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Ilya Repin – The gifted artist of the group known as “The Itinerants”
Ilya Repin was the most gifted of the group known in Russia as “The Itinerants”. When only twelve years old, he joined Ivan Bounakov’s studio to learn the icon-painter’s craft. Religious representations always remained of great importance for him.
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Emotions through unique color and form in Wassily Kandinsky’s abstract art
Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a Russian painter credited as being among the first to truly venture into abstract art. He persisted in expressing his internal world of abstraction despite negative criticism from his peers.
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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: The performances of Parisian nightlife
Known for his posters for cabarets and performances, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) was the painter of Parisian nightlife par excellence. Completely immerged in the bohemian milieu of the period, he produced numerous paintings and lithographs representing the lower levels of society.
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Shelley’s Art Musings – Spotlight on Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks
Edward Hopper was born in 1882 in New York. He was brought up in a comfortable family setting as was a was a good student, showing the early signs of being an artist at the age of 5. His parents encouraged this, keeping him in supplies and learning material to hone his skills. In 1899 he started a correspondence course in art and soon transferred to the New York school of art and design. He studied there for 6 years learning about oil painting, he took inspiration from Manet and Degas, yet found it shocking to sketch from live models.
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Isaac Levitan: Simple, Unpretentious landscapes through his eyes
At the end of the nineteenth century the landscape was one of the foremost genres in Russian painting. It was this influence that shaped Levitan’s art, an art fully and by right symbolic of the finest achievements of Russian landscape painting.
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Egon Schiele – One of the great Expressionist painters
Egon Schiele's roots were in the Jugendstil of the Viennese Secession movement. Like a whole generation, he came under the overwhelming influence of Vienna’s most charismatic and celebrated artist, Gustav Klimt.
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Leonardo Da Vinci – Artist, Painter of the Renaissance
Studying nature with passion, and all the independence proper to his character, he could not fail to combine precision with liberty, and truth with beauty. It is in this final emancipation, this perfect mastery of modelling, of illumination, and of expression, this breadth and freedom, that the master’s raison d’être and glory consist.
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Goya (English version)
Goya is perhaps the most approachable of painters. His art, like his life, is an open book. He concealed nothing from his contemporaries, and offered his art to them with the same frankness. He proved that if a man has the capacity to live and multiply his experiences, to fight and work, he can produce great art without classical decorum and traditional respectability.
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William Morris (English version)
William Morris was one of the most emblematic personalities of the nineteenth century. Painter, architect, poet and engineer, wielding the quill as well as the brush, he jolted Victorian society by discarding standards established by triumphant industry. His commitment to the writing of the Socialist Manifesto was the logical result of the revolution he personified in his habitat, the form of his design and the colours he used.
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Élisabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun (English version) – W. H. Helm
Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun was not only the rare woman of her time who integrated herself into the French Royal Academy of Painting, but also beloved portraitist to the aristocracy. Self-taught, Vigée-Lebrun knew how to get the best from her models, mastering painting effects to perfection and making use of a delicate and refined style.
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