Childe Hassam - Conneticut Impressionist !

While Childe Hassam's French connection was recognized so early in his career that any reference to Claude Monet became an annoyance to him, impressionism was but one of three strong currents flowing through his art. Two others surged up earlier: popular culture made familiar through Hassam's work as an illustrator; and lessons of early nineteenth century British landscape painting, reinforced by the artistic leanings of Boston during the 1860s and 1870s, and furthered by Hassam's travels to England in the 1880s.
Ernest Haskell, 1922
He has a way of taking his own where he finds it, and thus he leaves the stamp of his personality on localities where he has worked... The schooners beating in and out, the wharves, the sea, the sky, these belong to Hassam....
There are many other fields that he has invaded and made his. Flowers in gardens, flowers in still life, flowers as accessories to portraits. These are painted with great tenderness, great restraint of color yet very colorfully, always part of the picture, neverjumping out in forced contrast. interiors are his, interiors that are renderings of space with a magic play of light, the light that instinctively seems to be the heritage of Hassam.

Elizabeth Broun, 1994
In a series of paintings begun in 1907, Hassam showed a solitary woman standing by a window the individual placed in relation to the broader world. His women embody the finest of Western and Eastern traditions, evoked in this painting by the Hellenistic figurine and oriental screen. They are well bred, like the hybrid roses on the table. Hassam's generation was preoccupied by evolutionary theory, and to him, the modern American woman represented a refinement of nature and culture that had been long in the making.
The key to the picture, however, is found in the sliver of the "outside world" glimpsed through the window, where laborers are seen building a skyscraper. While these men are creating the visible edifices of the modern American age, the new American woman is coming to maturity as a guardian of civilization.
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Edward Hopper - American Original

Hopper, Edward, 1882–1967, American painter and engraver, b. Nyack, N.Y., studied in New York City with Robert Henri. Hopper lived in France for a year but was little influenced by the artistic currents there. His early paintings had slight success; he gained a reputation, however, through his etchings, which remain popular. The first one-man show of his paintings was held in 1920. Hopper excelled in creating realistic pictures of clear-cut, sunlit streets and houses, often without figures. In his paintings there is a frequent atmosphere of loneliness, an almost menacing starkness, and a clear sense of time of day or night. His work in oil and watercolor is slowly and carefully painted, with light and shade used for pattern rather than for modeling. Hopper is represented in many leading American museums. Early Sunday Morning (1930; Whitney Museum, N.Y.C.) and Nighthawks (1942; Art Institute of Chicago) are characteristic oils.
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Claude Monet - Founder of Impressionism

Monet, Claude 1840–1926, French landscape painter, b. Paris. Monet was a founder of impressionism. He adhered to its principles throughout his long career and is considered the most consistently representative painter of the school as well as one of the foremost painters of landscape in the history of art.

As a youth in Le Havre, Monet was encouraged by the marine painter Boudin to paint in the open air, a practice he never forsook. After two years (1860–62) with the army in Algeria, he went to Paris, over parental objections, to study painting. In Paris, Monet formed lasting friendships with the artists who would become the major impressionists, including Pissarro, Cézanne, Renoir, Sisley, and Bazille. He and several of his friends painted for a time out-of-doors in the Barbizon district.

Monet soon began to concern himself with his lifelong objective: portraying the variations of light and atmosphere brought on by changes of hour and season. Rather than copy in the Louvre, the traditional practice of young artists, Monet learned from his friends, from the landscape itself, and from the works of his older contemporaries Manet, Corot, and Courbet. Monet's representation of light was based on his knowledge of the laws of optics as well as his own observations of his subjects. He often showed natural color by breaking it down into its different components as a prism does. Eliminating black and gray from his palette, Monet rejected entirely the academic approach to landscape.

In his later works Monet allowed his vision of light to dissolve the real structures of his subjects. To do this he chose simple matter, making several series of studies of the same object at different times of day or year: haystacks, morning views of the Seine, the Gare Saint-Lazare (1876–78), poplars (begun 1890), the Thames, the celebrated group of Rouen Cathedral (1892–94), and the last great lyrical series of water lilies (1899, and 1904–25), painted in his own garden at Giverny (one version, a vast triptych c.1920; Mus. of Modern Art, New York City).

In 1874 Sisley, Morisot, and Monet organized the first impressionist group show, which was ferociously maligned by the critics, who coined the term impressionism after Monet's Impression: Sunrise, 1872 (Mus. Marmottan, Paris). The show failed financially. However, by 1883 Monet had prospered, and he retired from Paris to his home in Giverny. In the last decade of his life Monet, nearly blind, painted a group of large water lily murals (Nymphéas) for the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris.

Monet's work is particularly well represented in the Louvre, the Marmottan (Paris), the National Gallery (London), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. It is also included in many famous private collections.
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Franz Marc - Expressionism!

(b Munich, 8 Feb 1880; d nr Verdun, 4 March 1916). German painter. He decided to become a painter in autumn 1900, after initially intending to study philosophy and theology. He began his training at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich under Gabriel von Hackl (1843–1926) and Wilhelm von Dietz (1839–1907) and worked in the style of Munich landscape painting. His early Portrait of the Artist’s Mother (1902; Munich, Lenbachhaus) reveals in its form and construction that he already possessed an astonishing mastery of traditional artistic means. From summer 1902 onwards, increasingly self-taught, he worked at Kochel in Upper Bavaria, often on the alpine slopes of the Staffelalm. In May 1903, thanks to his excellent command of French (his Huguenot mother came from Alsace), he accompanied a friend on a study trip to Paris. On his return to Munich he gave up his studies at the Akademie. In his studio in the Kaulbachstrasse he devoted himself primarily to illustrations of poems by Richard Dehmel, Carmen Sylva, Hans Bethge and others, which were published posthumously by Anette von Eckhardt in 1917 in Munich under the title Stella Peregrina.
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Toulouse-Lautrec - Painted the decadent life!

Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 1864–1901, French painter and lithographer, b. Albi. Son of a wealthy nobleman, Lautrec fell and broke both legs when he was a child. His permanently stunted growth has traditionally been seen as the result of this accident, but more recently doctors have theorized that it may have been the result of a rare genetic abnormality. Showing an early gift for drawing, he studied with Bonnat and Cormon and set up a studio of his own when he was 21. As a youth he was attracted by sporting subjects and admired and was influenced by the work of Degas.

His own work is, above all, graphic in nature, the paint never obscuring the strong, original draftsmanship. He detailed the music halls, circuses, brothels, and cabaret life of Paris with a remarkable objectivity born, perhaps, of his own isolation. His garish and artificial colors, the orange hair and electric green light of his striking posters, caught the atmosphere of the life they advertised. Lautrec's technical innovations in color lithography created a greater freedom and a new immediacy in poster design. His posters of the dancers and personalities at the Moulin Rouge cabaret are world renowned and have inspired countless imitations.

After a life of enormous productivity (more than 1,000 paintings, 5,000 drawings, and 350 prints and posters), debauchery, and alcoholism, Lautrec suffered a mental and physical collapse and died at the age of 37. His life has inspired numerous biographies, of varying accuracy. Although exhibitions of his work were not well received in his lifetime, he is now one of the world's most popular artists and is represented in most of the major museums of France and the United States. Many of his sketches and some paintings are in the Musée Lautrec of his native Albi. His painting At the Moulin de la Galette (1892) is in the Art Institute, Chicago; the lithograph Seated Female Clown (1896) is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
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Ilya Repin - Russian master!

Ilya Repin is the most prominent painter in the XVIII century Russian realism. He had a gift of a strong talent. The Artist studied at the Petersburg Academy of Arts from 1864 to 1871. On a scholarship from the Academy, Repin lived and worked in Paris, becoming a member of the Academy. He spent one year living in Moscow but moved to St Petersburg in 1882.
1878-1882 Repin was a member of S.Mammontov's Abramtsevo Art Circle and a member of the Itinerants. He was a professor of art at the Academy and became its director in 1898-1899. Ilya Repin also taught at the Princess M. Tenisheva studio-school.
Repin produced several lithographs, a huge number of drawings, landscapes, portraits, and historical paintings.
In 1900 Repin moved to his estate in the vicinity of Petersburg.
By 1901 He finished The Formal Session of the State Council of May7,1901,on the day of the Centenary of its Establishment. It was a grandiose design, the final canvas measures 400 x 877 cm! (157 x 345 inches) it was a government commission, so, in 1905 the painting was acquired from the artist. Now it's placed in the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
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Joseph Mallord Turner - Original "Painter of Light"

Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 1775–1851, English landscape painter, b. London. Turner was the foremost English romantic painter and the most original of English landscape artists; in watercolor he is unsurpassed. The son of a barber, he received almost no general education but at 14 was already a student at the Royal Academy of Arts and three years later was making topographical drawings for magazines. In 1791 for the first time he exhibited two watercolors at the Royal Academy. In the following 10 years he exhibited there regularly, was elected a member (1802), and was made professor of perspective (1807). By 1799 the sale of his work had freed him from drudgery and he devoted himself to the visionary interpretations of landscape for which he became famous.

In 1802, Turner made a trip to the Continent, where he painted his famous Calais Pier (National Gall., London). From then on he traveled constantly in England or abroad, making innumerable direct sketches from which he drew material for his studio paintings in oil and watercolor. Turner showed a remarkable ability to distill the best from the tradition of landscape painting and he helped to further elevate landscape (and seascape) as important artistic subject matter. The influence of the Dutch masters is apparent in his Sun Rising through Vapor (National Gall., London). In the vein of the French classical landscape painter, Claude Lorrain, he produced the Liber Studiorum (1807–19), 70 drawings that were later reproduced by engraving under Turner's supervision. Among the paintings evocative of Claude's style are his Dido Building Carthage (National Gall., London) and Crossing the Brook (Tate Gall., London). Despite his early and continued success Turner lived the life of a recluse. As his fame grew he maintained a large gallery in London for exhibition of his work, but continued to live quietly with his elderly father.

Turner's painting became increasingly abstract as he strove to portray light, space, and the elemental forces of nature. In fact, some of his modern admirers have noted that the true subjects of his late paintings are the radiance of light and the vitality of paint itself. Characteristic of his later period are such paintings as The Fighting Téméraire and Rain, Steam, and Speed (both: National Gall., London). His late Venetian works, which describe atmospheric effects with brighter colors, include The Grand Canal (Metropolitan Mus.) and Approach to Venice (National Gall., Washington, D.C.). Turner encountered violent criticism as his style became increasingly free, but he was passionately defended by Sir Thomas Lawrence and the youthful Ruskin. Visionary, revolutionary, and extremely influential, these late paintings laid the groundwork for impressionism, postimpressionism, abstract expressionism, color-field painting, and a myriad of other art movements of the late 19th and 20th cents. Turner's will, which was under litigation for many years, left more than 19,000 watercolors, drawings, and oils to the British nation. Most of these works are in the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery, London. Many of Turner's oils have deteriorated badly.