1745–1806
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Artists
Biographies, facts and images with open sources and verified rights.
Found: 1775
1720–1786
Yuhanna al-Armani
Yuhanna al-Armani al-Qudsi (c. 1720–1786), an icon painter of Armenian stock, worked in Cairo from the 1740s and left about four hundred icons, most of them in the churches of Egypt and in the Coptic Museum. His icons decorate the Hanging Church of the Virgin in Old Cairo. He painted in the Coptic tradition, with elongated figures and landscapes of Armenian schooling, labelling the images with Arabic and Coptic text.
14.05.1905–13.10.1981
Antonio Berni
Antonio Berni (1905–1981), the son of an Italian tailor in Rosario, was a Surrealist and a friend of Aragon in the Paris of the 1920s, returned to Argentina in the 1930s to “New Realism” and large canvases of the unemployed, and from 1958 assembled, out of boards, tin and rags from the dumps, the story of Juanito Laguna, a boy from the shanty towns of Buenos Aires. For his prints of Juanito and Ramona he won the Grand Prix of the 1962 Venice Biennale.27.06.1913–07.06.1980
Philip Guston
Philip Guston (1913–1980), the son of emigrants from Odessa, was born in Montreal, grew up in Los Angeles, painted an antifascist mural in Mexico in 1934 and in the 1950s became one of the first-generation Abstract Expressionists. In 1970 he showed at the Marlborough Gallery hooded Klansmen, shoes and light bulbs painted like a comic strip, and the critics answered with a drubbing; today his works are in Tate Modern and the Metropolitan Museum.
29.08.1780–14.01.1867
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) saw himself as a history painter and an heir to Raphael, yet he is remembered above all for portraits: the “Portrait of Monsieur Bertin”, the pencil sheets of his Roman years, the “Grande Odalisque” with its over-long back. A pupil of David, he argued with Delacroix for thirty years about line and colour, lived twice in Rome, and at eighty-three finished “The Turkish Bath”. To Montauban he bequeathed more than four thousand works and his violin.
1716–03.01.1797
Yuan Mei
Yuan Mei (1716–1797) resigned at thirty-two from a county magistracy near Nanjing and spent half a century in his own Sui Garden on Xiaocang Hill: writing poetry, collecting ghost stories for the anthology “What the Master Would Not Discuss”, compiling a cookbook and teaching poetry to dozens of women students. His contemporaries called him “Mister Suiyuan”; far less is known about his paintings than about his verse.
14.11.1990–present
Aya Tarek
Aya Tarek was born in Alexandria in 1990 (1989 by other accounts) and has been painting the walls of her home city since 2008, three years before Egyptian street art drew the world’s attention. She studied oil painting at Alexandria University, inherited the studio of her grandfather, a cinema poster artist, and gathered in it the city’s first graffiti group. In 2024 she received the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture.
21.01.1938–16.11.2009
Pablo Amaringo
Pablo Amaringo (1938–2009), born in a settlement on a tributary of the Ucayali, healed people for several years as a curandero, then in 1977 gave up the practice and began to paint what he had seen in ayahuasca ceremonies. The book “Ayahuasca Visions”, with his paintings, made him known far beyond Peru, and at his Usko-Ayar school in Pucallpa children were taught to draw free of charge.30.11.1904–23.06.1980
Clyfford Still
Clyfford Still (1904–1980) arrived at non-objective painting between 1938 and 1942, ahead of Pollock and Rothko, and painted enormous canvases with a palette knife: ragged tongues of colour, as if one layer of paint had been torn away to show another beneath. In the early 1950s he broke with the galleries, from 1961 he lived on a farm in Maryland, and under his will some 2,400 of his works went to a city that built a separate museum for them; it opened in Denver in 2011.
18.12.1879–29.06.1940
Paul Klee
Paul Klee (1879–1940) thought of himself until thirty-five chiefly as a draughtsman and a violinist, and called himself a painter in April 1914 in Tunisia: “Colour and I are one.” For ten years he taught at the Bauhaus alongside Kandinsky, in 1933 he was dismissed from the Düsseldorf Academy and left for Bern. He left behind about nine thousand works, most of them small, in watercolour and ink, with birds, letters, numbers and angels.
27.06.1878–01.09.1972
He Xiangning
He Xiangning (1878–1972) studied painting in Tokyo in the 1900s, between meetings of Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary league, for which she sewed banners, and in the 1920s she sold her paintings to clothe and treat soldiers. All her life she painted plum blossom, pines, tigers and lions in the manner of the Lingnan School; in 1960 she headed the China Artists Association, and in 1997 China’s first national-level museum named after a single artist opened in Shenzhen, bearing her name.02.05.1952–17.12.2012
Chinwe Chukwuogo-Roy
Chinwe Chukwuogo-Roy (1952–2012) grew up in Nigeria among her father’s cocoa plantations, lived through the Biafran War as a teenager, moved to England in 1975 and took up painting professionally only at thirty-six. In 2002 she painted the official Golden Jubilee portrait of Elizabeth II, the second Nigerian artist after Ben Enwonwu to receive such a commission; her series “Migrants” and “African Slave Trade” are about something else entirely: dread, despair and hope.
14.12.1887–09.04.1963
Xul Solar
Xul Solar (1887–1963), born Oscar Schulz Solari, reversed the Latin lux and made a name out of it. Twelve years in Europe, friendships with Pettoruti and Borges, small-format watercolours and temperas with ladders, roads and the letters of two languages he invented; then horoscopes, chess by the stars, a repainted piano and puppets of the signs of the zodiac. His house in Buenos Aires is kept by the foundation that bears his name, and a museum has been open since 1993.12.03.1918–01.02.1989
Elaine de Kooning
Elaine de Kooning (1918–1989) signed her canvases with her initials so that they would not be called “women’s painting” or confused with the work of her husband, Willem de Kooning. She painted portraits of New York’s poets, critics and painters with a sweeping stroke that never lost the likeness, in 1962 received the commission for a portrait of John F. Kennedy, published about a hundred articles in ARTnews and taught from New Mexico to Yale.
02.12.1859–29.03.1891
Georges Seurat
In less than ten years Georges Seurat (1859–1891) worked out the method that came to be called divisionism or pointillism: pure colours laid side by side in small strokes and mixed only in the viewer’s eye. “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” (1884–1886), shown at the last Impressionist exhibition, gave Neo-Impressionism its name. He died at thirty-one, leaving “The Circus” unfinished.05.10.1946–07.12.2004
Pacita Abad
Pacita Abad (1946–2004), born in Basco in the Philippine islands of Batanes, gave up a law-school scholarship for painting and in three decades made more than four thousand works. Her trapunto technique, a quilted and stuffed canvas with mirrors, shells and buttons sewn on, took shape in Boston in the early 1980s. A few months before her death she covered the 55-metre Alkaff Bridge in Singapore with 2,350 coloured circles.
28.04.1834–25.05.1911
Harry Bolus
Harry Bolus (1834–1911) arrived in South Africa at fifteen as a naturalist’s assistant, grew rich as a stockbroker in Cape Town and from 1865 built up a herbarium that became the oldest in the country. He described the orchids of the Cape Peninsula and drew them himself: the 36 plates in his book of 1888 are his own work, and the multi-volume “Icones Orchidearum” went on appearing until his death. Five plant genera bear his name.
29.08.1840–31.12.1903
Cándido López
Cándido López (1840–1902) went to the Paraguayan War as a second lieutenant, lost his right arm at Curupayty in September 1866 and by 1869 had taught himself to paint with his left. His battle canvases, stretched horizontally in a proportion of one to three, with tiny figures of soldiers under calm skies, were painted from his front-line sketches in 1888–1902 with the support of the former president Bartolomé Mitre. Of the hundred pictures he planned, he finished 52.
28.01.1900–13.10.1984
Alice Neel
For half a century Alice Neel (1900–1984) painted portraits of her neighbours in Spanish Harlem, poets, communists, critics and pregnant friends while abstraction ruled American painting, and recognition came only when she was nearing seventy: a retrospective at the Whitney in 1974, a portrait of Kate Millett for the cover of “Time”, a nude self-portrait at eighty. In 1981, 85 of her works were shown in Moscow.
29.09.1518–31.05.1594
Tintoretto
Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti, 1518 or 1519 – 1594), a Venetian dyer’s son, spent half a century filling the Scuola di San Rocco, the Doge’s Palace and the churches of his city with canvases, hardly ever leaving it. He painted fast, often for a pittance or for nothing, so long as he got the commission; over his studio door he hung the motto “Michelangelo’s drawing and Titian’s colour”. His “Paradise” in the Doge’s Palace, nine metres by twenty-two, is reputed to be the largest painting on canvas.
12.06.1733–31.08.1795
Maruyama Ōkyo
Maruyama Ōkyo (1733–1795), a farmer’s son from Tamba province, started out in a Kyoto toy shop, painting the faces of dolls, and there saw his first European stereoscope. From Western perspective, Chinese models and the Kanō school he put together a manner of his own: a bird, a fish or a snow-laden pine on an empty ground, from life, without outline, with a broad flat brush. His Maruyama school and the Shijō school that grew from it set the course of Kyoto painting for a century.
1880–09.04.1952
Vahram Manavyan
Vahram Manavyan (1880–1952), the son of an Armenian writer in Constantinople, trained under Simon Agopyan and at the Académie Julian, and in 1911 moved with his family to Egypt. In Alexandria he taught drawing, ran a photographic studio and drew caricatures: his collection “Egyptian Humour” came out in 1916. Seventeen years separate his two Cairo exhibitions, of 1934 and 1951.
10.02.1827–17.12.1902
Martín Tovar y Tovar
Martín Tovar y Tovar (1827–1902), a pupil of the Madrazos in Madrid and of Léon Cogniet in Paris, painted thirty portraits of the heroes of independence and “The Battle of Carabobo” for the Federal Legislative Palace in Caracas: canvases totalling 458 square metres, glued to an elliptical dome in 1888. Of the four battles commissioned from him he managed to finish three; in 1865 he opened one of Venezuela’s first photographic studios in Caracas.24.12.1913–30.08.1967