Fan Ho / 何藩 | Street photographer

Fan Ho (Shanghai, 1931-2016) photographic⏭ career started at the early age of 14 when given his first Kodak Brownie from his father.

Within the first year he won his first award⏭ in 1949 in Shanghai.

At the age of 18, he acquired his twin lens Rolleiflex with which he captured all his famous work after he moved to Hong Kong with his parents and continued to purse his love for photography.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti | Cassandra

Rend, rend thy hair, Cassandra: he will go.⁠⁠⁠

Yea, rend thy garments, wring thy hands, and cry

⁠From Troy still towered to the unreddened sky.

See, all but she that bore thee mock thy woe: -

He most whom that fair woman arms, with show

⁠Of wrath on her bent brows; for in this place

⁠This hour thou bad'st all men in Helen's face

The ravished ravishing prize of Death to know.

Irving Ramsey Wiles | The Green Cushion, 1895

Artist: Irving Ramsey Wiles (1861-1948)
Date: 1895
Culture: American⏩
Medium: Watercolor, graphite, and gouache on paper
Dimensions: 22 x 28 in. (55.9 x 71.1 cm)
Classification: Drawings
Credit Line: Gift of Ann M. and Thomas W. Barwick, and Purchase, Ann M. and Thomas W. Barwick Gift, 1994

This watercolor portrays a young woman reclining on an Empire revival-style recamier couch. The woman at leisure was a popular subject in late-nineteenth-century American painting.

Simon Pasini, 1976 | Impressionist painter

Simon Pasini was born in Genoa. In 1984 he moved with his family to South Africa, where he began studying art and began to cultivate a passion for painting and art.

His early works watercolors are characterized by attention to detail and the use of light with dramatic cuts.

He returned to Italy in 1992, he attended the Art School "James and Pio Manzu" of Bergamo.

After his studies he worked initially as a restorer, then specializing in the realization of the frescoes, dedicated in particular to the decoration.

Claude Monet | La Grenouillère, 1869

During the summer of 1869, Monet⏩ and Renoir⏭ set up their easels at La Grenouillère, a boating and bathing resort on the Seine River, not far from Paris.

Monet noted on September 25,

"I do have a dream, a painting, the baths of La Grenouillère, for which I have made some bad sketches, but it is only a dream. Renoir, who has just spent two months here, also wants to do this painting".

Among their various depictions of the subject, this composition closely resembles one by Renoir in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. | © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Francesco Guardi | Baroque Era / Veduta painter

Francesco Guardi (1712-1793), one of the outstanding Venetian landscape painters of the Rococo period.

Francesco and his brother Nicolò (1715-86) were trained under their elder brother, Giovanni Antonio Guardi. Their sister Cecilia married Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. By 1731 the brothers are recorded as collaborating in a bottega, half-studio and half-shop.

Pier Toffoletti, 1957 | Figurative painter

Italian painter Pier Toffoletti was born in the village of Torreano near Cividale in Northern Italy, surrounded by the art and antiquities of ancient Rome. Now he lives and works in Udine. Since he was a young boy, painting has been a passion and he drew inspiration from the tiles and frescos which were a part of his daily life.

In 1976 Pier earned a "Diploma di Maestro in Arte Applicata" (Certificate of Master in Applied Arts). While developing his unique medium and style he worked as Creative Director for his advertising agency, using his talented eye for developing and directing television commercials. Pier also worked with the Italian public broadcasting network (RAI) on a number of animation projects.

Frank Cadogan Cowper | The last of the Pre-Raphaelites

From: Christie's

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Frank Cadogan Cowper was born in 1877 at Wicken in Northamptonshire, where his maternal grandfather was rector. He studied art at the St John's Wood Art School and then spent five years in the Royal Academy Schools (1897-1902), before entering the Cotswold studio of Edwin Austin Abbey (1852-1911).

After six months working with this American muralist who, like his friend John Singer Sargent, had taken up residence in England, Cowper completed his artistic education by studying for a while in Italy.