08.01.1947–10.01.2016
Research · Sources · Context
Artists
Biographies, facts and images with open sources and verified rights.
Found: 1775
27.01.1859–04.06.1941
Wilhelm II
Wilhelm II came to the throne at twenty-nine, in the “Year of the Three Emperors”, and two years later dismissed Bismarck in order to rule himself. For thirty years he headed the German Empire: he built up the navy, toured the courts of Europe and the Ottoman Empire, and took an interest in archaeological digs and drawing. He abdicated in November 1918 and lived in the Netherlands, at Huis Doorn, until his death.17.01.1962–?
Jim Carrey
Jim Carrey has drawn and painted for many years: in 2017 came the six-minute film “I Needed Color” about his work in the studio, and in 2018 a Los Angeles gallery showed 108 of his pen drawings from Twitter. As an actor he became known through “Ace Ventura”, “The Mask” and “Dumb and Dumber” (1994), and later won two Golden Globes for dramas.17.08.1953–?
Herta Müller
Herta Müller grew up in a village in the Banat where German was spoken at home and she learned Romanian only at school. Her first book, “Nadirs”, was printed in Romania in 1982 with passages cut by the censors; the full text came out in West Germany. She has lived in Berlin since 1987, writes prose and poetry, and makes collages from cut-out words. In 2009 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.31.12.1937–?
Anthony Hopkins
Anthony Hopkins began in repertory theatres in Wales and England, and in 1965, at Laurence Olivier’s invitation, joined the Royal National Theatre company. He won an Academy Award in 1992 for Hannibal Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991), and a second in 2021 for the title role in “The Father” (2020). He has also directed the films “August” and “Slipstream” and writes music for orchestra.22.01.1849–14.05.1912
August Strindberg
Strindberg wrote more than sixty plays and about thirty books of fiction, memoir and polemic, and in his later decades he also painted and made photographs without a camera. His novel The Red Room (1879) made him known across Scandinavia, Miss Julie entered the theatrical canon, and A Dream Play became a forerunner of expressionism. About sixty thousand people came to his funeral.08.02.1819–20.01.1900
John Ruskin
John Ruskin came to notice in 1843 with the first volume of “Modern Painters”, a defence of J. M. W. Turner, and over the next half century wrote about fifty books, from treatises on architecture to letters to workmen. In 1869 he became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford and founded a drawing school there. He also drew and painted watercolours, and in 1878 he was sued for libel by Whistler.16.04.1940–?
Margrethe II
Queen of Denmark from 1972 to 2024, Margrethe II also worked as an artist: she illustrated “The Lord of the Rings” under the pseudonym Ingahild Grathmer, made découpage and embroidered church vestments. She designed ballets and films based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales; in 2024 she won a Robert Award for the costumes of “Ehrengard”.24.03.1926–13.10.2016
Dario Fo
Dario Fo (1926–2016) finished a course in painting in Milan but became famous as a playwright and actor: he performed his monologue “Mistero Buffo” alone, in an invented blend of northern Italian dialects. “Accidental Death of an Anarchist” was written in the wake of the 1969 Milan bombing and opened in December 1970. In 1997 the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature. He designed his own productions and painted a great deal.11.09.1885–02.03.1930
D. H. Lawrence
The son of a miner from Eastwood, Lawrence was the first boy in his area to win a scholarship to Nottingham High School. His novels “The Rainbow” and “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” were banned and tried for obscenity, and in his last years he painted pictures that the police confiscated. From 1919 he lived abroad: in Italy, Australia, the United States, Mexico and the south of France.29.04.1957–?
Daniel Day-Lewis
Daniel Day-Lewis trained as a carpenter as much as an actor: after school he applied for a five-year cabinet-making apprenticeship, was turned down and went to drama school in Bristol instead. He later starred in “My Left Foot”, “There Will Be Blood” and “Lincoln”, and each role won him an Academy Award. He works rarely and prepares for his roles for months.31.01.1938–?
Beatrix of the Netherlands
Beatrix was born in 1938 at Soestdijk Palace, spent her childhood in exile in Canada, studied law at Leiden and in 1980 succeeded her mother on the throne. She was Queen of the Netherlands for thirty-three years and abdicated in favour of her son on 30 April 2013. As an amateur sculptor she models and carves for herself; one theory holds that she made the anonymous street sculptures of Amsterdam.28.01.1853–19.05.1895
José Martí
At sixteen José Martí landed in a Havana prison because of a single letter, and at thirty-nine he created the party that prepared the armed uprising in Cuba. As a teenager he took drawing lessons at the Havana School of Painting and Sculpture; later he wrote poems, chronicles and essays, published the newspaper Patria and a children’s magazine, and translated. He was killed in the first battle after landing on the island, in May 1895.31.10.1950–31.03.2016
Zaha Hadid
Zaha Hadid’s diploma work at the Architectural Association in London was an acrylic painting: a hotel on Hungerford Bridge inspired by Malevich. For almost ten years her projects remained drawings and competition wins, and her first notable building was the fire station for the firm Vitra (1993). In 2004 she became the first woman to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize.06.07.1859–20.05.1940
Verner von Heidenstam
Verner von Heidenstam (1859–1940) dreamed of painting and studied in Rome and Paris, but in the early 1880s he turned to poetry. His first collection, “Pilgrimage and Wander Years” (1888), grew out of his youthful impressions of the East and made him the leader of the Swedish “Nineties” writers. “The Charles Men”, on Charles XII, brought him success, and in 1916 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.06.12.1942–?
Peter Handke
In 1966 Peter Handke went in a few months from a law student who had dropped out of university to the most talked-about young author on the German-language stage: a speech at a meeting of Group 47 in Princeton, then the play “Offending the Audience”. He wrote prose, plays and screenplays, translated, and worked with the director Wim Wenders. He won the Georg Büchner Prize (1973) and the Nobel Prize in Literature (2019).24.01.1776–25.06.1822
E. T. A. Hoffmann
Hoffmann, a jurist in Prussian service, wrote stories, composed music and drew caricatures, one set of which cost him his post in Posen. His opera “Undine” was staged in Berlin in 1816, and “The Golden Pot”, “The Sandman” and “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” made his name as a writer. In his last years he served at the Kammergericht, the Berlin court of appeal, and dictated his texts when already paralysed.05.09.1774–07.05.1840
Caspar David Friedrich
Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), a native of Swedish Pomerania, studied in Copenhagen and from 1798 lived in Dresden. For his first years he worked in sepia and ink, and he began painting in oil in 1807. His “Tetschen Altar” raised the question of whether a landscape could stand in place of an altarpiece. Among the buyers of his work were the Prussian king and the Russian imperial family.21.08.1853–04.04.1932
Wilhelm Ostwald
Wilhelm Ostwald (1853–1932), a Baltic German born in Riga, held the world's first chair of physical chemistry at Leipzig and won the 1909 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on catalysis. He founded the Zeitschrift für Physikalische Chemie and edited the series Classics of the Exact Sciences. After retiring he turned to the philosophy of energetics, colour theory and painting.20.01.1873–25.11.1950
Johannes V. Jensen
Johannes V. Jensen grew up in Farsø, the son of a veterinary surgeon, abandoned medical studies for literature and became famous for his stories of his native Himmerland, the novel “The Fall of the King” and the cycle “The Long Journey”. He wrote poems without a fixed metre, translated the Icelandic sagas, modelled portrait busts and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1944.19.06.1861–30.12.1896
José Rizal
José Rizal (1861–1896) graduated from the Ateneo, the Jesuit school in Manila, studied medicine in Madrid and Heidelberg, and was an ophthalmologist by profession. He wrote the novels Noli Me Tángere and El filibusterismo, modelled in clay and carved wood, and spoke many languages fluently. In 1896 he was shot in Manila on the sentence of a military court.07.03.1872–01.02.1944
Piet Mondrian
Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) began as a drawing teacher and a painter of quiet Dutch landscapes, and by the 1920s had arrived at canvases of black lines and red, blue and yellow rectangles. He shortened his surname in Paris in 1912. With Theo van Doesburg he founded De Stijl, then lived in Paris, London and New York, where he painted “Broadway Boogie-Woogie”.17.06.1898–27.03.1972
M. C. Escher
M. C. Escher studied to be an architect, gave it up and chose printmaking: he liked that a single block could yield many identical impressions. He spent twelve years in Italy, saw the Alhambra a second time in 1936 and began building his prints on geometric tessellations. His works include “Drawing Hands”, “Waterfall” and “Ascending and Descending”.28.07.1866–22.12.1943