Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant | Orientalist painter

Biography from: Christie's

Born in Paris into a Languedoc family, Jean Joseph Benjamin Constant (1845-1902) trained in Toulouse at the local Academie before moving to Paris in 1866.

He enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts and completed his training under the academic master Alexandre Cabanel.

His studies were interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War and the young artist never resumed his formal training.

Instead, in the early 1870s he travelled to Spain, and fell under the spell of the Mudejar architecture of Andalucia.

Fanny Fleury | Academic painter

Fanny Laurent Fleury, known as Madame Fanny (1846-1923) was a French painter.

Fleury was born in Paris, France, and trained with Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran, Marie Durand and Jean-Jacques Henner.

She developed a reputation as a talented portraitist and painter of figure studies.

She also painted genre scenes and still life, which she exhibited at the Salons of Saint-Etienne and Dijon.

Jean-Jacques Henner | Academic painter

Jean-Jacques Henner (5 March 1829 - 23 July 1905) was a French painter, noted for his use of sfumato and chiaroscuro in painting figures, religious subjects and portraits.

Henner was born at Bernwiller (Alsace). He began his studies in art as a pupil of Michel Martin Drolling and François-Édouard Picot.

In 1848, he entered the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, and took the Prix de Rome with a painting of Adam and Eve finding the Body of Abel in 1858.

In Rome, he was guided by Flandrin, and painted four pictures for the gallery at Colmar among other works.

Juana Romani | Belle Époque painter

Biography from: Sotheby's

Born in Velletri, Italy, Joana Carolina Carlessimo, called Juana Romani, moved with her family as a young girl to Paris, where she first encountered painting as an art school model.

At age nineteen, Romani began her training as the pupil of Jean-Jacques Henner before becoming a student of Ferdinand Roybet, and later, his mistress.

Like Roybet, she chose historical subjects and painted many portraits of young, mysterious women in costume.

Ottilie Roederstein | Portrait painter

Ottilie Wilhelmine Roederstein (22 April 1859 - 26 November 1937) was a German-Swiss painter.

She was the long-time companion of Elisabeth Winterhalter, one of the first female doctors in Germany.

Roederstein was born in Zürich, Switzerland.

Gottardo Segantini | Divisionist painter

Biography from: The British Museum

Gottardo Guido Segantini (1882-1974) - Painter and etcher. The eldest son of the painter Giovanni Segantini.

Born in Pusiano near Brianza in the province of Como.Gottardo SegantiniHe moved with his family to Savognin in Switzerland in 1882 and to Maloja in 1894.

In 1899 Gottardo Segantini spent a few months at the Accademia di Brera before going on to Zurich to study engineering at the Technical University (now ETH) where he learnt the technique of etching, and began painting in 1902.

Jan Brueghel the Elder | Baroque painter

Biography from: The National Gallery, London

Jan Brueghel the Elder was born in Brussels in 1568, the son of Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

He is said to have been taught in Antwerp by Pieter Goetkint and to have visited Cologne.

From 1589-1596 he worked in Italy, mainly in Naples, Rome, and Milan where he met one of his most important patrons, Cardinal Federico Borromeo, who remained a lifelong friend.

Anselm Kiefer, 1945 | Neo-expressionist painter / sculptor

"Art is difficult, it is not entertainment!" - Anselm Kiefer, German painter and sculptor.

Biography from: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Anselm Kiefer was born in Donaueschingen, Baden-Württembürg, Germany, and raised near the east bank of the Rhine in the region of the Black Forest.

Kiefer was named after the nineteenth-century classical painter Anselm Feuerbach and planned from childhood to become an artist.

After studies at the university in Freiburg and the academy in Karlsruhe, he studied informally in the early 1970s with the artist Joseph Beuys on occasional visits to Düsseldorf.

Anselm Kiefer | Die fruchtbare Halbmond / La Mezzaluna fertile | Sammlung Essl Museum