Mary Beale | Baroque painter

Mary Beale (née Cradock; bapt. 26 March 1633 – bur. 8 October 1699) was an English portrait painter.

She was part of a small band of female professional artists working in London.

Beale became the main financial provider for her family through her professional work - a career she maintained from 1670/71 to the 1690s.

Beale was also a writer, whose prose Discourse on Friendship of 1666 presents scholarly, uniquely female take on the subject.

Cornelis de Heem | Baroque painter

Cornelis de Heem (8 April 1631 (baptized) - 17 May 1695 (buried) was a still-life painter associated with both Flemish Baroque and Dutch Golden Age painting.

He was a member of a large family of still-life specialists, of which his father, Jan Davidszoon de Heem (1606–1684), was the most significant.

Cornelis was baptised in Leiden on 8 April 1631, and moved with his family to Antwerp in 1636.

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