Artists
Six painters, ordered by birth. Each page has a life, a dated timeline and every work we hold.
Dutch Golden Age
Johannes Vermeer
Dutch · 1632–1675 · 3 works
Around thirty-five paintings by Vermeer are generally accepted, which for a career of roughly twenty years is about two a year — a rate that tells you most of what you need to know about how he worked. He spent his…
Ukiyo-e
Katsushika Hokusai
Japanese · 1760–1849 · 3 works
Hokusai worked for seventy years, used more than thirty art names, and produced something in the order of thirty thousand designs — prints, paintings, book illustrations and the fifteen volumes of sketches known as the…
Romanticism
J. M. W. Turner
British · 1775–1851 · 6 works
Turner was a barber's son from Covent Garden who entered the Royal Academy schools at fourteen, exhibited there at fifteen, and became a full Academician at twenty-six — about as fast as the English art establishment…
Impressionism
Claude Monet
French · 1840–1926 · 5 works
Monet gave Impressionism its name by accident, with a painting called Impression, Sunrise that a hostile critic used as a stick to beat the whole group in 1874. He spent the next fifty years pursuing one idea with more…
Post-Impressionism
Paul Gauguin
French · 1848–1903 · 5 works
Gauguin was a successful Paris stockbroker who collected Impressionist paintings before he made any, and who gave up the career at thirty-five to paint full-time — leaving a wife and five children in Copenhagen in the…
Post-Impressionism
Vincent van Gogh
Dutch · 1853–1890 · 8 works
Van Gogh painted for roughly ten years, and for the first five of them he was not very good. That is worth saying plainly, because the usual telling turns him into a natural whose genius was simply unrecognised. He…