Amy Werntz, 1979 | Portrait painter

Amy Werntz is a contemporary realist artist currently residing in Dallas, Texas. Originally from the midwest, Amy’s appreciation and interest in art developed as a child, in a family full of talented artists.

She has always been drawn to faces and the human figure.

Through the years her inspiration has evolved to now focus on those around her.

She is fascinated by the postures and expressions of people within their everyday lives.

Amy got her BFA in Interior Design and currently splits her time between design and creating art.

Jules Breton | Naturalist painter

As one of the primary painters of peasant themes in the nineteenth century, and an artist strongly influenced by his own native traditions from northern France, Jules Breton’s reputation rivaled that of Eugène Delacroix or Jean-Dominique Ingres at the time of his death in 1906.

Since then, after a long period of relative obscurity, Breton has returned to considerable favor; he is now regarded as a primary painter of daily life with an inherent and substantial understanding of the old masters form the Italian renaissance especially Raphael.

Norberto Proietti (1927-2009)

Norberto Proietti, known as Norberto was an Italian painter of Naive art, known worldwide by his works that contain dozens of industrious "little monks".

Norberto was born in the close knit and charming hamlet of Spello in 1927. His father was an agent in the livestock trade who also sold olives and grain and at the same time, he managed a modest trattoria. His mother helped out in the trattoria and was also a dressmaker of outfits for first communions.

He went on to immortalize the fairytale-like collection of ancient stone houses of his home town in most of his paintings: paintings that were set in delightful medieval villages framed by the sky and countryside.

As an adolescent, Norberto was sent to his uncle in Trastevere, a district of Rome, where he learned the tailoring. He returned to Spello in 1951 and opened his own tailor's shop.

Pontormo | Mannerist painter

Jacopo da Pontormo*, original name Jacopo Carrucci (born May 24, 1494, Pontormo, near Empoli, Republic of Florence (Italy)-buried Jan. 2, 1557, Florence) Florentine painter who broke away from High Renaissance classicism to create a more personal, expressive style that is sometimes classified as early Mannerism.

Pontormo was the son of Bartolommeo Carrucci, a painter. According to the biographer Giorgio Vasari, he was apprenticed to Leonardo da Vinci and afterward to Mariotto Albertinelli and Piero di Cosimo.

At the age of 18 he entered the workshop of Andrea del Sarto, and it is this influence that is most apparent in his early works.

In 1518 he completed an altarpiece in the Church of San Michele Visdomini, Florence, that reflects in its agitated-almost neurotic-emotionalism a departure from the balance and tranquillity of the High Renaissance.

Henri Fantin-Latour: "L'uomo di talento dovrebbe camminare da solo.."

"Success can be harmful, it makes you relax, you sit on it and are distracted.

You alone should correct the faults, you know what I think of advice, correction.

The gifted man should walk alone, straight to his goal, what happens is nothing, rejection, success, selling pleasing, all that is nonsense".

Van Gogh | La Mousmé, 1888

The intention and determination that inform Van Gogh's art can be obscured by the sensational legends that have arisen about his life.

The artist's correspondence, particularly frdeom his brief mature period of 1888-1890, contradicts popular lore and attests to the deliberateness, sensitivity, and integrity of his work.

On July 29, 1888, Van Gogh wrote his younger brother Theo, an art dealer in a Parisian gallery, that "if you know what a 'mousmé' is (you will know when you have read Loti's Madame Chrysanthème), I have just painted one.

Shafira Yablonski, (Impressionist painter, 1938)

Ukrainian painter Shafira Yablonski was born in the city of Dneprodzerzhinsk.

When Shafira was 3 years old the world war II began and her family was evacuated to Kazakhstan.

When the war was over and the city of Dneprodzerzhinsk was liberated, they returned home to Ukraine.

There Shafira spent her childhood and adolescence and finished high school.

All her childhood she was fond of drawing. When Shafira was 15, she joined the art studio at the House of Culture and began learning to paint.

Henri Fantin-Latour, Il pittore di fiori che era stufo dei suoi capolavori..

Contemporaneo degli impressionisti, l'artista francese Henri Fantin-Latour si distinse per i suoi dipinti di fiori e per i ritratti di gruppo degli intellettuali parigini dell'epoca.

Figlio di Théodore Fantin-Latour, anch'egli artista, che lo iniziò all'arte della pittura, studiò all'École de Dessin di Parigi.

Tuttavia, trasse la sua vera formazione copiando le opere classiche dei Grandi Maestri del Museo del Louvre, in particolare Tiziano e Veronese.

Più tardi, nel 1861, fu per un certo periodo discepolo di Gustave Courbet, anche se il suo realismo intimo e discreto era molto diverso da quello del suo maestro e li fece ben presto separare.