Raoul Du Gardier | Genre / seascape painter

Raoul Alfred Henri Robert du Gardier (1 April 1871 - 17 October 1952) was a French painter.

He was born in Wiesbaden (Ger), the son of a very wealthy French family.

In 1890 he studied at the Écoles des Beaux Arts in Paris under Gustave Moreau, Théobald Chartran, Élie Delaunay and Albert Maignan.

Pietro Gabrini | Genre painter

Pietro Gabrini (Rome, 1856-1926) was an Italian painter and watercolourist who worked in variety of mediums on diverse subject matters.

A pupil of Guglielmo de Sanctis, he soon devoted himself to painting historical and literary subjects - "Romeo and Juliet", exhibited in Rome in 1885.

From the mid-1980s he also tackled genre subjects and landscapes, creating watercolors of the Roman countryside.

"Dimmi ciò che leggi e ti dirò chi sei"! / "Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are"!

• "Dimmi ciò che leggi e ti dirò chi sei, è vero, ma ti conoscerei meglio se mi dicessi quello che rileggi".

• "Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread".

François Mauriac

• "The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book".

• "La macchina tecnologicamente più efficiente che l’uomo abbia mai inventato è il libro".

Herman Northrop Frye

Carl Spitzweg | The Bookworm, 1850 | Grohmann Museum

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