PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: printmaking
Dutch artist
Rembrandt Dutch Baroque painter and printmaker, one of the greatest storytellers in the history of art, possessing an exceptional ability to render people in their various moods and dramatic guises. Rembrandt...
British writer and artist
William Blake was an English engraver, artist, poet, and visionary, author of exquisite lyrics in Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) and profound and difficult “prophecies,” such...
Spanish artist
Pablo Picasso Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most-influential artists of the 20th century and the creator (with Georges Braque)...
French artist
Edgar Degas French painter, sculptor, and printmaker who was prominent in the Impressionist group and widely celebrated for his images of Parisian life. Degas’s principal subject was the human—especially...
French artist
Henri Matisse artist often regarded as the most important French painter of the 20th century. He was the leader of the Fauvist movement about 1900, and he pursued the expressiveness of colour throughout...
German artist
Albrecht Dürer was a painter and printmaker generally regarded as the greatest German Renaissance artist. His vast body of work includes altarpieces and religious works, numerous portraits and self-portraits,...
Italian artist
Andrea Mantegna painter and engraver, the first fully Renaissance artist of northern Italy. His best known surviving work is the Camera degli Sposi (“Room of the Bride and Groom”), or Camera Picta (“Painted...
French artist
Camille Pissarro painter and printmaker who was a key figure in the history of Impressionism. Pissarro was the only artist to show his work in all eight Impressionist group exhibitions; throughout his...
English painter
J.M.W. Turner English Romantic landscape painter whose expressionistic studies of light, colour, and atmosphere were unmatched in their range and sublimity. Turner was the son of a barber. At age 10 he...
French artist
Honoré Daumier was a prolific French caricaturist, painter, and sculptor especially renowned for his cartoons and drawings satirizing 19th-century French politics and society. His paintings, though hardly...
English artist
William Hogarth the first great English-born artist to attract admiration abroad, best known for his moral and satirical engravings and paintings—e.g., A Rake’s Progress (eight scenes,1733). His attempts...
Spanish artist
Francisco Goya was a Spanish artist whose paintings, drawings, and engravings reflected contemporary historical upheavals and influenced important 19th- and 20th-century painters. The series of etchings...
French painter
Édouard Manet French painter who broke new ground by defying traditional techniques of representation and by choosing subjects from the events and circumstances of his own time. His Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe...
Flemish painter
Anthony van Dyck after Peter Paul Rubens the most prominent Flemish Baroque painter of the 17th century. A prolific painter of portraits of European aristocracy, he also executed many works on religious...
Russian-born artist
Wassily Kandinsky Russian-born artist, one of the first creators of pure abstraction in modern painting. After successful avant-garde exhibitions, he founded the influential Munich group Der Blaue Reiter...
Swiss-German artist
Paul Klee Swiss-German painter and draftsman who was one of the foremost artists of the 20th century. Klee’s mother, née Ida Maria Frick of Basel, and his German-born father, Hans Klee, were both trained...
Italian artist
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo great Italian painter of the 18th century. His luminous, poetic frescoes, while extending the tradition of Baroque ceiling decoration, epitomize the lightness and elegance of...
French artist
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec French artist who observed and documented with great psychological insight the personalities and facets of Parisian nightlife and the French world of entertainment in the 1890s....
French artist
Georges Braque was a French painter, one of the important revolutionaries of 20th-century art who, together with Pablo Picasso, developed Cubism. His paintings consist primarily of still lifes that are...
French artist
Claude Lorrain was a French artist best known for, and one of the greatest masters of, ideal landscape painting, an art form that seeks to present a view of nature more beautiful and harmonious than nature...
Belorussian-born French artist
Marc Chagall was a Belorussian-born French painter, printmaker, and designer who composed his images based on emotional and poetic associations, rather than on rules of pictorial logic. Predating Surrealism,...
German painter
Lucas Cranach, the Elder was a leading painter of Saxony, and one of the most important and influential artists in 16th-century German art. Among his vast output of paintings and woodcuts, the most important...
American artist
James McNeill Whistler American-born artist noted for his paintings of nocturnal London, for his striking and stylistically advanced full-length portraits, and for his brilliant etchings and lithographs....
Norwegian artist
Edvard Munch Norwegian painter and printmaker whose intensely evocative treatment of psychological themes built upon some of the main tenets of late 19th-century Symbolism and greatly influenced German...
French artist
Eugène Delacroix was one of the greatest French Romantic painters, whose use of colour was influential in the development of both Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting. His inspiration came chiefly...
French painter
Camille Corot was a French painter, noted primarily for his landscapes, who inspired and to some extent anticipated the landscape painting of the Impressionists. His oil sketches, remarkable for their...
Japanese artist
Hokusai Japanese master artist and printmaker of the ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) school. His early works represent the full spectrum of ukiyo-e art, including single-sheet prints of landscapes...
Spanish artist
Joan Miró Catalan painter who combined abstract art with Surrealist fantasy. His mature style evolved from the tension between his fanciful, poetic impulse and his vision of the harshness of modern life....
Italian artist
Canaletto was an Italian topographical painter whose masterful expression of atmosphere in his detailed views (vedute) of Venice and London and of English country homes influenced succeeding generations...
Japanese artist
Hiroshige Japanese artist, one of the last great ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) masters of the colour woodblock print. His genius for landscape compositions was first recognized in the West...
French artist
Pierre Bonnard French painter and printmaker, member of the group of artists called the Nabis and afterward a leader of the Intimists; he is generally regarded as one of the greatest colourists of modern...
Korean artist, critic, philosopher, and poet
Lee Ufan Korean artist, critic, philosopher, and poet who was a prominent theorist and proponent of the Tokyo-based movement of young artists from the late 1960s through the early ’70s known as Mono-ha...
French artist
Georges Rouault French painter, printmaker, ceramicist, and maker of stained glass who, drawing inspiration from French medieval masters, united religious and secular traditions divorced since the Renaissance....
British actor and director
Edward Gordon Craig was an English actor, theatre director-designer, producer, and theorist who influenced the development of the theatre in the 20th century. Craig was the second child of a liaison between...
French artist
Édouard Vuillard French painter, printmaker, and decorator who was a member of the Nabis group of painters in the 1890s. He is particularly known for his depictions of intimate interior scenes. Vuillard...
French painter
Théodore Géricault was a painter who exerted a seminal influence on the development of Romantic art in France. Géricault was a dandy and an avid horseman whose dramatic paintings reflect his flamboyant...
American painter
Mary Cassatt was an American painter and printmaker who was part of the group of Impressionists working in and around Paris. She took as her subjects almost exclusively the intimate lives of contemporary...
German engraver
Martin Schongauer painter and printmaker who was the finest German engraver before Albrecht Dürer. Schongauer was the son of Caspar Schongauer, a goldsmith of Augsburg. In 1465 he registered at the University...
American artist
Andy Warhol American artist and filmmaker, an initiator and leading exponent of the Pop art movement of the 1960s whose mass-produced art apotheosized the supposed banality of the commercial culture of...
German artist
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner German painter and printmaker who was one of the leaders of a group of Expressionist artists known as Die Brücke (“The Bridge”). His mature style was highly personal and notable for...
American artist
Sol LeWitt American artist whose work provides a link between Minimalism and conceptual art. LeWitt was the son of Russian immigrants. He attended Syracuse University (B.F.A., 1949) and, following military...
German artist
Käthe Kollwitz German graphic artist and sculptor who was an eloquent advocate for victims of social injustice, war, and inhumanity. The artist grew up in a liberal middle-class family and studied painting...
Dutch artist
Lucas van Leyden northern Renaissance painter and one of the greatest engravers of his time. Lucas was first trained by his father, Huygh Jacobszoon; later, he entered the workshop of Cornelis Engelbrechtsz(oon),...
Spanish artist
Salvador Dalí was a Spanish Surrealist painter and printmaker, influential for his explorations of subconscious imagery. As an art student in Madrid and Barcelona, Dalí assimilated a vast number of artistic...
American artist
James Rosenquist one of the seminal figures of the Pop art movement, who took as his inspiration the subject and style of modern commercial culture. Through a complex layering of such motifs as Coca-Cola...
American painter
George Wesley Bellows was an American painter and lithographer noted for his paintings of action scenes and for his expressive portraits and seascapes. Bellows attended Ohio State University before moving...
Spanish painter
José de Ribera Spanish painter and printmaker, noted for his Baroque dramatic realism and his depictions of religious and mythological subjects. He was born in Spain but spent most of his life in Italy....
German artist
Franz Marc German painter and printmaker who is known for the intense mysticism of his paintings of animals. He was a founding member of Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”), an association of German Expressionist...
Dutch painter
Jan van Goyen was a painter and etcher, one of the most gifted landscapists in the Netherlands during the early 17th century. He learned painting under several masters at Leiden and Haarlem and settled...
American painter and printmaker
Wayne Thiebaud American painter and printmaker who was perhaps best known for his thickly painted American still lifes of such items as foods and cosmetics. He is often incorrectly associated with American...