From his beginnings, Degas seemed equally attracted to the severity of line and to the sensuous delights of colour, echoing a historic tension that was still much debated in his time. In Italy he consciously modeled some drawings on the linear restraint of the Florentine masters, such as Michelangelo, although he gradually acknowledged the lure of the Venetian painters, such as Titian, and their densely hued surfaces. Characteristically, the young Degas developed a near reverence for Ingres, the 19th-century champion of Classical line, while almost guiltily imitating Eugène Delacroix, who was the leading proponent of lyrical colour in the century and considered to be Ingres’s antithesis. Many of the pictures of Degas’s maturity grew out of a confrontation between these impulses, which arguably found resolution in the vigorously drawn and brilliantly coloured pastels of his later years.

Thus it was that in the mid-1880s Toulouse-Lautrec began his lifelong association with the bohemian life of Montmartre. The cafés, cabarets, entertainers, and artists of this area of Paris fascinated him and led to his first taste of public recognition. He focused his attention on depicting popular entertainers such as Aristide Bruant, Jane Avril, Loie Fuller, May Belfort, May Milton, Valentin le Désossé, Louise Weber (known as La Goulue [“the Glutton”]), and clowns such as Cha-U-Kao and Chocolat.

In 1884 Toulouse-Lautrec made the acquaintance of Bruant, a singer and composer who owned a cabaret called the Mirliton. Impressed by his work, Bruant asked him to prepare illustrations for his songs and offered the Mirliton as a place where Toulouse-Lautrec could exhibit his works. By this means and through reproductions of his drawings in Bruant’s magazine Mirliton, he became known in Montmartre and started to receive commissions.

Toulouse-Lautrec sought to capture the effect of the movement of the figure through wholly original means. For example, his contemporary Edgar Degas (whose works, along with Japanese prints, were a principal influence on him) expressed movement by carefully rendering the anatomical structure of several closely grouped figures, attempting in this way to depict but one figure, caught at successive moments in time. Toulouse-Lautrec, on the other hand, employed freely handled line and colour that in themselves conveyed the idea of movement. Lines were no longer bound to what was anatomically correct; colours were intense and in their juxtapositions generated a pulsating rhythm; laws of perspective were violated in order to place figures in an active, unstable relationship with their surroundings. A common device of Toulouse-Lautrec was to compose the figures so that their legs were not visible. Though this characteristic has been interpreted as the artist’s reaction to his own stunted, almost worthless legs, in fact the treatment eliminated specific movement, which could then be replaced by the essence of movement. The result was an art throbbing with life and energy, that in its formal abstraction and overall two-dimensionality presaged the turn to schools of Fauvism and Cubism in the first decade of the 20th century.

He exhibited for the first time in 1912 at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona, Der Sturm gallery in Berlin, the Salon de la Société Normande de Peinture Moderne in Rouen, and the Salon de la Section d’Or in Paris. That same year D.H. Kahnweiler signed Gris to a contract that gave Kahnweiler exclusive rights to the artist’s work. Gris became a good friend of Henri Matisse in 1914 and over the next several years formed close relationships with Jacques Lipchitz and Jean Metzinger. After Kahnweiler fled Paris at the outbreak of World War I, Gris signed a contract with Léonce Rosenberg in 1916. His first major solo show was held at Rosenberg’s Galerie l’Effort Moderne in Paris in 1919. The following year Kahnweiler returned and once again became Gris’s dealer.

In 1922 the painter first designed ballet sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev. Gris articulated most of his aesthetic theories during 1924 and 1925. He delivered his definitive lecture, “Des possibilités de la peinture,” at the Sorbonne in 1924. Major Gris exhibitions took place at the Galerie Simon in Paris and the Galerie Flechtheim in Berlin in 1923 and at the Galerie Flechtheim in Düsseldorf in 1925. As his health declined, Gris made frequent visits to the south of France. He died in Boulogne-sur-Seine on May 11, 1927.

You don’t want a painting that looks like it is done from a photograph because the colors are often times generic and plane while the figures looks flat. I focus on making the portraits as realistic as possible by working from real life in my downtown studio.

The process consists of an initial meeting ideally in my studio to decide upon the subject matter. If that is not possible, we can speak over the phone or wherever is most convenient. We will go over examples of beautifully painted portraits from famous painters to get an idea of what your tastes might be as far as the setup and look of the work. We will then do a session where I sketch a preliminary pencil drawing or drawings to further establish an understanding of the desired portrait composition. Once the composition is established, we may begin the sittings at the sitter’s convenience.

Ideally, a session last 3 hours with 5 minute breaks every 25 minutes. It normally takes me between 10 and 15 sittings to complete a portrait. During the sessions, I love to talk to the sitter and listen to music the sitter desires because I understand that for some, the idea of sitting for a portrait isn’t fun. It is also okay to take breaks outside of the break period and to stretch whenever needed. I want the sitter to be comfortable.

It is likely that Bellows intended Both Members of This Club as an allusion to the recent and much-publicized success of the African American professional prizefighter Jack Johnson, who had won the world heavyweight championship in 1908. The idea of a black boxing champion was so unsettling to the prejudiced social order of the time that many thought interracial bouts should be outlawed. Painted at the height of the Jim Crow era, Bellows’s powerful delineation of a white fighter about to be defeated by a black opponent was an exceptionally daring and provocative piece of social commentary.

In the early twentieth century, the artist George Bellows aspired to represent the rough edges and dark aspects of New York City. In his early twenties, Bellows moved to the city from Ohio, where he had attended the Ohio State University and played baseball and basketball. He studied with Robert Henri at the New York School of Art and became part of an informal group of American artists that came to be called the “Ashcan School” due to the painters’ gritty brand of realism and the apparent muddiness of their color palettes. Henri, who led the group, encouraged his associates, a number of whom had been illustrators in Philadelphia, to sketch and paint from real life. Typical subjects for Henri, Bellows, and their Ashcan brethren included rough-and-tumble youths, working class people, immigrant communities, and the hubbub of the urban street. While still in his twenties, Bellows painted Both Members of This Club (1909), one of his most recognizable images.

In the painting, two men, one white and the other black, on the left and right respectively, engage one another in a prizefighting (boxing for cash prize) ring. The painting’s style reinforces its subject matter. Bellows’ brushstrokes underscore the violence, physicality and vigorous action of the match. Bellows applied paint with a quickness and sketchiness that echoes the energetic movement of the athletes and the flickering of low light as it bounces across the faces of the rowdy, restless audience. The forms, while distinct, are not delicately rendered, but instead are roughly described. Slashes of paint are particularly noticeable in the highlights along the black boxer’s back and side. They are also apparent in the streaks of red, evoking blood, by the elbow of the white boxer, along his ribs and stomach, and across his neck and chin.

He studied at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam, and the art academies in Antwerp and Brussels. Among those he studied with were August Allebé and Hendrik Valkenburg (1826-1896). In his turn, he gave private lessons to Edmée Broers (1876-1955), Meta Cohen Gosschalk [nl], Maria Adeline Alice Schweistal (1864-1950) and Pauline Suij; at a time when women were not admitted to the Rijksakademie.

In 1892, he was awarded a Royal Subsidy to sustain his work. The 1901 edition of Camera Obscura [nl], by Nicolaas Beets, contains a portrait of the author by Haverman. He was also an art critic and wrote numerous articles for De Gids, the oldest Dutch literary journal. In 1918, there was a major retrospective of his works at the Pulchri Studio in The Hague. The first exhibition of his works after his death took place in 2008 at Pygmalion Visual Arts in Maarssen.

Hendrik Johannes Haverman was a Dutch painter who was born in 1857. Hendrik Johannes Haverman’s work has been offered at auction multiple times.

Klee was born in 1879 in Münchenbuchsee, near Bern, Switzerland, the second child of Hans Klee, a German music teacher, and a Swiss mother. His training as a painter began in 1898 when he studied drawing and painting in Munich for three years. By 1911, he had returned to that city, where he became involved with the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), founded by Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc in 1911. Klee and Kandinsky became lifelong friends, and the support of the older painter provided much-needed encouragement. Until then, Klee had worked in relative isolation, experimenting with various styles and media, such as making caricatures and Symbolist drawings, and later producing small works on paper mainly in black and white. His work was also influenced by the Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and the abstract translucent color planes of Robert Delaunay.

In 1920, Walter Gropius invited Klee to join the faculty of the Bauhaus. A school of architecture and industrial design operating first in Weimar (1919–25) and then Dessau (1925–32), it also included the study of arts and crafts. Nearly half of Klee’s some 10,000 works (mainly small-scale watercolors and drawings on paper) were produced during the ten years he taught at the Bauhaus, and they vary widely. Some relate to the subject of his courses, to his preoccupation with the relationship of colors, such as Static-Dynamic Gradation, produced in 1923 (1987.455.12). In the same year, Klee painted Ventriloquist and Crier in the Moor (1984.315.35), which, with its humor and grotesque fantasy, may strike many viewers as the quintessential “Klee.”

From 1931 to December 1933, Klee taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf. When the National Socialists declared his art “degenerate” in 1933, Klee returned to his native Bern. Personal hardship and the increasing gravity of the political situation in Europe are reflected in the somber tone of his late work. Lines turn into black bars, forms become broad and generalized, scale larger, and colors simpler.

Ventriloquist and Crier in the Moor is a watercolor, ink painting created by Paul Klee in 1923. It lives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Paul Klee was a Swiss painter of German nationality. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He was also a student of orientalism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually mastered color theory, and wrote extensively about it; his lectures on form and design theory, published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are considered so important for modern art that is compared to the importance that Leonardo’s A Treatise on Painting had for Renaissance. He and his colleague, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the German Bauhaus school of art, design, and architecture. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes child-like perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality. His work influenced all later 20th-century surrealist and nonobjective artists and was a prime source for the budding abstract expressionist movement.

Brett was born near Reigate on 8 December 1831, the son of an army vet. His sister Rosa Brett was also an artist and during 1850 and 1851 they shared a studio. In 1851 he began lessons in art with James Duffield Harding, a landscape painter. He also studied with Richard Redgrave. In 1853 he entered the Royal Academy schools, but was more interested in the ideas of John Ruskin and William Holman Hunt, whom he met through his friend the poet Coventry Patmore. Inspired by Hunt’s ideal of scientific landscape painting, Brett visited Switzerland, where he worked on topographical landscapes and came under the further influence of John William Inchbold.

In 1858 Brett exhibited The Stonebreaker, the painting that made his reputation. This depicted a youth smashing stones to create a road-surface, sitting in a brightly lit and brilliantly detailed landscape. (The treatment provided a strong contrast with Henry Wallis’s painting of the same name, exhibited the same year.) The precision of the geological and botanical detail in Brett’s version greatly impressed Ruskin, who praised the painting highly, predicting that Brett would be able to paint a masterpiece if he were to visit the Val d’Aosta in Italy. Partly funded by Ruskin, Brett made the trip to paint the location, exhibiting it in 1859, again to high praise from Ruskin, who bought the painting. Other critics were less effusive, one describing it as a “gravestone for post-Ruskinism”.

Brett continued to paint carefully detailed landscape views, staying in Italy on many occasions in the 1860s. He was always keen to stress the scientific precision of his rendering of nature, but often infused it with moral and religious significance, as recommended by Ruskin. In his later years he painted more coastal subjects and seascapes, subjects he came to know well due to his ownership of a 210-ton schooner, Viking (which had a crew of twelve), on which he travelled the Mediterranean.

During summers in the 1880s Brett rented the castle at Newport, Pembrokeshire to use as a base for his large family while he painted, sketched and photographed the south and west coasts of Wales. An exhibition in 2001 at the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, entitled John Brett – a Pre-Raphaelite on the Shores of Wales brought together many of the major works from this period of his career.

Brett was also a keen astronomer, having studied the subject from childhood. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1871. Brett was a founder member of the Art Workers’ Guild and Master in 1890.