Maria Peitcheva: 161 books

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617 – 1682) was a Spanish Baroque painter. Although he is best known for his religious works, Murillo also produced a considerable number of paintings of contemporary women and children. These lively, realist portraits of flower girls, street urchins, and beggars constitute an extensive and appealing record of the everyday life of his times.

José Victoriano González-Pérez (1887 – 1927), better known as Juan Gris, was a Spanish painter and sculptor born in Madrid who lived and worked in France most of his life. Closely connected to the innovative artistic genre Cubism, his works are among the movement's most distinctive. In 1906 he...

Lucas Cranach the Elder was a German Renaissance painter and printmaker in woodcut and engraving. He was court painter to the Electors of Saxony for most of his career, and is known for his portraits, both of German princes and those of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, whose cause he embraced...

George Romney was an English portrait painter, the most fashionable artist of his day, painting many leading society figures – including his artistic muse, Emma Hamilton, mistress of Lord Nelson. Romney is generally ranked third in the hierarchy of 18th-century society portrait painters, after Joshua...

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...

Mary Cassatt was an American impressionist painter who depicted the lives of women, chiefly the intimate bond between mother and child. Her works are painted with quick brushstrokes in a pastel palette. Invited in 1877 by her friend and mentor Edgar Degas, Cassatt was one of three women—and the...

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591 – 1666), best known as Guercino, or Il Guercino, was an Italian Baroque painter and draftsman from the region of Emilia, and active in Rome and Bologna. The vigorous naturalism of his early manner is in contrast to the classical equilibrium of his later works. His...

Gwendolen Mary John was a Welsh artist who worked in France for most of her career. She is noted for her still lifes and for her portraits, especially of anonymous female sitters. John was an artist's model for the sculptor Auguste Rodin. John exhibited in Paris for the first time in 1919 at the Salon...

Kuzma Sergeevich Petrov-Vodkin, (1878 – 1939) was an important Russian and Soviet painter and writer. Petrov-Vodkin extensively used an aesthetic of Orthodox icon together with brighter colors and unusual compositions. His works were often deemed irreligious and erotic. From 1924 to 1926 Petrov-Vodkin...

Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin was one of the most famous Russian war artists and one of the first Russian artists to be widely recognized abroad. The graphic nature of his realist scenes led many of them to never be printed or exhibited. Vereshchagin graduated first in the list at the naval school,...

John William Waterhouse was a painter of classical, historical, and literary subjects. Before entering the Royal Academy schools in 1870, Waterhouse assisted his father in his studio. His early works were of classical themes in the spirit of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Frederic Leighton, and were...

Armand Guillaumin (1841 –1927) was a French impressionist painter and lithographer. Noted for their intense colours, Guillamin's paintings are represented in major museums around the world. He is best remembered for his landscapes of Paris, the Creuse département, and the area around Les Adrets-de-l'Estérel...

Theodore Clement Steele (1847 – 1926) was an American Impressionist painter known for his Indiana landscapes. Steele was an innovator and leader in American Midwest painting and is considered to be the most important of Indiana's Hoosier Group painters. In addition to painting, Steele contributed...

Essential figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism, Edouard Manet was an influential painter who left his own unique mark on the art world. In 1856, in his early thirties, Manet opened his own studio. He began painting in a quasi-realist style, which transitioned to a more Impressionist...