10 Artists you need to Know 👀
Discover 10 hidden gems of the art world, including Lorenzo Lotto , Anna Ileby, Hippolyte Petitjean & Giorgio Morandi. Your next favorite artist is here.
1 | Chris Cyprus (born 1971)
He left school and joined the building trade in Manchester. No art school. No theory. No permission.
For years he painted watercolours on the side. Then a trip to the south of France in 2001 changed everything. The heat made watercolour impossible. He switched to oils and never went back.
His subject? English allotments. Sheds, potato patches, old men in boots tending cabbages at dusk.
Sounds dull. It isn’t. His allotments glow like they’re lit from inside. Orange light pouring over rusted wheelbarrows.
In 2025 Sky Arts made him one of their Landscape Artists of the Year. The builder is now one of Britain’s most collected painters.
2 | Lorenzo Lotto (c.1480–1556)
He was Titian’s contemporary. He lost every major Venetian commission to him.
So he left. Bergamo, the Marches, small towns in the middle of nowhere. He kept a diary of every commission and every patron who tried to haggle him down. It survives. It’s one of the most vivid self portraits any Renaissance painter left behind.
His faces are the giveaway. While other Venetians painted beauty, Lotto painted anxiety. A young man biting his lip. A widow clutching a rosary too tight. Real people, caught mid thought.
He ended his days as a lay brother at the Holy House of Loreto, donating his few remaining possessions to the sanctuary. Died poor, nearly forgotten.
Today he is considered one of the most psychologically complex painters of the entire Renaissance.
3 | Kay Sage (1898–1963)
American heiress. Raised in Italy, married an Italian prince, walked out of the marriage at forty.
She moved to Paris, joined the Surrealists, fell in love with Yves Tanguy. They lived together in rural Connecticut for the rest of his life.
Her paintings are the strangest things American surrealism ever produced. Empty landscapes. Endless horizons. Huge architectural scaffolds draped in white cloth, standing in deserts that go nowhere.
When Tanguy died suddenly in 1955, she fell apart. Cataracts took her eyesight. She kept writing poems.
In 1963 she shot herself in the heart. Her will left every painting she owned to MoMA.
4 | Anna Ileby (born 1984)
Swedish. Born in Värmland. Started as an illustrator, then decided illustrating wasn’t enough.
Her paintings are impossibly quiet. A woman alone in a yellow kitchen. A child facing a window. Empty corridors bathed in Scandinavian winter light.
Realistic but never photographic. Colour is turned up just slightly, as if every scene is remembered rather than seen.
The title of her personal website is her manifesto: An artist cannot fail.
She is one of the most interesting young realist painters working in Sweden right now. Most of the art world outside Scandinavia hasn’t caught up yet.
5 | Ferdinand Loyen du Puigaudeau (1864–1930)
Gauguin invited him to Tahiti in 1891. His family forbade him to go.
So he stayed in Brittany and painted the night. Religious processions by torchlight. Village fairs lit by paper lanterns. Fireworks reflected on dark water.
Nobody in French painting did night better. Not Van Gogh, not Whistler, not anyone. His glows feel physical. A true, underrated impressionist