Sharon Sprung, 1953 | Figurative painter

Sharon Sprung is a Brooklyn based award-winning artist who studied at Cornell, The Art Students League in New York and the National Academy of Design.

Apart from her creative practice, Sprung also teaches painting and drawing at National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts and The Art Students League.

Her work has won numerous awards and is featured in prominent public collections, including the United States House of Representatives, Bell Laboratories, ATandT, Princeton University, Sherman and Sterling and the Chase Manhattan Bank.

Art Quotes

Laura Knight(1877-1970) A Girl Reading, probably Florence Carter Wood (later Mrs Alfred Munnings)

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German writer and statesman, 1749-1832)

La musica lava via dall'anima la polvere della vita di ogni giorno.

- Berthold Auerbach (Poeta e scrittore Tedesco, 1812-1882)

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

- Leonardo da Vinci (Inventore, artista e scienziato Italiano, 1452-1519)

Le idee sono per la letteratura ciò che la luce è per la pittura.

- Paul Bourget - (Scrittore e saggista Francese, 1852-1935)

Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Literature

Literature was integrated into the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's artistic practice from the beginning (including that of Rossetti), with many paintings making direct literary references.

For example, John Everett Millais' early work, Isabella (1849), depicts an episode from John Keats' Isabella, or, the Pot of Basil (1818).

Rossetti was particularly critical of the gaudy ornamentation of Victorian gift books and sought to refine bindings and illustrations to align with the principles of the Aesthetic Movement.

Rossetti's key bindings were designed between 1861-1871.

He collaborated as a designer/illustrator with his sister, poet Christina Rossetti, on the first edition of Goblin Market (1862) and The Prince's Progress (1866).

Matthijs Roling, 1943 | Figurative painter

Dutch painter and teacher Matthijs Röling (Oostkapelle, 1943) received the prize for his entire painted oeuvre. The jury was particularly impressed by the fact that his teaching at the Academie Minerva in Groningen has been no less inspirational to large numbers of younger artists than his painting.

In 1983 Matthijs Röling began working on large-scale decorative projects, such as monumental canvases and wall and ceiling paintings. In recent years these projects have come to occupy an increasingly important place within Röling's highly diverse oeuvre. His manner has been compared to that of the Old Masters, and the illusionistic scenes he paints on walls and ceilings are reminiscent of frescoes.

Notwithstanding these parallels with the past, Röling's work is distinguished by his independence, integrity and craftsmanship.

Frederic Shields | Pre-Raphaelite painter

Frederic James Shields (Hartlepool, 14 March 1833 - 26 February 1911, London) painter and decorative artist, born at Hartlepool on 14 March 1833, was the third of the six children of John Shields, a bookbinder and printer, by his wife Georgiana Storey, daughter of an Alnwick farmer. His brothers and sisters all died in infancy. His father, after fighting as a volunteer in Spain for Queen Isabella (1835-6), removed to Clare Market in London, where the boy's mother opened a dressmaker's shop.

Frederic attended the charity school of the parish of St. Clement Danes until the age of fourteen. Having shown an early talent for drawing, he worked from the antique at the British Museum for a few months after leaving school, and on 4 Oct. 1847 was apprenticed to Maclure, Macdonald and Macgregor, a firm of lithographers.

His indenture was for a term of three years, but after about a year he was sent for by his father, who had obtained work at Newton-le-Willows, although he was unable to provide for his family. He helped Frederic to find employment at 5s. a week with a firm of mercantile lithographers in Manchester.

An ingrained piety, a love of literature, and a passion for sketching enabled Shields to face stoically nine years of grinding poverty and of uncongenial drudgery at commercial lithography.