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Description
Wyeth:
Andrew Wyeth (1917 -). American painter, noted for his interpretations of the people and the austere rural landscapes of Pennsylvania and Maine. Wyeth was born in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and was trained by his father, the illustrator and muralist Newell Convers Wyeth. Andrew Wyeth held his first one-man show at the age of 20 and scored an immediate success. His media are chiefly watercolor and tempera; his colors are predominantly subtle shades of brown and gray. In his compositions he displays technical brilliance, realism, and affection for his subjects. Among Wyeth's best-known works are Christina's World (1948, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), Her Room (1963, Farnsworth Museum, Rockland, Me.), and Spring Fed (1967, W. E. Weiss, Jr., Collection). Perhaps the most popular painter of his day, he received the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963, and in 1970 he became the first living artist to be accorded an exhibition in the White House. In 1986, 240 previously unknown works, all studies of a woman named Helga, were revealed to the public for the first time. Andrew Wyeth's son, James Browning Wyeth, is also an artist.

Winslow Homer:
His works, mostly engravings, are characterized by clean outlines, simplified forms, dramatic contrast of light and dark, and lively figure groupings — qualities that remained important throughout his career.
In 1859 he opened a studio in New York City, and began his painting career.
Harper's sent Homer to the front lines of the American Civil War (1861 - 1865), where he sketched battle scenes and mundane camp life. Although the drawings did not get much attention at the time, they influenced much of his later work.
Back at his studio after the war, Homer set to work on real war-related paintings, among them Sharpshooter on Picket Duty, and Prisoners from the Front which is noted for its objectivity and realism.
After exhibiting at the National Academy of Design, Homer traveled to Paris, France in 1867 where he remained for a year. He practiced painting landscapes while continuing to work for Harper's. Though his interest in depicting natural light parellels the impressionists interest in natural light, the group did not directly affect his work.
Throughout the 1870s he portrayed mostly rural or idyllic scenes of farm life, children playing, and resorts. Homer gained acclaim as a painter in the late 1870s and early 1880s. His 1872 composition, Snap-the-Whip, showed at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
In 1873 he started painting with watercolours, and the medium became as important to him as oil paint. His watercolor painting's show a fresh, spontaneous, loose, yet natural style. Thereafter, Homer seldom went anywhere without paper, brushes and water paints.

Hopper:

American painter, whose highly individualistic works are landmarks of American realism. His paintings embody in art a particular American 20th-century sensibility that is characterized by isolation, melancholy, and loneliness.
Hopper was born on July 22, 1882, in Nyack, New York, and studied illustration in New York City at a commercial art school from 1899 to 1900. Around 1901 he switched to painting and studied at the New York School of Art until 1906, largely under Robert Henri. He made three trips to Europe between 1906 and 1910 but remained unaffected by current French and Spanish experiments in cubism. He was influenced mainly by the great European realists—Diego Velazquez, Francisco de Goya, Honore Daumier, Edouard Manet—whose work had first been introduced to him by his New York City teachers. His early paintings, such as Le pavillon de flore, were committed to realism and exhibited some of the basic characteristics that he was to retain throughout his career: compositional style based on simple, large geometric forms; flat masses of color; and the use of architectural elements in his scenes for their strong verticals, horizontals, and diagonals.
Although one of Hopper's paintings was exhibited in the famous Armory Show of 1913 in New York City, his work excited little interest, and he was obliged to work principally as a commercial illustrator for the next decade. In 1925 he painted House by the Railroad, a landmark in American art that marked the advent of his mature style. The emphasis on blunt shapes and angles and the stark play of light and shadow were in keeping with his earlier work, but the mood—which was the real subject of the painting—was new: It conveyed an atmosphere of all-embracing loneliness and almost eerie solitude.
Hopper continued to work in this style for the rest of his life, refining and purifying it but never abandoning its basic principles. Most of his paintings portray scenes in New York or New England, both country and city scenes, all with a spare, homely quality—deserted streets, half-empty theaters, gas stations, railroad tracks, rooming houses. One of his best-known works, Nighthawks, shows an all-night café, its few uncommunicative customers illuminated in the pitiless glare of electric lights.
Although Hopper's work was outside the mainstream of mid-20th-century abstraction, his simplified schematic style was one of the influences on the later representational revival and on pop art. He died May 15, 1967, in New York City.

Degas:
French artist, acknowledged as the master of drawing the human figure in motion. Degas worked in many mediums, preferring pastel to all others. He is perhaps best known for his paintings, drawings, and bronzes of ballerinas and of race horses.
The art of Degas reflects a concern for the psychology of movement and expression and the harmony of line and continuity of contour. These characteristics set Degas apart from the other impressionist painters, although he took part in all but one of the 8 impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886. Degas was the son of a wealthy banker, and his aristocratic family background instilled into his early art a haughty yet sensitive quality of detachment. As he grew up, his idol was the painter Jean Auguste Ingres, whose example pointed him in the direction of a classical draftsmanship, stressing balance and clarity of outline. After beginning his artistic studies with Louis Lamothes, a pupil of Ingres, he started classes at the Ecole des Beaux Arts but left in 1854 and went to Italy. He stayed there for 5 years, studying Italian art, especially Renaissance works.
Returning to Paris in 1859, he painted portraits of his family and friends and a number of historical subjects, in which he combined classical and romantic styles. In Paris, Degas came to know Édouard Manet, and in the late 1860s he turned to contemporary themes, painting both theatrical scenes and portraits with a strong emphasis on the social and intellectual implications of props and setting.
In the early 1870s the female ballet dancer became his favorite theme. He sketched from a live model in his studio and combined poses into groupings that depicted rehearsal and performance scenes in which dancers on stage, entering the stage, and resting or waiting to perform are shown simultaneously and in counterpoint, often from an oblique angle of vision.

Rembrandt:

Cezanne:
French painter, one of the greatest of the Postimpressionists, whose works and ideas were influential in the aesthetic development of many 20th-century artists and art movements, especially Cubism. Cézanne's art, misunderstood and discredited by the public during most of his life, grew out of Impressionism and eventually challenged all the conventional values of painting in the 19th century through its insistence on personal expression and on the integrity of the painting itself. He has been called the father of modern painting.

Bernini, Michelangelo, da Vinci

Description
Wyeth:
Andrew Wyeth (1917 -). American painter, noted for his interpretations of the people and the austere rural landscapes of Pennsylvania and Maine. Wyeth was born in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and was trained by his father, the illustrator and muralist Newell Convers Wyeth. Andrew Wyeth held his first one-man show at the age of 20 and scored an immediate success. His media are chiefly watercolor and tempera; his colors are predominantly subtle shades of brown and gray. In his compositions he displays technical brilliance, realism, and affection for his subjects. Among Wyeth's best-known works are Christina's World (1948, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), Her Room (1963, Farnsworth Museum, Rockland, Me.), and Spring Fed (1967, W. E. Weiss, Jr., Collection). Perhaps the most popular painter of his day, he received the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963, and in 1970 he became the first living artist to be accorded an exhibition in the White House. In 1986, 240 previously unknown works, all studies of a woman named Helga, were revealed to the public for the first time. Andrew Wyeth's son, James Browning Wyeth, is also an artist.

Winslow Homer:
His works, mostly engravings, are characterized by clean outlines, simplified forms, dramatic contrast of light and dark, and lively figure groupings — qualities that remained important throughout his career.
In 1859 he opened a studio in New York City, and began his painting career.
Harper's sent Homer to the front lines of the American Civil War (1861 - 1865), where he sketched battle scenes and mundane camp life. Although the drawings did not get much attention at the time, they influenced much of his later work.
Back at his studio after the war, Homer set to work on real war-related paintings, among them Sharpshooter on Picket Duty, and Prisoners from the Front which is noted for its objectivity and realism.
After exhibiting at the National Academy of Design, Homer traveled to Paris, France in 1867 where he remained for a year. He practiced painting landscapes while continuing to work for Harper's. Though his interest in depicting natural light parellels the impressionists interest in natural light, the group did not directly affect his work.
Throughout the 1870s he portrayed mostly rural or idyllic scenes of farm life, children playing, and resorts. Homer gained acclaim as a painter in the late 1870s and early 1880s. His 1872 composition, Snap-the-Whip, showed at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
In 1873 he started painting with watercolours, and the medium became as important to him as oil paint. His watercolor painting's show a fresh, spontaneous, loose, yet natural style. Thereafter, Homer seldom went anywhere without paper, brushes and water paints.

Hopper:

American painter, whose highly individualistic works are landmarks of American realism. His paintings embody in art a particular American 20th-century sensibility that is characterized by isolation, melancholy, and loneliness.
Hopper was born on July 22, 1882, in Nyack, New York, and studied illustration in New York City at a commercial art school from 1899 to 1900. Around 1901 he switched to painting and studied at the New York School of Art until 1906, largely under Robert Henri. He made three trips to Europe between 1906 and 1910 but remained unaffected by current French and Spanish experiments in cubism. He was influenced mainly by the great European realists—Diego Velazquez, Francisco de Goya, Honore Daumier, Edouard Manet—whose work had first been introduced to him by his New York City teachers. His early paintings, such as Le pavillon de flore, were committed to realism and exhibited some of the basic characteristics that he was to retain throughout his career: compositional style based on simple, large geometric forms; flat masses of color; and the use of architectural elements in his scenes for their strong verticals, horizontals, and diagonals.
Although one of Hopper's paintings was exhibited in the famous Armory Show of 1913 in New York City, his work excited little interest, and he was obliged to work principally as a commercial illustrator for the next decade. In 1925 he painted House by the Railroad, a landmark in American art that marked the advent of his mature style. The emphasis on blunt shapes and angles and the stark play of light and shadow were in keeping with his earlier work, but the mood—which was the real subject of the painting—was new: It conveyed an atmosphere of all-embracing loneliness and almost eerie solitude.
Hopper continued to work in this style for the rest of his life, refining and purifying it but never abandoning its basic principles. Most of his paintings portray scenes in New York or New England, both country and city scenes, all with a spare, homely quality—deserted streets, half-empty theaters, gas stations, railroad tracks, rooming houses. One of his best-known works, Nighthawks, shows an all-night café, its few uncommunicative customers illuminated in the pitiless glare of electric lights.
Although Hopper's work was outside the mainstream of mid-20th-century abstraction, his simplified schematic style was one of the influences on the later representational revival and on pop art. He died May 15, 1967, in New York City.

Degas:
French artist, acknowledged as the master of drawing the human figure in motion. Degas worked in many mediums, preferring pastel to all others. He is perhaps best known for his paintings, drawings, and bronzes of ballerinas and of race horses.
The art of Degas reflects a concern for the psychology of movement and expression and the harmony of line and continuity of contour. These characteristics set Degas apart from the other impressionist painters, although he took part in all but one of the 8 impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886. Degas was the son of a wealthy banker, and his aristocratic family background instilled into his early art a haughty yet sensitive quality of detachment. As he grew up, his idol was the painter Jean Auguste Ingres, whose example pointed him in the direction of a classical draftsmanship, stressing balance and clarity of outline. After beginning his artistic studies with Louis Lamothes, a pupil of Ingres, he started classes at the Ecole des Beaux Arts but left in 1854 and went to Italy. He stayed there for 5 years, studying Italian art, especially Renaissance works.
Returning to Paris in 1859, he painted portraits of his family and friends and a number of historical subjects, in which he combined classical and romantic styles. In Paris, Degas came to know Édouard Manet, and in the late 1860s he turned to contemporary themes, painting both theatrical scenes and portraits with a strong emphasis on the social and intellectual implications of props and setting.
In the early 1870s the female ballet dancer became his favorite theme. He sketched from a live model in his studio and combined poses into groupings that depicted rehearsal and performance scenes in which dancers on stage, entering the stage, and resting or waiting to perform are shown simultaneously and in counterpoint, often from an oblique angle of vision.

Rembrandt:

Cezanne:
French painter, one of the greatest of the Postimpressionists, whose works and ideas were influential in the aesthetic development of many 20th-century artists and art movements, especially Cubism. Cézanne's art, misunderstood and discredited by the public during most of his life, grew out of Impressionism and eventually challenged all the conventional values of painting in the 19th century through its insistence on personal expression and on the integrity of the painting itself. He has been called the father of modern painting.

Bernini, Michelangelo, da Vinci