Dutch Post-Impressionist Painter, 1853-1890 Vincent Willem van Gogh (30 March 1853 ?C 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist artist. Some of his paintings are now among the world's best known, most popular and expensive works of art. Van Gogh spent his early adult life working for a firm of art dealers. After a brief spell as a teacher, he became a missionary worker in a very poor mining region. He did not embark upon a career as an artist until 1880. Initially, Van Gogh worked only with sombre colours, until he encountered Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism in Paris. He incorporated their brighter colours and style of painting into a uniquely recognizable style, which was fully developed during the time he spent at Arles, France. He produced more than 2,000 works, including around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches, during the last ten years of his life. Most of his best-known works were produced in the final two years of his life, during which time he cut off part of his left ear following a breakdown in his friendship with Paul Gauguin. After this he suffered recurrent bouts of mental illness, which led to his suicide. The central figure in Van Gogh's life was his brother Theo, who continually and selflessly provided financial support. Their lifelong friendship is documented in numerous letters they exchanged from August 1872 onwards. Van Gogh is a pioneer of what came to be known as Expressionism. He had an enormous influence on 20th century art, especially on the Fauves and German Expressionists.  Related Paintings of Vincent Van Gogh :. | Still life:vase with Twelve Sunflowers (nn04) | Portrait of the Postman joseph Roulin (nn04) | Self-Portrait (nn04) | Ladies of Arles | The Garden of the Asylum in St.Remy |
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Samuel Butler
British author , (1835 - 1902) Samuel Butler was born on Dec. 4, 1835, in Langar, near Bingham, Nottinghamshire, the son of the local vicar. In a time of common paternal absolutism, his childhood seems to have been bleak and graceless. After taking a degree at Cambridge, he came into open conflict with his father over the question of his future profession, and at last he emigrated to New Zealand to become a sheep farmer. But though free of his father, he was not free of revolt, and the spirit of resentful rebelliousness marked much of his later life. In New Zealand he read Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and wrote a series of newspaper articles setting forth Darwin's ideas and ingeniously applying the evolutionary hypothesis to machines. Having made a modest fortune, he returned to England in 1864. Erewhon (1872), Butler's first book, is a mixture of satire, utopian theories, and serious speculation masked as whimsy. Set in the frame of a trip to an unknown land (Erewhon is an anagram of "no-where"), it has no real plot but is rather a description and discussion of the customs and institutions of Erewhon. In this land moral failings are treated as mental illness and cured by a "straightener," but physical illness and misfortune are considered crimes and severely punished. Children sign certificates absolving their parents of responsibility for their birth, and education is carried on in the College of Unreason. Butler's reflections on orthodox religion, begun in New Zealand, issued in The Fair Haven (1873), an ironic attempt to reconcile the New Testament with rationalistic criticism. In Life and Habit he returned to the question of evolution. In Evolution Old and New (1879), Unconscious Memory (1880), and Luck, or Cunning? (1887), he developed his ideas with an increasingly self-righteous resentment of what he conceived to be the Darwinians' deliberate concealment of the truth. Butler hoped to be able to restore will, intelligence, and design to a universe apparently made meaningless by the blind process of natural selection. The novel The Way of All Flesh, Butler's most famous work, was written between 1872 and 1885. It is the supposed biography of Ernest Pontifex, narrated by an older friend with an unrelenting candor deliberately affronting conventional pieties.
Masolino
Italian c1383-c1477 Masolino Gallery The principal monograph is by Toesca, Masolino da Panicale (Bergamo, 1908); also, A. H. Layard, The Brancacci Chapel and Masolino, Masaccio, and Filippino Lippi published by the Arundel Society (London, 1868); Schmarsow, Massacio Studien (Cassel, 1895-1900); Bernard Berenson, "Quelques peinures m??connues de Masolino da Panicale," in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, ser. 3, volume xxvii (Paris, 1902); Berenson in Study and Criticism of Italian Art, volume ii (London, 1902); Crowe and Cavalcaselle, History of Painting in Italy, edited by Douglas and Strong (New York, 1903); for data on the life of Masolino: Milanesi, Storia dell' arte toscana (Florence, 1873).
Galeazzo Campi
(1475/1477 - 1536) was an Italian painter of the Renaissance from Cremona. He was a pupil of Boccaccio Boccaccinis . His representation was rather rigid, but careful. His landscapes show influences of Perugino and Giovanni Bellini. Campi was the head of an artist family, existing in the middle and end of 16th Century who lived in Cremona and left numerous works of art. His three sons, Giulio Campi, Antonio Campi and Vincenzo Campi are historically noteworthy.