Albert Bierstadt | Hudson River School

German-born American painter Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), recognized as the foremost painter of the american frontier during the nineteenth-century, was born in Solingen, Germany, in 1830.

At the age of two, he and his family emigrated to the United States, settling in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Edgar Degas | The Ballet dancers

Among the supreme masterpieces of the century are Degas's pictures of the ballet and its dancers.

The impulse towards painting the contemporary scene came to him not only from Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) and Manet (1832-1883) but from his friend, the critic Duranty, the exponent of the aesthetics of naturalism.

Yet in the particular direction of his tastes and his conception of design he was entirely individual.

To study and convey movement was a chosen task, first undertaken on the race course and then in his many pictures of the Opera, viewed from behind the scenes, in the wings, or from the orchestra stalls during a performance.

Albert Lynch ~ La Belle Époque

Albert Lynch [1851-1912] settled in Paris, where he studied at l'École des Beaux-Arts. Lynch worked under the guidance of painters Jules Achille Noël, Gabriel Ferrier and Henri Lehmann. He showed his artwork in the Salon of French artists which he won in 1890 and 1892 and in the World's Fair of 1900 during which he received a gold medal.

Cecil Kennedy ~ Flowers painter

Cecil Kennedy [1905-1997] was a painter in oils who specialised in flowers becoming one of the popular British flower painters of his time. After training at art school, Kennedy studied under a number of artists, the most influential being Nieco Jungmann.

Igor Venski, 1962 ~ Impressionist painter

Venski was born on 6 June 1962 in Krasnodar, Russia, and he began drawing and painting very early in his youth. He studied painting at Krasnodar School of Fine Arts. Igor Venski is adhering to the aesthetic principles and the classical traditions. The artistic formula he employs is that of romantic impressionism with a marked infusion of realistic elements. Sometimes he paints in manner such as of post modernism.