Masters Gallery 
Contact
The Masters Gallery
Michelangelo Buonarotti
Birth Year : 1475
Death Year : 1564
Country : Italy
Michelagniolodi Lodovico di Lionardo di Buonarroti Simone was born in Caprese in Tuscany. He attended Latin School and studied painting in the workshop of the Ghirlandaio brothers and sculpture with Bertoldo, a pupil of Donatello. Michelangelo's early training came from the great Florentine masters of the Low Renaissance: Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, and Signorelli. A true Renaissance man, he was gifted as a painter, a sculptor, an architect, an engineer, and a poet, but his preference was for sculpture with its plastic possibilities for the revelation and exaltation of the human body.
Visit the Michelangelo Gallery
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
Birth Year : 1573
Death Year : 1609
Country : Italy
Caravaggio, revolutionary naturalist painter, was born in Caravaggio near Milan. He showed his talent early in his life. During the period of 1592-1598, Caravaggio's work was precise in contour, brightly colored, and sculpturesque in form, like the Mannerists, but with an added social and moral consciousness.
Mary Cassatt
Birth Year : 1845
Death Year : 1927
Country : US
Cassatt, one of the two women and the only American to show with the Impressionists, was born in Pittsburgh. She was the daughter of a millionaire and spent her childhood in Europe with her family. After the Cassatt's returned to live in Philadelphia, Mary studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art until she was 23. She eventually left for Europe to study further and visit Italy, Spain, and Belgium before going to Paris where the sight of a pastel by Degas changed her life.
Leonardo da Vinci
Birth Year : 1452
Death Year : 1519
Country : Italy
Leonardo was born in Vinci, a village near Florence. In 1467, Leonardo entered Verrocchio's studio and became a member of the Painter's Guild. He worked with Verrocchio for several years, collaborating with him on paintings and working on commissions of his own. In 1478, Leonardo became an independent artist under the protection of Lorenzo the Magnificent. By 1482, Leonardo left Florence for Milan, where he stayed for nearly 20 years. He applied his talent to music, decorating, pageantry, portrait painting, and engineering projects, particularly of weapons for war and bridge construction.
Salvador Dali
Birth Year : 1904
Death Year : 1589
Country : Spain
Salvador Dali was born in Figueras, Spain, the son of a notary whose family came from Cadaques on the Costa Brava. The Dali family spent their summers in Cadaques, and it is this landscape that appears over and over in the artist's work, either as background or as an integral part of the composition. Dali began his career as an enfant terrible in the schools of Figueras and then went to the School of Fine Arts in Madrid where he quickly learned the fundamentals of drawing. At this time, however, he was more interested in studying Freud and art magazines that specialized in Cubism, Futurism, and metaphysical art.
Edgar Degas
Birth Year : 1834
Death Year : 1917
Country : France
Degas, an Impressionist painter, was born in Paris. He was the son of a banker who wished him to go into business. Degas did not begin to study art until he was 23 years old. He studied the work of Clouet and Poussin at the Louvre, and he then went to Italy and studied the art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Once Degas joined the Impressionists, he changed his subject matter, painting racetrack scenes sketched from life and finished in his studio, theatrical and ballet scenes, and many pictures of women.
Paul Gauguin
Birth Year : 1848
Death Year : 1903
Country : France
Gauguin, the most exotic of the Post-Impressionists, was born in Paris. The son of a French journalist and a Peruvian woman, Gauguin spent his early childhood in Peru and attended a boarding school in France. He was a merchant seaman before becoming a stockbroker's assistant in 1871. At first an occasional painter, Gauguin often visited the Nouvelle Athenes Café, where he met Pissarro and the Impressionists, whose works he purchased. Gauguin decided to give up the business world in 1883 and devote himself to art.
Frida Kahlo
Birth Year : 1910
Death Year : 1954
Country : Mexico
Frida Kahlo was born in Coyoicoàn, Mexico City, to a Mexican mother and German father. At the age of fifteen, when she was preparing to enter medical school, she suffered a road accident. Though she never fully recovered, and her life would be increasingly filled with pain and disability, she began painting during her recuperation from the accident. She sent paintings to the well-established Mexican painter Diego Rivera. Rivera encouraged Kahlo, and in 1928 the two painters married; their stormy relationship would last for the rest of Kahlo's life.
Claude Monet
Birth Year : 1840
Death Year : 1928
Country : France
Monet, the leader of the Impressionist movement, was born in Paris but spent his youth in Le Havre, where he began his artistic career as a caricaturist. In 1858 and 1859, he painted outdoors under Boudin and Jongkind, both of whom were interested in the effects of light upon objects and in capturing various atmospheric conditions. In 1860, Monet went to Paris to study at the Académie Gleyre, where he met Renoir, Sisley, and Bazille. The four artists, as well as Pissarro and Cezanne, met frequently with Manet, and it was from these associations and conversations that Monet began to develop his own theories of painting. Between 1865-1871, he developed the style that is most closely associated with the Impressionist movement.
Pablo Picasso
Birth Year : 1881
Death Year : 1973
Country : Spain
Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain. The son of a Basque art teacher, Picasso showed a very early talent for drawing. He was fourteen when the family moved to Barcelona where his father was a professor at the School of Art. Two years later Picasso had his first exhibition of rather somber, quite classical paintings. Between 1900 and 1904 he made three trips to Paris where he studied the works of the Impressionists and of Cezanne. In 1904 he settled in France, where he has remained all his life.
Visit the Pablo Picasso Gallery
Camille Pissarro
Birth Year : 1830
Death Year : 1903
Country : France
Pissarro was born on St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, and did not arrive in Paris until he was 25. He first studied at the Beaux-Arts and then with Corot, whose style influenced his earliest works. Pissarro became interested in Courbet Courbet. Some of Courbet's realism may be found in Pissarro's works of about 1863. A painter of nature, Pissarro was happy in the country, and he settled in Louveciennes with his family in 1866.
Diego Rivera
Birth Year : 1886
Death Year : 1957
Country : Mexico
Diego Rivera was born in Guanajuato, Mexico. From 1898-1905, he studied at the academy of San Carlos, where he first discovered the beauty of Baile en Tehauntepec Diego Rivera Buy From Art.com pre-Columbian art and gained his understanding of the laws of perspective. From 1907-1921, he traveled in Europe where he encountered such artists as Braque, Derain, Cezanne, Picasso and Mondrian, and their work influenced him greatly. In 1920, a visit to Italy exposed him to the murals of the Italian painters of the quattrocentro. He envisioned a new and revolutionary public art that could help advance his revolutionary ideals.
Raphael Sanzio
Birth Year : 1483
Death Year : 1520
Country : Italy
Raphael, the last of the three great painters of the Renaissance, was born Raffaello Sanzio in Urbino, in the province of Umbria. It is probable that he took his first lessons from his father, a provincial painter named Giovanni di Santi, before going to Florence. He was working in the studio of Perugino by 1500, an artist well known for his serene and beautifully colored works. Raphael's work became luminous in atmosphere, rich and clear in color, harmonious in movement, sculpturally three-dimensional, and perfectly balanced in composition.
Rembrandt van Rijn
Birth Year : 1606
Death Year : 1669
Country : Netherlands
Rembrandt, the finest of the Dutch painters and one of the greatest artists of all time, was born in Leyden. The son of a prosperous miller, young Rembrandt studied painting after attending Latin school. He first attended school in Leyden and then in Amsterdam under Peter Lastman, from whom he learned chiaroscuro-the dramatic use of light and shadow-as his teacher had learned in Italy from Caravaggio. In 1631, Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam, where he remained permanently.
Peter Paul Rubens
Birth Year : 1577
Death Year : 1640
Country : Netherlands
Rubens, the great Flemish Baroque master, was born in Germany while his Protestant father was in exile. Rubens did not comeback to his family's native Antwerp until after his father's death in 1589. He was then brought up Catholic and received a classical education before studying art with three different Flemish artists. He became a member of the Antwerp Painters' Guild in 1598. In 1600, Rubens left for Italy. Except for a brief trip to Spain, he remained in Italy for eight years, It was during this time that he showed the ideas and influences of Michelangelo, Raphael, Correggio, and his contemporaries, the Caracci and Caravaggio. He produced religious works at this time that already more than hinted at his later style.
Vincent Van Gogh
Birth Year : 1853
Death Year : 1890
Country : Netherlands
Van Gogh was born in Groot-Zundert, Holland. The son of a pastor, Vincent was highly emotional and lacked self-confidence. Between 1860 and 1880, when he finally decided to become an artist, van Gogh had had two unsuitable and unhappy romances and had worked unsuccessfully as a clerk in a bookstore, an art salesman, and a preacher in the Borinage (a dreary mining district in Belgium), where he was dismissed, He remained in Belgium to study art, determined to provide happiness by creating beauty. The works of his early Dutch period are somber-toned, sharply lit, genre paintings. The most famous of these paintings is "The Potato Eaters" (1885).
Diego Velázquez
Birth Year : 1599
Death Year : 1660
Country : Spain
Velázquez, although born in Seville, was of Portuguese descent. He may have studied with Herrara, the elder, but it is certain that he spent six years in Seville in the studio of a painter named Pacheco. He married Pacheco's daughter in 1618. His work was Baroque in style, with heavy pigment and sharp contrasts that suited the tavern scenes and still lifes he painted until 1623, when he went to Madrid and became painter to the king. As court painter he was principally a portraitist; and his style changed entirely, becoming lighter, clearer, and shallower in composition. Following a trip to Italy in 1629, Velázquez, who had copied Renaissance paintings, abandoned Classicism. He began to use silvery tones and a wider range of color, painting in a way that was not to be equaled in atmosphere, use of light, dramatic composition, and optical effects until the 19th century Impressionists.
Johannes Jan Vermeer
Birth Year : 1632
Death Year : 1675
Country : Netherlands
Vermeer, the finest genre painter of the 17th century, lived in Delft. He was the son of a silk weaver and tavern owner who sold art as well as beer. So little is known about Vermeer that it is only presumed that he was at one time an apprentice to Rembrandt's pupil, Carel Fabritius. Vermeer had eight children after marrying in 1653, kept the tavern that he had inherited from his father, and painted in his spare time. Vermeer garnered very little, if any, attention during his lifetime. It was not until 1860 that a Parisian art critic published a monograph on Vermeer and brought him public recognition.
Andy Warhol
Birth Year : 1928
Death Year : 1987
Country : United States
Andy Warhol began his artistic endeavors as a child. He was often bedridden from the movement disorder Sydenham's chorea. This period of his life was crucial to his development. Outcast from other children, he became close to his mother, listened to the radio and collected pictures of movie stars (who would become his life-long obsession). It was also during this period that he found a talent and a love of drawing. When he graduated high school he entered the Carnegie Institute of Technology's Fine Art College.