15.10.1763–06.01.1841
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Artists
Biographies, facts and images with open sources and verified rights.
Found: 1775
08.04.1897–08.04.1964
Mahmoud Sa'id
Mahmoud Sa'id (1897–1964) served for more than twenty years in the Mixed Courts of Egypt and painted in oil throughout that time. He studied in Alexandria with Italian painters, then in Paris at the Académie Julian. His work was shown in New York, at the 1937 Paris exhibition and at the Venice Biennale, and a museum bearing his name stands in Alexandria.06.07.1962–present
Helmut Ditsch
Helmut Ditsch (born 1962) paints mountains, glaciers, deserts and the sea on large canvases, first travelling on foot to the chosen place and spending several days there. In his youth he became an extreme mountaineer, and in 1988 he moved to Vienna to study at the Academy of Fine Arts. His largest painting, “Perito Moreno”, is on a canvas measuring two by twelve metres.
10.06.1822–29.05.1884
Juan Cordero
The Mexican painter Juan Cordero left for Rome in 1844 on money raised by his family, and there won a prize from the Roman academy for a study of a nude figure. His “Columbus at the Court of the Catholic Monarchs” was shown in Rome and Florence, and in 1874 he painted in Mexico City the country’s first mural on a secular philosophical theme; it was destroyed in 1900.
1801–11.12.1853
William Buelow Gould
William Buelow Gould (c. 1801–1853) arrived in Van Diemen's Land as a convict in 1827 and, at the penal station on Sarah Island, painted fishes, birds and plants in watercolour for doctors who were amateur naturalists. His sketchbook of fishes, made around 1832 and containing thirty-six sheets, was added to the Australian Memory of the World Register of UNESCO in 2011. He died in Hobart.
26.10.1862–21.10.1944
Hilma af Klint
Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) painted her first series of abstract pictures for the “Temple” in 1906, at the age of forty-four, well before the first non-objective works of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian. She did not exhibit these canvases and left more than 1,200 works and about 150 notebooks. The wider public saw them only in the 1980s.
1450–1555
Mir Musavvir
Mir Musavvir worked in the royal book workshop of Shah Tahmasp I at Tabriz and took part in illustrating the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi commissioned by the shah. His signature appears on the miniature “Manuchihr Enthroned”, and the portrait of the table-steward Sarkhan Beg bears an inscription pointing to his authorship. He most likely spent the end of his life at the court of Humayun, where his son Mir Sayyid Ali had gone before him.1950–present
Kwame Akoto
Kwame Akoto was born in Kumasi in 1950 and in 1972 opened his own workshop there, where he painted film posters and shop signs for barbers and salons by hand. After converting to Christianity he began calling himself “Almighty God” and renamed the workshop. His work has been shown in Ghana, Europe and the United States; in 2022 a retrospective was held at the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles.
06.09.1785–1841
José Gil de Castro
José Gil de Castro (1785–1841) was born in Lima to a free father and an enslaved mother, and made his name in Chile, where he painted portraits of leaders of the wars of independence. Most of his canvases carry a plaque with a text about the sitter. By the surviving evidence he left no self-portrait, and the place and exact date of his death are unknown.13.01.1959–present
José Bedia Valdés
José Bedia (born 1959) was initiated into the secret rituals of Palo Monte at twenty-three, an Afro-Cuban religion with Central African roots, and that tradition became the basis of his painting, drawing and installations. He studied in Havana, took part in the 1990 Venice Biennale, lived in Mexico from 1991 and in the United States from 1993, and now lives in Miami.
16.12.1882–17.10.1939
Elioth Gruner
Elioth Gruner (1882–1939) was born in New Zealand but grew up in Sydney, and from the age of fourteen worked in a shop fourteen hours a day, drawing only at weekends. He won the Wynne Prize for landscape seven times; his best-known picture, “Spring Frost” (1919), is in the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He painted small canvases, chiefly light over the Australian countryside.
08.07.1867–22.04.1945
Käthe Kollwitz
Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) made her name with the print cycles “The Weavers” and “The Peasant War”, and after her son was killed at the front in 1914 she worked for almost twenty years on the sculpture group “The Grieving Parents”. In 1919 she became the first woman professor at the Prussian Academy of Arts and in 1933 was forced to leave it. She died in Moritzburg sixteen days before the end of the war in Europe.06.08.1932–30.03.2012
Tenga Rinpoche
Tenga Rinpoche (1932–2012), a Tibetan lama of the Karma Kagyu school, was recognized at the age of seven as a reincarnation of Lama Samten. He studied at Benchen and Palpung monasteries, left Tibet in 1959 with the 16th Karmapa and served him for seventeen years at Rumtek. From 1976 he lived in Nepal, where he founded Benchen Monastery and a retreat centre at Pharping. He is also known as an expert in painting, mandalas and sculpture.29.08.1904–25.10.2002
Ernest Mancoba
Ernest Mancoba began at the Anglican mission school of Grace Dieu, where he learned wood carving in 1925 and in 1929 carved “African Madonna”, probably the first modern sculpture by a Black South African. In 1938 he left on a scholarship for Paris and lived mostly in Europe, in France and Denmark. Later he moved from sculpture to painting and drawing, built around a half-dissolved figure.
05.10.1807–28.07.1879
Pancho Fierro
Pancho Fierro (1807–1879) earned his living in Lima by painting shop signs and bullfight posters, and became known for watercolours on cardboard sheets, of which about 1,200 are recorded. They show street vendors, washerwomen, priests, soldiers, carnivals and processions of the late colonial period and the first decades of the republic. Large collections of his work are now in Lima, Saint Petersburg and New York.
15.12.1944–present
Manuel Mendive
Manuel Mendive was born in Havana in 1944 into a family that practised Santería, and he has spent his career painting and carving the gods and spirits of the Yoruba. His first solo show was held in Havana in 1964. In the 1980s he spent a year travelling in West Africa, and in 1986 he staged the performance “La vida”, painting the bodies of dancers. His work is in museums in Cuba, Russia, Africa and Europe.
17.03.1895–02.12.1988
Lloyd Rees
Lloyd Rees (1895–1988) was born in Brisbane into a family with Mauritian and Cornish roots, began as a commercial artist and spent his life drawing Sydney Harbour and the landscapes of France and Italy. He won the Wynne Prize twice, taught at the University of Sydney's architecture faculty from 1946 to 1986 and painted until he was 93. His last pictures are about light.31.07.1901–12.05.1985
Jean Dubuffet
Jean Dubuffet was born into a family of wine merchants in Le Havre and went to Paris at seventeen to study painting, but gave it up for years in favour of the wine trade and returned to art only in 1942. He coined the term “art brut” and assembled a collection that is now in Lausanne. His own paintings used a thick paste of sand and coal dust, and from the late 1960s he made large painted sculptures.
1858–20.03.1930
Hoca Ali Rıza
Hoca Ali Rıza (1858–1930) began as an army officer: he studied at Kuleli Military High School and at the military academy, and retired in 1911 as a lieutenant colonel. He taught drawing and, from 1914, landscape painting at the School of Fine Arts. He painted landscapes and city views; his last exhibition in his lifetime was held in Paris in 1928.
02.01.1913–16.11.2002
Hussein Bicar
Hussein Bicar (1913–2002) illustrated Taha Hussein’s “The Stream of Days” and created the children’s magazine Sinbad, which began in 1952. A graduate of the School of Fine Arts in Cairo, he taught, painted portraits, wrote columns for the newspaper Akhbar El Yom and drew illustrated reports from trips through Africa, Spain and Syria. For a documentary about Abu Simbel he painted a series of pictures.
04.02.1929–present
Carlos Alonso
Carlos Alonso (1929–2026) entered the National Academy of Fine Arts in Mendoza at fourteen, and in 1957 won the Emecé publishing house competition to illustrate part two of “Don Quixote”. He later made a series of drawings after the “Divine Comedy” and illustrated “Martín Fierro”. After the coup of 1976 and the disappearance of his daughter he lived in exile in Italy and Spain, returning in 1981.
08.01.1925–19.04.2010
José Bernal
José Bernal (1925–2010) grew up in Santa Clara, graduated there from the teachers' college and an art school, and in 1962 left Cuba for the United States with his wife and three children. In Chicago he first worked in a factory making art materials, then at the Marshall Field's department store, and later returned to teaching. His paintings, collages and assemblages are in the Art Institute of Chicago and the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid.1956–02.11.2022
Nicholas Harding
Nicholas Harding (1956–2022) was born in London, came to Sydney as a boy and grew up to be an Australian artist. Before turning to painting he spent many years drawing for animation studios. In 2001 he won the Archibald Prize for his portrait of the actor John Bell as King Lear. He painted landscapes and portraits in thick impasto and made large ink drawings.
23.09.1865–07.04.1938