Paul Cadmus | Magic Realism painter

Paul Cadmus, (1904-1999), American artist who created paintings, drawings and prints in a figurative, near-illustrational style during a career that spanned some 70 years.

Cadmus decided upon a career in art when he was still a young boy and enrolled in art classes at New York City’s National Academy of Design (now the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts) when he was 15. He studied there until 1926 and at the Art Students League for the following two years and then went to work at an advertising agency.

Between 1931-1933 he lived with artist Jared French. The two traveled to the island of Majorca, Spain, and there Cadmus created the well-known paintings Shore Leave and YMCA Locker Room (both 1933).

Frans Hals | Dutch Golden Age painter

From: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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The celebrated portraitist and genre painter Frans Hals (1582-1666) has been placed second only to Rembrandt and, during the past hundred years, to Vermeer in the pantheon of great Dutch painters of the Golden Age.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Hals was actually the most admired artist in some quarters - especially in Paris, since Vermeer’s small oeuvre was still only beginning to be defined, and Hals' bourgeois subjects, his often colorful palette, and above all his bold brushwork became more inspiring to Realist and Impressionist painters than was the venerable model of Rembrandt.

Gustave Loiseau (1865-1935)

Gustave Loiseau nasce a Parigi il 3 ottobre 1865; sarebbe diventato uno dei più importanti pittori post-impressionisti.

Dopo il servizio militare e dopo aver lavorato per l'azienda di famiglia, Loiseau visitò Pont Aven nel 1890, dove lavorò sotto la guida di Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), dopo il ritorno di quest'ultimo dalla sua prima visita a Tahiti.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti | Pictures and poems | The portrait

O Lord of all compassionate control,

O Love! let this my lady's picture glow

⁠Under my hand to praise her name, and show

Even of her inner self the perfect whole:

That he who seeks her beauty's furthest goal,

⁠Beyond the light that the sweet glances throw

Giovanni Bellini | High Renaissance painter

Italian painter Giovanni Bellini (1430-1516) was the founder of the Venetian school of painting and raised Venice to a center of Renaissance art that rivaled Florence and Rome. He brought to painting a new degree of realism, a new wealth of subject matter, and a new sensuousness in form and color.

Perhaps more than any other, Giovanni Bellini [Giambellino] was an artist who passed through different periods and cultural revolutions.

He, before Leonardo, was the great inventor of the representation of sentiment and nature, painting works of extraordinary poetry, landscapes that brought together everything that had been seen until then in Italy and Europe, with the human figure totally immersed in the surrounding space.