Gilbert Charles Stuart was an American painter from Rhode Island Colony who is widely considered one of America's foremost portraitists. His best-known work is an unfinished portrait of George Washington, begun in 1796, which is sometimes referred to as the Athenaeum Portrait. Stuart retained the portrait and used it to paint scores of copies that were commissioned by patrons in America and abroad. The image of George Washington featured in the painting has appeared on the United States one-dollar bill for more than a century and on various postage stamps of the 19th century and early 20th century.
Rembrandt Peale was an American artist and museum keeper. A prolific portrait painter, he was especially acclaimed for his likenesses of presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Peale's style was influenced by French neoclassicism after a stay in Paris in his early thirties.
Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault was a French painter and lithographer, whose best-known painting is The Raft of the Medusa. Despite his short life, he was one of the pioneers of the Romantic movement.
Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, also known as Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson or simply Girodet, was a French painter and pupil of Jacques-Louis David, who participated in the early Romantic movement by including elements of eroticism in his paintings. Girodet is remembered for his precise and clear style and for his paintings of members of the Napoleonic family.
The Lansdowne portrait is an iconic life-size portrait of George Washington painted by Gilbert Stuart in 1796. It depicts the 64-year-old President of the United States during his final year in office. The portrait was a gift to former British Prime Minister William Petty, 1st Marquess of Lansdowne, and spent more than 170 years in England.
Petrus Christus was an Early Netherlandish painter active in Bruges from 1444, where, along with Hans Memling, he became the leading painter after the death of Jan van Eyck. He was influenced by van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden and is noted for his innovations with linear perspective and a meticulous technique which seems derived from miniatures and manuscript illumination. Today, some 30 works are confidently attributed to him. The best known include the Portrait of a Carthusian (1446) and Portrait of a Young Girl ; both are highly innovative in the presentation of the figure against detailed, rather than flat, backgrounds.
Robert Seldon Duncanson was a 19th-century American landscapist of European and African ancestry. Inspired by famous American landscape artists like Thomas Cole, Duncanson created renowned landscape paintings and is considered a second generation Hudson River School artist. Duncanson spent the majority of his career in Cincinnati, Ohio and helped develop the Ohio River Valley landscape tradition. As a free black man in antebellum America, Duncanson engaged the abolitionist community in America and England to support and promote his work. Duncanson is considered the first African-American artist to be internationally known. He operated in the cultural circles of Cincinnati, Detroit, Montreal, and London. The primary art historical debate centered on Duncanson concerns the role that contemporary racial issues played in his work. Some art historians, like Joseph D. Ketner, believe that Duncanson used racial metaphors in his artwork, while others, like Margaret Rose Vendryes, discourage viewers from approaching his art with a racialized perspective.
The Portrait of Juan de Pareja is a painting by Spanish artist Diego Velázquez of the enslaved Juan de Pareja, a notable painter in his own right, who was owned by Velázquez at the time the painting was completed. Velázquez painted the portrait in Rome, while traveling in Italy, in 1650. It is the earliest known portrait of a Spanish man of African descent.
The Eleven Caesars was a series of eleven painted half-length portraits of Roman emperors made by Titian in 1536-1540 for Federico II, Duke of Mantua. They were among his best-known works, inspired by the Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius. Titian's paintings were originally housed in a new room inside the Palazzo Ducale di Mantova. Bernardino Campi added a twelfth portrait in 1562.
Malle Babbe is a painting by the Dutch Golden Age painter Frans Hals, painted c. 1633-1635, and now in the Gemäldegalerie, in Berlin. The painting has also been titled as Hille Bobbe or the Witch of Haarlem. It was traditionally interpreted as a tronie, or genre painting in a portrait format, depicting a mythic witch-figure. The painting is now often identified as a genre-style portrait of a specific individual from Haarlem, known as Malle Babbe, who may have been an alcoholic or suffered from a mental illness.
Sir Peter Paul Rubens was a Flemish artist and diplomat from the Duchy of Brabant in the Southern Netherlands. He is considered the most influential artist of the Flemish Baroque tradition. Rubens's highly charged compositions reference erudite aspects of classical and Christian history. His unique and immensely popular Baroque style emphasized movement, colour, and sensuality, which followed the immediate, dramatic artistic style promoted in the Counter-Reformation. Rubens was a painter producing altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and history paintings of mythological and allegorical subjects. He was also a prolific designer of cartoons for the Flemish tapestry workshops and of frontispieces for the publishers in Antwerp.
The Portrait of Alfonso I d'Este is a now-lost painting by Titian, dating to 1523. It was painted as a pendant to the Portrait of Laura Dianti of the same year and is now known through copies, one of which is by Rubens and another of which is held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Others are held in the collections of the countess of Vogüe Commarin at Dijon and the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen - the latter is the oldest but only shows the head and shoulders.
The Portrait of Philip IV in Fraga is a mid-length portrait of Philip IV of Spain by Velázquez. It was painted over the course of three sessions in June 1644 in Fraga, where Philip IV had moved the royal court as part of the "Jornada de Aragón" which resulted in the recovery of Lérida from France, which had occupied the city earlier during the Reapers' War. The portrait was gifted by Philip V to his son, the future Philip, Duke of Parma, and the painting left Spain along with him in 1748. In 1911 it was acquired by the Frick Collection, where it is currently on display.
The Flight of Europa is a bronze Art Deco sculpture created by American artist Paul Manship in 1925. Copies are held by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It depicts the Greek myth of Europa being abducted by Zeus in the form of a bull.
The Athenaeum Portrait, also known as The Athenaeum, is an unfinished painting by Gilbert Stuart of United States President George Washington. Created in 1796, it is Stuart's most notable work. The painting depicts Washington at age 64, about three years before his death, on a brown background. It served as the model for the engraving that would be used for Washington's portrait on the United States one-dollar bill.
This 1629 self-portrait by Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn is part of the Clowes Fund Collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art in Indianapolis, Indiana. It is among the earliest of over 40 self-portraits by Rembrandt, which he produced over the course of four decades.
Portrait of Susanna Lunden or Le Chapeau de Paille is a painting by Peter Paul Rubens, in the National Gallery, London. It was probably painted around 1622–1625.
Hans Holbein the Younger painted the Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam several times, and his paintings were much copied, at the time and later. It is difficult to disentangle Holbein's original work from that of his workshop and other copyists. Possibly five largely original versions survive, as well as a number of drawings made as studies.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel Standing Before the Launching Chains of the Great Eastern is a photograph taken by Robert Howlett in November 1857. It shows Brunel, the British engineer, during the troubled first attempt to launch the SS Great Eastern, by far the largest ship constructed to that date. Brunel stands before a drum of chain used during the launching of the vessel. He carries his customary cigar case and his boots and trousers are muddy.
