Max Pietschmann | Symbolist painter

Ernst Max Pietschmann (1865-1952) was a German Symbolist painter.

Max Pietschmann studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts from 1883 to 1889.

His teachers included Leon Pohle and Ferdinand Pauwels.

Pietschmann belonged to the painters' colony in Goppeln near Bannewitz, which specialized in plein air painting.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel: "The masses will always be below the average".. 1871

Journal Intime / 12th June 1871: - "Numbers make law, but goodness has nothing to do with figures.

Every fiction is self-expiating, and democracy rests upon this legal fiction, that the majority has not only force but reason on its side - that it possesses not only the right to act but the wisdom necessary for action.

The fiction is dangerous because of its flattery; the demagogues have always flattered the private feelings of the masses.

René Magritte (1898-1967) | Le lieu commun, 1964 | Christie's

Maurice Ravel: "The only love affair I have ever had was with music!"

• "Dobbiamo sempre ricordare che la sensibilità e l'emozione costituiscono il vero contenuto di un'opera d'arte".

• "Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second".

• "We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art".

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec | Spanish Dancer | Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

René Magritte | The “Renoir” period, 1940-1947

- "For the period I call 'Surrealism in full sunlight', I am trying to join together two mutually exclusive things: one, a feeling of levity, intoxication, happiness, which depends on a certain mood and on an atmosphere that certain Impressionists, or rather, Impressionism in general, have managed to render in painting.

Without Impressionism, I do not believe we would know this feeling of real objects perceived through colours and nuances, and free of all classical reminiscences... and, two, a feeling of the mysterious quality of objects" - René Magritte.

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.