Famous artists

• Rembrandt
  1606 in Leiden, The Netherlands, died 1669
  Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn is the most famous painter of the Dutch Golden Age, etcher and draftsman.� He was a painter of light and shade and favoured an uncompromising realism. Rembrandt's biblical scenes and self-portraits were atypical of Dutch pictures of the 17th century. Being among the greatest of all religious painters, he was not particularly outwardly religious.� He is probably most known for his work in portraiture or group portraiture, with his most famous paintings “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp” and “The Night Watch”. Rembrandt's artistic legacy consists of around 500 paintings, more than 1000 drawings and nearly 300 etchings.
• Henri Matisse
  1869 in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, France, died 1954
  Henri Matisse worked in various media, including printmaking, paper collage, and stained glass.� Matisse is best known for his paintings and cutouts, but he was also an accomplished sculptor of bronze reliefs. For his paintings he used rich colors and bold brushstrokes, simple shapes, graceful lines. He tried a new style by painting paper, cutting it out, and then pasting it into the painting. Henri Matisse� became a leader of the Fauve movement, known for its radical, even violent, use of color.
• Vincent van Gogh
  1853 in Zundert, The Netherlands, died 1890
  Vincent van Gogh is a famed impressionist painter. His chaotic paintings have thick brush strokes of heavy, unmixed paint with vibrant colors that pop off the canvas. Suffering from an inherited disease, he had a tumultuous state of mind. This lead to the infamous� ear-mutilation. His bold and unconventional use of color, changed our perception of art and gave inspiration to other artists.� However his black-and-white drawings are considered among his finest and most dramatic creations. Vincent van Gogh's best known works are "Starry Night" and his "Sunflower" series. When he was alive he never sold a painting, but after his death, his works became exceptionally valuable.
• Salvador Dali
  1904 in Figueres, Spain, died 1989
  Salvador Dali is an important Catalan painter, and had his first exhibition at age 14. Even though Salvador Dali experimented with Cubism, Futurism and Metaphysical paintings, he is best known for his surrealist paintings. His groundbreaking surrealist work he made between 1929-39 are striking, bizarre, dreamlike images, and� frequently included figures of humans with distorted bodies.
• Michelangelo
  1475 in Caprese, Italy, died 1564
  Michelangelo Buonarotti was a Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, draftsman and poet. He also produced designs for decorative objects and interior furnishings. He is famous for works as the Last Judgement over the altar, the sculpture Pietá, colossal David, the completion of architecture of Saint Peter's (Rome), and his incredible painting paintings on the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel. Michelangelo used the human body to express emotions. His sculptures represent an epitome of the High Renaissance.
• Leonardo Da Vinci
  1452 in Vinci, Italy, died 1519
  Leonardo da Vinci is one of the great masters of the High Renaissance.� He was a scientist, inventor, artist and mastery of technical innovations. He engineered canal locks, cathedrals, and engines of war. Leonardo Da Vinci's surviving notebooks detail flying machines, parachutes, human anatomy (he dissected a human body), and the first robot in recorded history. His paintings are known for their subtle naturalism, drama and expressive gestures. The Mona Lisa is today’s most popular symbol of the genius, with the mysterious smiling subject. The film version of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" raised interest in the work of Leonardo da Vinci. It refers to cryptic messages supposedly incorporated by Da Vinci into his artwork.
• Claude Monet
  1840 in Paris, France, died 1926
  Claude Monet grew up in Le Havre. He first became known for his caricatures and exhibited this work locally. During this time, met fellow artist Eugene Boudin who became his mentor. Impressionism was named after his painting "Impression Sunrise". The Impressionists painted what they saw and felt rather than painting something exactly the way it really looked. Claude Monet sought to bring visual integrity to painting by working in plein air and observing first hand the effects of light on objects. He is perhaps best known for his series of paintings of his magnificent gardens in Giverny and The Rouen Cathedral series.
• Edvard Munch
  1863 in Ådalsbruk, Norway, died 1944
  Edvard Munch was a Norwegian painter and print maker and one of the most prolific, influential and innovative figures in modern art. Edvard Munch was a pioneer of an art which depicted the conflicts of modern man. He is best known for one painting with several versions: The Scream. This is a hallucinogenic self-portrait, inspired by his sister's death from tuberculosis. The later, more painterly landscapes and portraits of Munch are often forgotten. He is regarded as one of the most significant influences on the development of expressionism. In 2006 two Edvard Munch masterpieces were recovered. They had been stolen from the Munch Museum in Oslo and missing for two years.
• Edgar Degas
  1834 in Paris, France, died 1917
  Edgar (Hilaire-Germain-Edgar) Degas is known as the master of drawing bodies in motion. They may be race horses, they might be bathers or laundresses or (most famously) ballerinas. Edgar Degas is also known for his clever use of empty space in composition. He made sculptures, which he created out of wax and clay originally, and cast in bronze later.
• Piet Mondrian
  1872 as Piet Mondriaan in Amersfoort, The Netherlands, died 1944
  Piet Mondrian was a Dutch abstract expressionist painter. His non-representational paintings that he called compositions, consist of rectangular forms of red, yellow, blue and black and look like otherworldly power grids. He was one of the founding members in 1917 of a Dutch art movement called De Stijl (meaning "The Style"), a coldly intellectual approach to design. Piet Mondrian was also fascinated by trees and flowers.
• Johannes Vermeer
  1632 in Delft, Holland, died in 1675
  Jan or Johannes Vermeer was born in Delft, a town best known for its blue and white glazed earthenware (Delft Blue). Vermeer painted Delft streets and home interiors of Delft.� Vermeer painted the domestic scenes with great clarity and repose, with subtle uses of light and shade, and slightly blurred outlines.� In the scenes there were often solitary, serene figures caught in acts of private contemplation.
• Paul Gauguin
  1848 in Paris, France, died 1903
  French painter, sculptor, and print maker is with a creative relationship with Vincent van Gogh. He decided to "drop out" from his business career and family life, looking for pure artistic inspiration in a "primitive" environment in the Brittany and the South Pacific. Paul Gauguin is known for some very weird paintings, provocative portraits of young Tahitian women. His work has been categorized as Post-Impressionist, Synthetist, and Symbolist. Gauguin's art influenced many other artists work, including Edvard Munch, Henri Matisse who was inspired by Gauguin's use of colour, and Pablo Picasso.
• Paul Cezanne
  1839 in Aix-en-Provence, France, died in 1906
  Paul Cézanne was one of the greatest of the Post-Impressionists. Today many critics call him the Father of Modern Painting. He was a slow though diligent worker, and best known for his still lifes and landscapes. Paul Cézanne was most concerned with the formal qualities of his paintings and the precise balance of color, light, and shadow. He broke up the picture plane in a manner that was significant for George Braque's and Pablo Picasso's cubist discoveries, and profoundly influenced Henri Matisse.
• Pablo Picasso
  1881 in Málaga, Spain, died 1973
  Spanish painter, sculptor, graphic and ceramic artist Pablo Picasso changed the face of modern art. He developed Cubism near the beginning of his artistic career with fellow artist Georges Braque, and was central to the development of a number of important 20th century art movements. His drawings were known for their clarity, subtlety and simplicity with radical, abstract interpretations of human forms. Pablo Picasso had relations with many women despite being married. Throughout his extensive career, he sculpted and painted 300 sculptures, 13500 paintings. He is known for saying “Good artists copy, great artists steal”.
• Andy Warhol
  1928 as Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, died 1987
  Andy Warhol was an American painter, filmmaker and pop icon.� Warhol was trained as a commercial artist, and was part of the Pop Art Movement in American art, together with Roy Lichtenstein. He is best known for his screen-prints and paintings of the late 1960s: bold portrayals of such subjects as Campbell's Soup cans and celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Kennedy. Outside of the art world, Andy Warhol is best known for the quote "In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.". Later he told reporters, humorously "My new line is, 'In fifteen minutes, everybody will be famous'".