Artists
Cool Stories About Art covers the painters who changed how we see. Each guide below is a complete story: the life, the scandals, the work, and the facts most people get wrong. Pick a name and start reading.
The complete artist guides
Albert Bierstadt: The glowing, theatrical landscapes of the American West.
Alexandre Cabanel: The Salon king whose Venus and Fallen Angel ruled Paris before the Impressionists.
Alphonse Mucha: The Czech artist whose flowing posters became the face of Art Nouveau.
Amedeo Modigliani: the long necks, the almond eyes, and a doomed Montparnasse life.
Andrei Rublev: The medieval monk and saint who painted the most famous icon in the world.
Annibale Carracci: the reformer who out-painted the Mannerists and invented the caricature.
Aubrey Beardsley: The black ink genius who scandalized Victorian England before dying at 25.
Camille Pissarro: the quiet father figure of Impressionism who mentored them all
Canaletto: the Venice view painter whose glittering city scenes sold to Grand Tourists
Caravaggio: The violent genius who painted with light and killed a man.
Caspar David Friedrich: The lone figure before the sea of fog, and the heart of German Romanticism.
Childe Hassam: the American who turned wartime New York into a river of flags.
Cimabue: the last Byzantine master, and the man who discovered Giotto.
Claude Monet: The father of Impressionism and his endless garden at Giverny.
Correggio: the Parma master whose soaring domes invented the Baroque ceiling.
Diego Velazquez: Spain’s Golden Age master and the genius behind Las Meninas.
Domenico Ghirlandaio: the Florentine workshop king who taught the young Michelangelo.
Edgar Degas: The reluctant Impressionist behind the ballet, drawing and pastel.
Edouard Manet: The father of modern art, from Olympia to the Folies Bergere.
Edvard Munch: The Norwegian who painted modern anxiety and created The Scream.
Egon Schiele: Klimt’s protege, who painted the body raw and died at 28.
El Greco: The Cretan visionary of Toledo, rediscovered as a modern forefather.
Eugene Delacroix: the fire of Romanticism, from Liberty Leading the People to Morocco.
Faith Ringgold: The artist who turned the quilt into a way of telling Black stories.
Fernand Leger: the tubes and machines of a modern, mechanical age.
Filippo Lippi: the friar who ran off with a nun and mentored Botticelli.
Francisco Goya: The deaf genius who turned painting toward war, madness and the Black Paintings.
Frans Hals: the Dutch master of the laughing, living portrait
Franz Marc: The Blue Rider painter of blue horses, and a color code cut short at Verdun.
Frida Kahlo: The Mexican icon who turned her pain into unforgettable self portraits.
Georges Seurat: the inventor of pointillism behind A Sunday on La Grande Jatte
Gerda Wegener: the Art Deco star and the real painter behind The Danish Girl.
Giovanni Boldini: the Master of Swish who painted Belle Epoque Paris in motion.
Guido Reni: the divine Guido of Bologna, adored, then forgotten, then back.
Gustav Klimt: The Kiss, gold leaf and the scandals of Vienna.
Gustave Courbet: the Realist who painted ordinary life at life size and scandalized Paris
Gustave Dore: the illustrator who gave faces to Dante, the Bible and Don Quixote
Gustave Moreau: The Symbolist of myth and Salome, and the teacher who shaped Matisse and the Fauves.
Hans Holbein the Younger: Tudor court painter of Henry VIII and the hidden skull
Henri Matisse: the king of color and the cut outs, Picasso great rival.
Henri Rousseau: the customs clerk who dreamed up jungles he never saw.
Henry Fuseli: the painter of The Nightmare and the dark side of Romanticism.
Hieronymus Bosch: the medieval painter of heaven, hell and impossible monsters
Hilma af Klint: The Swede who may have painted the first abstract art, years before Kandinsky.
Horace Pippin: the wounded war veteran who taught himself to paint masterpieces.
HR Giger: The biomechanical nightmares behind the creature in Alien.
Ilya Repin: Russia's great realist, from the Volga barge haulers to Ivan the Terrible.
Ingres: the Neoclassical perfectionist of line, portraits and odalisques
Ivan Aivazovsky: The Russian master of the sea, from the Ninth Wave to storms painted from memory.
Jacob Lawrence: Black history told in sixty painted panels.
Jacques Louis David: the painter of the French Revolution and Napoleon.
James Ensor: carnival masks, skeletons and the Brussels canvas that scandalized his own circle.
James McNeill Whistler: the painter of the famous Mother and the man who sued a critic
James Tissot: The chronicler of Victorian society, then of the Bible, with his muse Kathleen Newton.
Jan Matejko: the artist who painted Poland when it had vanished from the map.
Jan van Eyck: the Flemish master of oil paint and the Arnolfini Portrait
Jean Leon Gerome: The academic star behind the gladiators of Pollice Verso and the Snake Charmer.
JMW Turner: the master of light, storms, and the sea.
Joaquin Sorolla: The Spanish master of sunlight, sea and shore.
Johannes Vermeer: The Girl with a Pearl Earring and the quiet master of Delft.
John Collier: the Victorian who painted Lilith and married two sisters.
John Constable: the English landscape painter of The Hay Wain
John Singer Sargent: the dazzling society portraitist of the Gilded Age
Joseph Ducreux: the court painter whose grinning self portraits became memes.
Katsushika Hokusai: The Great Wave and the old man mad about painting.
Kawase Hasui: the last great master of the Japanese woodblock print.
KAWS: The graffiti artist whose sad cartoon Companion became a global brand.
Kazimir Malevich: the black square and the birth of Suprematism.
Kehinde Wiley: Black sitters in Old Master poses, and the Obama portrait.
Leonardo da Vinci: The Mona Lisa, mirror writing and the mind of a universal genius.
Michelangelo: the David, the Pieta and the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
Odilon Redon: The Symbolist of dreams and floating eyes, from dark charcoals to bursts of color.
Otto Dix: the brutal, unflinching eye of Weimar Germany.
Pablo Picasso: The restless genius who reinvented modern art and consumed everyone around him.
Paul Cezanne: The father of modern art, from apples to the road to Cubism.
Paul Gauguin: The stockbroker who fled to Tahiti and freed color, for better and worse.
Paul Signac: the sailor who built light out of dots, and led Neo Impressionism.
Peter Paul Rubens: The Baroque powerhouse, painter, diplomat and workshop empire of Antwerp.
Pierre Auguste Renoir: The Impressionist who made sunlight and joy his subject.
Pierre Bonnard: the intimate glow of the Nabis, color painted from memory.
Piet Mondrian: red, yellow, blue, and the grid that shaped modern design.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder: peasant weddings, proverbs, and the coldest winters in art.
Raja Ravi Varma: The painter who gave India the faces of its gods.
Raoul Dufy: sunlit regattas and racecourses in quick, joyful color.
Raphael: The grace of the High Renaissance, from the Madonnas to The School of Athens.
Rembrandt: The Night Watch, a face in the mirror and a spectacular bankruptcy.
Salvador Dali: The mustachioed showman of Surrealism and his melting clocks.
Sandro Botticelli: The Birth of Venus, Primavera and the painter who burned his own work.
Suzanne Valadon: the circus acrobat and model who became a painter on her own terms.
Thomas Gainsborough: rival of Reynolds, painter of The Blue Boy and English landscapes
Thomas Kinkade: The self styled Painter of Light who sold glowing cottages by the million.
Thomas Moran: the painter whose Yellowstone canvases helped create the first national park.
Titian: The master of Venetian color and painter to emperors.
Toulouse Lautrec: The aristocrat who painted Montmartre and invented the modern poster.
Vincent van Gogh: The ear, the Sunflowers and the fame that came too late.
Wassily Kandinsky: the man who painted his way to the first pure abstraction.
Zinaida Serebriakova: the Russian master split from her children for 36 years.
Tintoretto: the fastest brush in Venice, and its most theatrical.
Paolo Veronese: the feast painter hauled before the Inquisition.
Jean-Francois Millet: the peasants that taught Van Gogh how to paint.
Winslow Homer: the sea, war and the American wild in watercolor.
Gustave Caillebotte: the rich Impressionist who painted rainy Paris.
Fra Angelico: the friar who painted heaven in gold and calm.
Camille Corot: the silver light that opened the door to Impressionism.
Andrea Mantegna: the master of foreshortening and hard Roman stone.
Piero della Francesca: the geometry and stillness the 20th century rediscovered.
John William Waterhouse: the last Pre Raphaelite and his doomed heroines.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti: the Pre Raphaelite founder and his doomed muses.
John Everett Millais: from Ophelia in the water to the Royal Academy.
Leon Spilliaert: the sleepless Belgian and his haunted self portraits.
August Macke: the color of the Blue Rider, gone at 27 in the war.
Plautilla Nelli: the nun who was the first known woman painter of Florence.
Alfred Sisley: the purest Impressionist, and the one who died unknown.
Giovanni Bellini: the father of Venetian color who taught Titian.
Jan Steen: the painter of rowdy households and hidden jokes.
Hans Memling: the calm of Bruges and a Last Judgement seized by pirates.
Masaccio: the boy who invented depth and died at 27.
Giorgione: the Venetian who invented mood, dead at 33.
Thomas Eakins: the American realist whose honesty got him fired.
William Adolphe Bouguereau: the academic star the Impressionists loved to hate.
Theodore Gericault: the Raft of the Medusa and a life burned fast.
Paolo Uccello: the man obsessed with perspective to the point of madness.
Umberto Boccioni: the face of Futurism, and its motion in bronze.
Robert Delaunay: color as pure rhythm, the Eiffel Tower in fragments.
Arnold Bocklin: the Isle of the Dead that haunted Freud and Hitler.
William Holman Hunt: the Pre Raphaelite who painted at the Dead Sea.
Honore Daumier: the caricaturist jailed for mocking the king.
Want the language behind the art? Browse the full art glossary, from chiaroscuro to sfumato, all explained in plain words.
