Jacques-Émile Blanche | Portrait painter

Jacques-Émile Blanche (1861-1942) was a French painter and writer.

His father, a fashionable nerve specialist, owned a clinic where many of Blanche's sitters had been patients.

As a painter he had both talent and charm, and he enjoyed a great vogue in his day.

His work lacks originality and was much influenced by such contemporaries as James Tissot and John Singer Sargent.

The loose brushwork and subdued colouring of his portraits are also reminiscent of Edouard Manet and English 18th-century artists, especially Thomas Gainsborough.

Greek Art History and Sitemap

Greek art began in the Cycladic and Minoan civilization, and gave birth to Western classical art in the subsequent Geometric, Archaic and Classical periods (with further developments during the Hellenistic Period).

It absorbed influences of Eastern civilizations, of Roman art and its patrons, and the new religion of Orthodox Christianity in the Byzantine era and absorbed Italian and European ideas during the period of Romanticism (with the invigoration of the Greek Revolution), until the Modernist and Postmodernist.

Greek art is mainly five forms: architecture, sculpture, painting, pottery and jewelry making.

Zorba's Dance / La Danza di Zorba, 1964

Jean-Etienne Liotard | Orientalist Pastel painter

Jean Etienne Liotard | Woman in Turkish Dress, Seated on a Sofa, 1752 | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Jean-Etienne Liotard was a widely traveled artist whose French Huguenot family had settled in Geneva, where he was born, owing to the passage of the Edict of Nantes.

From 1738 to 1742 he lived in Istanbul (Constantinople) and thereafter painted genre scenes of non-Muslim women in Turkish costume, such as this one, which were greatly admired throughout western Europe.

In pastel, his technique is colorful and exceptionally smooth and flawless.

Jean Etienne Liotard | Woman in Turkish Dress, seated on a Sofa, 1752 (pastel over red chalk underdrawing on parchment) | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Rachel Ruysch | Baroque painter

Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750), who has been called the "most celebrated Dutch woman artist of the 17th and 18th centuries", was successful for nearly 70 years as a specialist in flower paintings.

Born in The Hague, Ruysch moved to Amsterdam with her family when she was three.

Her maternal grandfather, Pieter Post, was an important architect and her father, Frederik Ruysch, an eminent scientist from whom she learned how to observe and record nature with great accuracy.

Matthias Stom | Baroque painter

Matthias Stom or Matthias Stomer (1600-1652) was a Dutch, or possibly Flemish, painter who is only known for the works he produced during his residence in Italy.

He was influenced by the work of non-Italian followers of Caravaggio in Italy, in particular his Dutch followers often referred to as the Utrecht Caravaggists, as well as by Jusepe de Ribera and Peter Paul Rubens.