Wilhelm Leibl | Genre painter

Wilhelm Maria Hubertus Leibl (1844-1900) was a German realist painter of portraits and scenes of peasant life.

Leibl was born in Cologne, where his father was the director of the Cathedral choir.

He was apprenticed to a locksmith before beginning his artistic training with the local painter Hermann Becker in 1861.

He entered the Munich Academy in 1864, subsequently studying with several artists including Carl Theodor von Piloty.

Claude Monet | Nazi looting / Il saccheggio nazista

Under the Nazi regime, both in Germany from 1933 and in German-occupied countries until 1945, Jewish art collectors of Monet were robbed by Nazis and their agents.

Several of the stolen artworks have been returned to their rightful owners, while others have been the object of court battles.

In 2014, during the spectacular discovery of a hidden trove of art in Munich, a Monet that had belonged to a Jewish retail magnate was found in the suitcase of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of one of Hitler's official dealers of looted art, Hildebrand Gurlitt.

Claude Monet | Fécamp, bord de mer

Emily Dickinson | Marzo: Mese di attesa / March: Month of expectation, 1877

Marzo: mese di attesa.

Le cose che ignoriamo -

E le persone del nostro presagio

Sono in cammino -

Ci sforziamo di fingere fermezza -

Come si deve, ma la gioia solenne

Claude Monet | Strada Romana at Bordighera | Museum Barberini

Cecil van Haanen | Genre painter

Cecil van Haanen (1844-1914) was a Vienna-born Dutch portrait and genre painter, whose significant work was centred at Venice.

Van Haanen was the son to landscape painter Remigius Adrianus Haanen (1812–1894) and Emilie Mayer von Alsó-Rußbach.

He received early artistic training from his father and Friedrich Schilcher, and from April 1854 was educated at the pre-school of the Vienna Academy under Peter Johann Nepomuk Geiger.

Carl von Marr | Genre painter

Carl von Marr (1858-1936) was an American-born German painter whose work encompassed religious and mythological subjects, genre and portraits.

He was also a professor of art in Munich.

He was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

He was a pupil of Henry Vianden in Milwaukee, of Martin Schauß in Weimar, of Karl Gussow in Berlin, and subsequently of Otto Seitz at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich.

His first work, Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, received a medal in Munich.

Grazia Deledda (Nobel Prize) | While the east wind blows, 1905

Grazia Maria Cosima Damiana Deledda (1871-1936) was an Italian writer who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926 "For her idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity picture the life on her native island [i.e. Sardinia] and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general".

She was the first Italian woman to receive the prize, and only the second woman in general after Selma Lagerlöf was awarded hers in 1909.

While the East Wind Blows

A short story by Grazia Deledda published on the official website of the Nobel Prize

From the collection I giuochi della vita, 1905

Translated by Anders Hallengren

Mentre soffia il levante (Original text)

Karl Raupp | Crossing Lake Chiemsee in a storm under the aegis of a guardian angel

Leonardo da Vinci | Ultima Cena / Last Supper, 1494-1498

Last Supper, one of the most famous artworks in the world, painted by Leonardo da Vinci probably between 1494 and 1498 for the Dominican monastery Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan.

It depicts the dramatic scene described in several closely connected moments in the Gospels, including Matthew 26:21–28, in which Jesus declares that one of the Apostles will betray him and later institutes the Eucharist.

According to Leonardo’s belief that posture, gesture, and expression should manifest the “notions of the mind”, each one of the 12 disciples reacts in a manner that Leonardo considered fit for that man’s personality.

The result is a complex study of varied human emotion, rendered in a deceptively simple composition.

Leonardo da Vinci | Ultima Cena / Last Supper, 1494-1498 | Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan

Luigi Russolo | Futurist painter

Luigi Carlo Filippo Russolo (1885-1947) was an Italian Futurist painter, composer, builder of experimental musical instruments, and the author of the manifesto The Art of Noises (1913).

Russolo completed his secondary education at Seminary of Portograuro in 1901, after which he moved to Milan and began gaining interest in the arts.

He is often regarded as one of the first noise music experimental composers with his performances of noise music concerts in 1913-14 and then again after World War I, notably in Paris in 1921.

He designed and constructed a number of noise-generating devices called Intonarumori.