Georges Rochegrosse | Orientalist painter

Georges Antoine Rochegrosse (1859-1938) was a French historical and decorative painter.

He was born at Versailles and studied in Paris with Jules Joseph Lefebvre and Gustave Clarence Rodolphe Boulanger.

His themes are generally historical, and he treated them on a colossal scale and in an emotional naturalistic style, with a distinct revelling in horrible subjects and details.

Ernest Higgins Rigg (British painter, 1868-1947)

Ernest Higgins Rigg was born in Bradford and attended the art school there and then at the Academie Julian in Paris.

He first visited Staithes in 1896 and lodged in Hinderwell at Quaker Garth and later stayed at the village’s Commercial Hotel. He moved to Sussex in 1908, but returned to Yorkshire after the First World War, living in Shipley in 1918 and Richmond in 1919. His brothers, Alfred and Arthur H. were both artists.

Raphael | The Sistine Madonna, 1513-1514

One of the most famous paintings of all time has its home in Dresden. Like Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" in Paris or Botticelli's "Birth of the Venus" in Florence, Raphael's "Sistine Madonna" was memorized in our cultural memory.

"The Sistine Madonna", also called "The Madonna di San Sisto", is an oil painting by the Italian artist Raphael. The canvas was one of the last Madonnas painted by Raphael.

Giorgio Vasari called it "a truly rare and extraordinary work".

Auguste Rodin | Artworks and Quotes

"The human body is first and foremost a mirror to the soul and its greatest beauty comes from that".

"Il corpo umano è prima di tutto uno specchio dell'anima e da questo deriva la sua più grande bellezza".

"L'artista deve creare una scintilla prima di poter fare un fuoco e quindi nasce l'arte, l'artista deve essere pronto a consumarsi al fuoco della sua stessa creazione".

Paul Gauguin | Washerwomen in Arles, 1888

"Washerwomen in Arles" - Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands - was painted in that French town, where Paul Gauguin settled late in 1888 summoned by Vincent van Gogh, who hoped to found a community of artists there.

The work captures the painter’s concern in emphasising expressiveness over and above formalism, which entailed his final break with Impressionism.

This principle, for which Gauguin coined the term Syntheticism, was characterised by non-mimetic representations of nature, the rejection of the third dimension taken from Japanese prints and the separation of colour in broad contrasted planes by means of dark lines.

Paul Gauguin | The Washerwomen in Arles | Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam