Julius Lange (1817-1878).

Love Letter from Auguste Rodin to Camille Claudel, 1886

"My ferocious friend".... "Mia feroce amica"...

Thus begins Rodin’s desperate cry of love to Camille Claudel in the early years of their relationship.

Rodin was soon captivated by this pupil who became his assistant, mistress and muse, while Claudel outwardly remained in complete control of her feelings.

Consumed and tormented by an obsessive love, he implores her - “on his knees” - to ease his suffering from beginning to end of this letter, written in a muddled style, with erroneous syntax and imperfect spelling.

Vilhelm Hammershøi | Interior painter

Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916) was a Danish painter. He is known for his poetic, subdued portraits and interiors.

In 1997, Denmark issued a postage stamp in his honour.

Vilhelm Hammershøi was born iin Copenhagen, Denmark.

The son of a well-to-do merchant, Christian Hammershøi, and his wife, Frederikke (née Rentzmann), Hammershøi studied drawing from the age of eight with Niels Christian Kierkegaard and Holger Grønvold, as well as painting with Vilhelm Kyhn, before embarking on studies with Frederik Vermehren and others at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.

Rainer Maria Rilke / Rodin | Love Song, 1907

How shall I hold my soul and yet not touch

It with your own? How shall I ever place

It clear of you on anything beyond?

Oh gladly I would stow it next to such

Things in the darkness as are never found

Down in an alien and silent space

That does not resonate when you resound.

Auguste Rodin - Fugit Amor, 1881

Rainer Maria Rilke | La sera / The evening

Come una indefinibile fata d'ombre...

Vien da lungi la Sera, camminando

per l'abetaia tacita e nevosa.

Johan August Malmström (1829-1901) | Dancing Fairies, 1866

Nadežda Petrović | Expressionist / Fauve painter

Nadežda Petrović / Надежда Петровић (1873-1915) was a Serbian painter and one of the women war photography pioneers in the region.

Considered Serbia's most famous Expressionist and Fauvist, she was the most important Serbian female painter of the period.

Born in the town of Čačak, Petrović moved to Belgrade in her youth and attended the women's school of higher education there.

In 1893, she became an art teacher at the school and later taught at the women's university in Belgrade.

Ivan Aivazovsky | Romantic painter

Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky / Ива́н Константи́нович Айвазо́вский (1817-1900) became the most prolific Russian painter of his time.

Early in his career, he was elected a member of five Academies of Fine Arts, including those of St. Petersburg (his Alma Mater) Rome, Florence, Stuttgart and Amsterdam.

He was an Academician at 27 and Professor of Marine Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, at the age of 30.

Teodor Axentowicz | Academic painter

Teodor Axentowicz (1859-1938) was a Polish-Armenian painter and university professor.

A renowned artist of his times, he was also the rector of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków.

As an artist, Axentowicz was famous for his portraits and subtle scenes of Hutsul life, set in the Carpathians.

In Paris, he received the prestigious title of Officier d'Académie Ordre des Palmes Académiques and Member of Académie des Beaux-Arts.

In 1904 at the St. Louis World's Fair, Axentowicz received a Special Commemorative Award in recognition of distinguished service in connection with various national sections of the Department of Art.

José Malhoa | Naturalist painter

José Vital Branco Malhoa, known simply as José Malhoa (28 April 1855 - 26 October 1933) was a Portuguese painter.

Malhoa was, with Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro, the leading name in Portuguese naturalist painting in the second half of the 19th century.

They were both members of the Grupo do Leão (Lion Group), a group of artists and writers in the 1880s.

He often painted popular scenes and subjects, like his two most famous paintings: The Drunks (1907) and Fado (1910).

Randolph Rogers | Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii, 1859

"Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii" by Randolph Rogers (Waterloo, New York 1825-1892 Rome) was the most popular American sculpture of the nineteenth century.

According to Rogers, it was replicated 167 times in two sizes.

The subject was drawn from "The Last Days of Pompeii" (1834), a widely read novel by Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton, which ends with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in a.d. 79.

Rogers’s evocative portrayal of Nydia highlights her heroic attempt to lead two companions out of the burning, ash-covered city.

Wilhelm von Gegerfelt | Post-Impressionist painter

Swedish painter Wilhelm von Gegerfelt (1844-1920) painted landscapes with motifs from Venice, Brittany, Swedish coastal landscapes and from Gotland in Sweden.

Gegerfelt studied at the Royal Danish Academy from 1861-1863, at the Royal Swedish Academy from 1864-1867, and thereafter in Düsseldorf until 1872.

He then went to Paris where he developed a new technique joining Alfred Wahlberg as one of the first Swedes to represent the Modern Breakthrough in Nordic art.

Gerardine Jacoba | Still life painter of flowers

Came from an artistic family, the still life Dutch painter Gerardina Jacoba Van de Sande Bakhuyzen (1826-1895), was a 19th-century painter from the Northern Netherlands.

Her father was the painter Hendrik Van de Sande Bakhuyzen, and her brother was the painter Julius Jacobus Van de Sande Bakhuyzen.

Gerardina was taught by her father, as were all her numerous sisters.

She achieved great success with her oils and watercolours of flowers and still lives, winning numerous medals between 1870-1880, in which year she had an exhibition at the Grafton Gallery in London.

Paul Signac | Neo-impressionist painter

French painter Paul Signac (1863-1935) was born in Paris.

He followed a course of training in architecture before deciding at the age of 18 to pursue a career as a painter.

He sailed around the coasts of Europe, painting the landscapes he encountered.

He also painted scenes of cities in France in his later years.

Tranquillo Cremona | Romantic painter

Tranquillo Cremona (10 April 1837 - 10 June 1878) was an Italian painter.

He was born in Pavia and was the brother of the mathematician Luigi Cremona.

He trained as a young man with Giovanni Carnovali. He lived in Venice from 1852-1859.

Cremona moved to Milan and he became part of the Scapigliatura movement which was characterized by bohemian attitudes and included poets, writers, musicians and artists infused with a combination of rebellious, and later anti-academic and anarchic, tendencies.

Gustav Vigeland | Figurative sculptor

Gustav Vigeland (1869-1943), born as Adolf Gustav Thorsen, was a Norwegian sculptor.

Gustav Vigeland occupies a special position among Norwegian sculptors, both in the power of his creative imagination and in his productivity.

He is most associated with the Vigeland installation (Vigelandsanlegget) in Frogner Park, Oslo.

The Vigeland installation made Frogner Park into Norway's most popular tourist attraction, and the park also contains Frogner Manor with the Oslo Museum and the Henriette Wegner Pavilion.

Vigeland was also the designer of the Nobel Peace Prize medal.

Vladimir Majakovskij e Maria Denisova, un Amore disperato

La storia del poema "La nuvola in calzoni" / "Облако в штанах" è collegata all'amore tormentato e non corrisposto del poeta Russo Vladimir Majakovskij (1893-1930) per la scultrice monumentale Russa, Maria Alexandrovna Denisova (1894-1944).

I due si incontrarono nel 1914 ad Odessa, durante il viaggio dei futuristi del 1913.

"La nuvola" è il capolavoro della stagione "prerivoluzionaria" di Majakovskij, uno dei testi più significativi del futurismo russo e della letteratura russa del Novecento.

Victor Nizovtsev

Composto tra il 1914-1915 da un Majakovskij poco più che ventenne, il poemetto trabocca di una forza lirica tesa, appassionata, che vuole essere dissacrante, antiborghese, antifilistea, ed è soprattutto intensamente libertaria.

Majakovskij vuol portare dentro l'arte della parola la carica dirompente di una visione nuova o rinnovata della realtà, dei sentimenti, dell'idea stessa della poesia e della scrittura.

Claude Monet | The Path through the Irises, 1914-1917

Irises, among Monet's favorite flowers, lined the pathways leading up to the house and Japanese bridge on the artist's property at Giverny.

This bird's-eye view of a garden path belongs to a series of monumental works painted during the First World War that capture the vital essence of these flowers with intensity and breadth of vision.

Late in life, as his eyesight faltered, he dispensed with subtlety and "took in the motif in large masses", waiting "until the idea took shape, until the arrangement and composition inscribed themselves on the brain". | Source: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Claude Monet | The Path through the Irises, 1914-1917 | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Vincent van Gogh | Irises, 1889-1890

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) returned to irises again and again in the final year of his life.

While staying at the psychiatric institution in Saint-Rémy (1889-1890), the garden became one of his main sources of inspiration.

He painted several studies of irises over the course of about a year.

Sometimes a single flower, sometimes overflowing bouquets.

He experimented with colour, rhythm and composition.

A small detail: the irises we see as blue today were originally painted a vibrant purple.

Over time, some of Van Gogh’s pigments faded, subtly changing the colours.

Vincent van Gogh | Irises, 1889 | Getty Museum

Frederic Edwin Church | Hudson River School

Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) was perhaps the best-known representative of the Hudson River School of landscape painting as well as one its most traveled.

Born in Hartford in 1826, he was the privileged son of Joseph Church, a jeweler and banker of that city, who interceded with Connecticut scion and collector Daniel Wadsworth to persuade the landscape painter Thomas Cole to accept his son as a pupil.

From 1844-1846, Church studied with Cole in his Catskill, New York, studio and accompanied him on sketching sojourns in the Catskill Mountains and the Berkshires of Massachusetts.

At one point, the master characterized the student as having "the finest eye for drawing in the world".