Thomas Cole | The Voyage of Life, 1842

The Voyage of Life - Childhood (National Gallery of Art)

Thomas Cole's renowned four-part series traces the journey of an archetypal hero along the "River of Life. Confidently assuming control of his destiny and oblivious to the dangers that await him, the voyager boldly strives to reach an aerial castle, emblematic of the daydreams of "Youth and its aspirations for glory and fame. As the traveler approaches his goal, the ever-more-turbulent stream deviates from its course and relentlessly carries him toward the next picture in the series, where nature's fury, evil demons, and self-doubt will threaten his very existence. Only prayer, Cole suggests, can save the voyager from a dark and tragic fate.

Louis Rémy Mignot | Hudson River School

Louis Rémy Mignot (1831-1870) was among the Hudson River School style of painters and did numerous tropical landscapes of Panama and Ecuador as well as scenes of upper New York state and some of the Southern states. Louis Rémy Mignot was short lived, dying at age 39.
Louis Remy Mignot was born in 1831 in Charleston, South Carolina. His father Remy Mignot was a French Catholic immigrant who owned a confectionary shop in Charleston. His boyhood, during which he demonstrated a precocious artistic talent, seems to have been spent in his grandfather's home, near Charleston.

Frederic Edwin Church | Hudson River School

Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) was perhaps the best-known representative of the Hudson River School of landscape painting as well as one its most traveled. Born in Hartford in 1826, he was the privileged son of Joseph Church, a jeweler and banker of that city, who interceded with Connecticut scion and collector Daniel Wadsworth to persuade the landscape painter Thomas Cole to accept his son as a pupil.
 From 1844-1846, Church studied with Cole in his Catskill, New York, studio and accompanied him on sketching sojourns in the Catskill Mountains and the Berkshires of Massachusetts. At one point, the master characterized the student as having "the finest eye for drawing in the world".

Eddy Roos, 1949 | Figurative sculptor

Eddy Roos (Amsterdam, 1949) is a Dutch artist and sculptor. He also choreographed 42 dance films and designs sculpture gardens.

A danced arabesque captured in bronze

The carefully reconstructed old- Dutch Renaissance-garden around the Groningen Verhildersum Manor at Leens forms in its idyllic setting of green lawns and delicately coloured flowerbeds the realization of a dream: from 1977 sculptor Eddy Roos is working on the realization of his own sculpture garden.

Robert Lewis Reid | Impressionist painter

Robert Lewis Reid (July 29, 1862 - December 2, 1929) was an American Impressionist🎨 painter and muralist.

Robert Reid was born in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston under Otto Grundmann, where he was also later an instructor. In 1884 he moved to New York City, studying at the Art Students League, and in 1885 he went to Paris to study at the Académie Julian under Gustave Boulanger and Jules Joseph Lefebvre🎨. His early pictures were figures of French peasants, painted at Étaples.

Edmund C. Tarbell | Impressionist painter

Edmund Charles Tarbell's (1862-1938) remarkable New Hampshire summer home is emblematic of the painter and his art.

Just as the artist's paintings draw upon traditional styles and motifs to construct an image of genteel New England, Tarbell's house blended the old and the new to create a rarefied atmosphere of history and domesticity.

On canvas, Tarbell repeatedly depicted modern life in terms of the past, arranging his female subjects in quiet interiors surrounded by icons of New England's glorious past, such as gate-leg tables, Chippendale chairs, and incense jars.

Tarbell's sitters read, knit, and drink tea as if in a historical vacuum.

August Gillé | Symbolist painter

August Gillé was a Belgian artist born in Mechelen in 1892 and died in Bonheiden in 1989. He was a painter and sculptor. Got his training in furniture manufacturing at the Academy in Mechelen (1910-1913).

Debuted as a furniture maker and sculptor. After the First World War, he started to focus on his great passion, painting. Then he took classes at the Academy in Mechelen (1919-1920) and Brussels (1922-1925).

As a painter, he evolved from expressionist figuration to spontaneous lyrical abstraction.

Realized approx. 10,000 works: oil paintings on canvas, drawings on paper, studies and sculptures.

Leonardo da Vinci | Della differenza ed ancora similitudine che ha la pittura con la poesia

Trattato della Pittura- Parte prima /19

La pittura ti rappresenta in un subito la sua essenza nella virtú visiva, e per il proprio mezzo, d'onde la impressiva riceve gli obietti naturali, ed ancora nel medesimo tempo, nel quale si compone l'armonica proporzionalità delle parti che compongono il tutto, che contenta il senso; e la poesia riferisce il medesimo, ma con mezzo meno degno dell'occhio, il quale porta nella impressiva piú confusamente e con piú tardità le figurazioni delle cose nominate che non fa l'occhio, vero mezzo infra l'obietto e l'impressiva, il quale immediate conferisce con somma verità le vere superficie e figure di quel che dinanzi se gli appresenta, dalle quali ne nasce la proporzionalità detta armonia, che con dolce concento contenta il senso, non altrimenti che si facciano le proporzionalità di diverse voci al senso dell'udito; il quale ancora è men degno che quello dell'occhio, perché tanto quanto ne nasce, tanto ne muore; ed è sí veloce nel morire come nel nascere.