Monet's gift was to show the world a different way of seeing and interpreting everything around us. He brought his canvases to life with dabs and swoops of color put together to give an impression of the scene. He is the ultimate Impressionist: not only did one of his paintings inspire the label "Impressionist" and so name one of the greatest art movements of all time, but he was its leader, whose work changed the way that artists represented nature,...

Ando Hiroshige is considered by many as the last of the great creative masters of the traditional Japanese woodblock print. His skill has won him worldwide fame and artistic influence, along with his contemporary, Katsushika Hokusai. Both artists widened the range of subjects they covered to encompass every aspect of life in Japan's Edo period. Although famous primarily for his landscapes and the studies of his home city of Edo, Hiroshige produced...

Katsushika Hokusai is the most famous of a sequence of names used by a versatile and long-lived Japanese artist who worked in many genres and schools, evolving a unique style that made him known then as well as now as a true master. He was an unusual and restless man who slipped boundaries and made fresh connections, yet never sought great wealth or position. Hokusai produced over 30,000 different designs, prints, illustrations, paintings, and sketches....

Modigliani's human subjects invariably have almond-shaped eyes with long, slightly twisted noses, small pursed mouths, and elongated necks. The majority of his works are semi-formal portraits that radiate a somewhat sculptural quality, suggesting his early roots as a sculptor. Amedeo Modigliani was an Italian Sephardic Jew, born in the port town of Livorno on the northwestern coast of Tuscany on July 12, 1884. He died young, just on the verge of discovery...

Vincent van Gogh is indisputably one of the greatest painters of the late nineteenth century. His works are some of the most recognizable and sought after of any artist. His paintings are the highlights of virtually all the greatest galleries and art collections around the world. On the rare occasions when one of van Gogh's paintings comes up for sale, it invariably breaks auction records-yet, heartbreakingly, van Gogh himself rarely had enough money...

Although an American, Mary Cassatt spent the majority of her life in France and gained most of her fame and success in Europe. Not until after her death on June 14, 1926, at Chateau de Beaufresne, near Paris, did she become a truly celebrated American artist. Cassatt is known most for her paintings and pastels of mothers and their children. Never having been a mother herself, perhaps Cassatt was mesmerized by the familial bond so evident to observers...

Many art historians consider Edouard Manet to be the father of modern art. Although often cited alongside the Impressionists, he was not a member of their group and never exhibited in their Salon des Réfusées. Instead, he pioneered a path between realism and impressionism, choosing contemporary subjects and composing them in a truly modern fashion. A number of Manet's paintings provoked outrage and scandal, but his most controversial work was Le...

Gustav Klimt was raised in poverty in mid-nineteenth century Vienna but his precocious artistic talent raised him from the gutter to the heights of Austrian society. Initially a generic painter of historical scenes he soon devised his own unique style featuring semi-naked women in mystical, gold-wrapped, abstract landscapes that either completely enchanted or totally outraged his audience. His trademark heavily patterned, exotically beautiful women...

Hieronymus Bosch is a Dutch painter of the late Middle Ages. He died in 1516. His work is known for its use of fantastic, now-viewed as horrific, imagery to illustrate moral and religious concepts and narratives of the Roman Catholic church during that time. Balancing the images of hell and tormented sinners are the bucolic, delicate, and detailed landscapes he painted on the back of his triptychs typically created for display and use in churches....

Albrecht Dürer, who lived from 1471 to 1528, worked during the time of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. Typical of his era, religion was the subject of most of his creative work. We know more about Dürer than many artists of his day, thanks to his proclivity with the pen as well as with his paintbrush. He was also widely known across Europe during his lifetime because much of his work was disseminated by printing. Dürer left a considerable...