Francis Barlow (c. 1626 – 1704) was an English painter, etcher, and draughtsman, mainly of animal subjects, known as ‘the father of British sporting painting’. He painted numerous large canvases for decorative schemes and was also a prolific book illustrator, his etchings for an edition of Aesop's Fables published in 1666 being particularly well known. His work is vividly observed, with an almost naive charm.He was born in the county of Lincoln, and received his first instructions i...

Joseph Mallord William Turner was English artist, one of the greatest and most original of all landscape painters. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivaling history painting. Although renowned for his oil paintings, Turner is also one of the greatest masters of British watercolor landscape painting. In 1856 the Court of Chancery awarded all the works remaining in his possession at his d...

Francesco Lazzaro Guardi (1712 – 1793) was a Venetian painter of veduta (a highly detailed, usually large-scale painting or, actually more often print, of a cityscape or some other vista), a member of the Venetian School. His early vedutas show influence both from Canaletto and Luca Carlevarijs. Francesco Guardi's most important later works include the Doge's Feasts, a series of twelve canvases celebrating the ceremonies held in 1763 for the election of Doge Alvise IV Mocenigo. In his late...

Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), Italian engraver and architect, is best known for his etchings of ancient and baroque Rome and grandiose architectural constructions of his own imagination. Throughout most of his adult life Piranesi made etchings of views of the city; not only its antiquities, such as the Pantheon, but also its contemporary masterpieces such as the Capitoline and Piazza Navona. The scenes are animated with tiny, frail, fluttering figures. Long before he died his pri...

Pieter Bruegel the Elder was a Dutch Renaissance painter and printmaker from Brabant, known for his landscapes and peasant scenes (so called genre painting). He received the nickname "Peasant Bruegel" or "Bruegel the Peasant" for his practice of dressing up like a peasant in order to socialize at weddings and other celebrations, thereby gaining inspiration and authentic details for his genre paintings. His drawings and prints made after his designs, while based on traditional sources, are ...

Antonio Allegri da Correggio (1489 – 1534), usually known as Correggio, was the foremost painter of the Parma school of the Italian Renaissance, who was responsible for some of the most vigorous and sensuous works of the 16th century. He was remembered by his contemporaries as a shadowy, melancholic and introverted character. An enigmatic and eclectic artist, he appears to have emerged from no major apprenticeship. In addition to the influence of Costa, there are echoes of Mantegna's style...

Sir Anthony van Dyck is most famous for his portraits of Charles I of England and his family and court, painted with a relaxed elegance that was to be the dominant influence on English portrait-painting for the next 150 years. He also painted biblical and mythological subjects, displayed outstanding facility as a draughtsman, and was an important innovator in watercolor and etching.A list of history paintings produced by van Dyck in England survives, compiled by Van Dyck's biograph...

Thomas Gainsborough (1727 – 1788) was an English portrait and landscape artist, the most versatile English painter of the 18th century. He was the most inventive and original, always prepared to experiment with new ideas and techniques. Gainsborough alone among the great portrait painters of the era also devoted serious attention to landscapes. Unlike Reynolds, he was no great believer in an academic tradition and laughed at the fashion for history painting; an instinctive painter, he deli...

John Singleton Copley (1738 – 1815) was an American painter, active in both colonial America and England. He was probably born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Richard and Mary Singleton Copley, both Anglo-Irish. He is famous for his portrait paintings of important figures in colonial New England, depicting in particular middle-class subjects. His paintings were innovative in their tendency to depict artifacts relating to these individuals' lives.John Singleton Copley’s portraits of co...

Winslow Homer was American painter, illustrator and etcher, one of the two most admired American late 19th-century artists and is considered to be the greatest pictorial poet of outdoor life in the United States and its greatest watercolorist. Nominally a landscape painter, in a sense carrying on Hudson River school attitudes, Homer was an artist of power and individuality whose images are metaphors for the relationship of Man and Nature. A careful observer of visual reality, he was at the...

Francesco Allegrini da Gubbio (1587–1663) was an Italian painter of the Baroque period. His children, Flaminio and Angelica Allegrini were also painters. Francesco Allegrini was admired as a battle painter. He was active in Rome, Genoa, Savona, and Naples. In Rome, he painted in the Vatican Loggias. He also painted in the church of San Marco, Rome, and the chapel of San Antonio in the church of Santi Cosimo e Damiano. Allegrini painted for the Casa Durazzo in Genoa. In Savona he painted fo...

Giovanni Antonio Canal, better known as Canaletto, was an Italian painter of landscapes of Venice. He was also an important printmaker in etching. Much of Canaletto's early artwork was painted "from nature", differing from the then customary practice of completing paintings in the studio. Some of his later works do revert to this custom, as suggested by the tendency for distant figures to be painted as blobs of color – an effect produced by using a camera obscura, which blurs farther-away ...