John Woodrow Kelley, 1952

A native of Knoxville, Tennessee, John Woodrow Kelley is a representational artist known for mythological scenes and portraiture.

In his works, Kelley seeks to reinterpret Western art through a contemporary lens.

His lifelong fascination with classical art stemmed from a trip to the Greek Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee, at age six.

Kelley’s oil paintings are inspired by Greek mythology and studies of the old masters like Diego Velázquez and Caravaggio; this emphasis on the subject matter and vocabulary of classical realism is in reaction to the emptiness of abstract expressionism and modernism in the visual arts.

Amalie Lindegren | Genre painter

Amalia Euphrosyne Lindegren (1814-1891) was a Swedish painter.

She was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts (1856).

Lindegren is associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting.

She painted portraits and genre and was inspired by Adolph Tidemand, Hans Gude and Per Nordenberg and the contemporary German style.

Charles Cushing, 1959 | Plein-air painter

Charles Cushing was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, but has lived and worked in center city Philadelphia for over 40 years.

He attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, graduating in 1988.

While at the academy, he studied under celebrated painters such as Arthur DeCosta, Seymour Remenick and Sidney Goodman, among others.

After graduating, his focus turned to landscape and cityscape paintings, and he has become well-known locally for his large Philadelphia scenes.

Bernardo Bellotto | Veduta painter

Bernardo Bellotto (1721-1780) was an Italian urban landscape painter or vedutista, and printmaker in etching famous for his vedute of European cities - Dresden, Vienna, Turin and Warsaw.

He was the student and nephew of the renowned Giovanni Antonio Canal Canaletto and sometimes used the latter's illustrious name, signing himself as Bernardo Canaletto.

François-Joseph Navez | Neoclassical painter

François-Joseph Navez (1787-1869) was a Belgian Neoclassical painter; known for his portraits and genre scenes.

As the son of an alderman, in a privileged family, he was able to devote himself entirely to art from an early age.

From 1803 to 1808, he was a pupil at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, where he studied with Pierre Joseph Célestin François.

François-Joseph Navez | The Massacre of the Innocents, 1824

"The massacre of the innocents' was created in 1824 by Belgian painter François-Joseph Navez (1787-1869) in Neoclassicism style.

The painting is currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"The Massacre of the Innocents" is a story from the life of Christ.

As recounted in the Gospel of Matthew (2:16-18), Herod the Great, King of Judea, ordered the slaughter of all boys under the age of two in and near the town of Bethlehem.

Herod’s larger aim was to kill the infant Jesus, who had been heralded as King of the Jews.

François-Joseph Navez | The Massacre of the Innocents, 1824 | Metropolitan Museum of Art

Johann Hamza | Genre painter

The Austrian painter Johann Hamza (1850-1927) is amongst the most gifted 19th Century genre artists, who showed a profound fascination with pictures set in the later eighteenth century.

As M. Poltimore and P. Hook commented, 'The eighteenth century assumed an almost mythic significance for bourgeois Europe of a hundred years later.

The Goncourt rediscovered it and elevated it into an Arcadia on a par with antiquity.

Mary Fedden | Modern painter

Mary Fedden, OBE RA PPRWA (1915-2012) was a British artist.

After the war was over, Fedden developed her own style of flower paintings and still lifes, reminiscent of artists such as Matisse and Braque.

In 1995, she acknowledged in an interview in The Artist magazine: