Stanley Cursiter | Post-Impressionist painter

Stanley Cursiter (1887-1976) was an Orcadian artist who played an important role in introducing Post-impressionism and Futurism to Scotland.

He served as the keeper (1919-1930), then director (1930-1948), of the National Galleries of Scotland, and as HM Limner and Painter in Scotland (1948-1976).

He was born on 29 April 1887 at 15 East Road in Kirkwall, Orkney, the son of John Scott Cursiter and Mary Joan Thomson.

He was educated at Kirkwall Grammar School before moving to Edinburgh, where he studied at Edinburgh College of Art.

Vanessa Bell | Post-Impressionist painter

Vanessa Bell (née Stephen; 30 May 1879 - 7 April 1961) was an English painter and interior designer, a member of the Bloomsbury Group and the sister of Virginia Woolf (née Stephen).

Vanessa Stephen was the elder daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Duckworth.

The family included her sister Virginia, brothers Thoby (1880-1906) and Adrian (1883-1948), half-sister Laura (1870-1945) whose mother was Harriett Thackeray and half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth; they lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Westminster, London.

Hans Laagland, 1965 | Neo Baroque style

Hans Laagland was born in Koersel (Belgium) to Ludo Laagland, a professional painter.

His father trained Hans throughout his childhood.

At the age of ten, Hans completed his first oil painting and two years later held his first solo exhibition.

As he continued to develop his skills, he became enthralled with the works and techniques of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), and at fifteen he set out to study those masterful techniques.

Roger Fry | Post-Impressionist painter and Art critic

The British art historian, curator, critic and painter Roger Eliot Fry (London, 1866-1934) was one of the foremost advocates of modern art of his time and was largely responsible for introducing modern French art to Anglophone audiences in Great Britain and the United States.

As a member of the Bloomsbury Group, cofounder of the Omega Workshops, curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and professor of art at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, Fry remains among the most important critical voices on art in the early twentieth century.

Konstantin Makovsky | Academic / Genre painter

Konstantin Egorovich Makovsky (1839-1915) left a significant artistic legacy.

He worked as a genre painter, was a master of history painting and was also a skilled landscape artist.

However, portraiture was definitive in his oeuvre.

The artist's son, the famous Silver Age art critic, Sergei Makovsky, considered that his father's legacy included 'very many portraits, more than all those by Kramskoi, Repin and Serov put together'.