Sir Thomas Lawrence was an English portrait painter and the fourth president of the Royal Academy. A child prodigy, he was born in Bristol and began drawing in Devizes, where his father was an innkeeper at the Bear Hotel in the Market Square. At age ten, having moved to Bath, he was supporting his family with his pastel portraits. At 18, he went to London and soon established his reputation as a portrait painter in oils, receiving his first royal commission, a portrait of Queen Charlotte, in 1790. He stayed at the top of his profession until his death, aged 60, in 1830.
Lucian Michael Freud was a British painter and draughtsman, specialising in figurative art, and is known as one of the foremost 20th-century English portraitists. He was born in Berlin, the son of Jewish architect Ernst L. Freud and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. Freud got his first name "Lucian" from his mother in memory of the ancient writer Lucian of Samosata. His family moved to England in 1933, when he was 10 years old, to escape the rise of Nazism. He became a British naturalized citizen in 1939. From 1942 to 1943 he attended Goldsmiths' College, London. He served at sea with the British Merchant Navy during the Second World War.
George Stubbs was an English painter, best known for his paintings of horses. Self-trained, Stubbs learnt his skills independently from other great artists of the 18th century such as Reynolds and Gainsborough. Stubbs' output includes history paintings, but his greatest skill was in painting animals, perhaps influenced by his love and study of anatomy. His series of paintings on the theme of a lion attacking a horse are early and significant examples of the Romantic movement that emerged in the late 18th century. He enjoyed royal patronage. His painting, Whistlejacket hangs in the National Gallery, London.
Thomas William Roberts was an English-born Australian artist and a key member of the Heidelberg School art movement, also known as Australian impressionism.
Sir William Dobell was an Australian portrait and landscape artist of the 20th century. Dobell won the Archibald Prize, Australia's premier award for portrait artists on three occasions. The Dobell Prize is named in his honour.
George Frederick Henry Bell was an Australian painter and teacher, critic, portraitist, violinist and war artist who contributed significantly to the advancement of the local Modern movement from the 1920s to the 1930s.
George Washington Thomas Lambert was an Australian artist, known principally for portrait painting and as a war artist during the First World War.
Ben Quilty is an Australian artist and social commentator, who has won a series of painting prizes: the 2014 Prudential Eye Award, 2011 Archibald Prize, and 2009 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize. He has been described as one of Australia's most famous living artists.
James Stuart MacDonald was an Australian artist, art critic and Director of the National Art Gallery of New South Wales from 1929 to 1937.
Peter Edwards,, is a British painter. He won the 1994 BP Portrait Award.
The Officers of the St George Militia Company in 1639 refers to the last and largest schuttersstuk painted by Frans Hals for the St. George civic guard of Haarlem, and today is considered one of the main attractions of the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem.
The Meagre Company, or The Company of Captain Reinier Reael and Lieutenant Cornelis Michielsz Blaeuw, refers to the only militia group portrait, or schutterstuk, painted by Frans Hals outside of Haarlem. Today the painting is in the collection of the Amsterdam Museum, on loan to the Rijksmuseum, where it is considered one of its main attractions of the Honor Gallery. Hals was unhappy about commuting to Amsterdam to work on the painting and, unlike his previous group portraits, was unable to deliver it on time. The sitters contracted Pieter Codde to finish the work.
Florence Ada Fuller was a South African-born Australian artist. Originally from Port Elizabeth, Fuller migrated as a child to Melbourne with her family. There she trained with her uncle Robert Hawker Dowling and teacher Jane Sutherland and took classes at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, becoming a professional artist in the late 1880s. In 1892 she left Australia, travelling first to South Africa, where she met and painted for Cecil Rhodes, and then on to Europe. She lived and studied there for the subsequent decade, except for a return to South Africa in 1899 to paint a portrait of Rhodes. Between 1895 and 1904 her works were exhibited at the Paris Salon and London's Royal Academy.
Hilda Rix Nicholas was an Australian artist. Born in the Victorian city of Ballarat, she studied under a leading Australian Impressionist, Frederick McCubbin, at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School from 1902 to 1905 and was an early member of the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors. Following the death of her father in 1907, Rix, her only sibling Elsie and her mother travelled to Europe where she undertook further study, first in London and then Paris. Her teachers during the period included John Hassall, Richard Emil Miller and Théophile Steinlen.
Portrait of an Army Doctor is an oil-on-canvas painting created during 1914–15 by the French artist, theorist and writer Albert Gleizes. Painted at the fortress city of Toul (Lorraine) while Gleizes served in the military during the First World War, the painting's abstract circular rhythms and intersecting aslant planes announce the beginning of the second synthetic phase of Cubism. The work represents Gleizes's commanding officer, Major Mayer-Simon Lambert (1870–1943), the regimental surgeon in charge of the military hospital at Toul. At least eight preparatory sketches, gouaches and watercolors of the work have survived, though Portrait of an Army Doctor is one of Gleizes's only major oil paintings of the period.
The Sock Knitter is a 1915 painting by the Australian artist Grace Cossington Smith. The painting depicts a woman, believed to be the artist's sister, knitting a sock. It was the first work by Cossington Smith to be exhibited and has been "acclaimed as the first post-impressionist painting to be exhibited in Australia."
The figure is pressed forward onto the picture plane. Tightly constructed. The creamy impasto paint of the backgrounds holds the picture together. The sitter then holds the background together. Like a jigsaw. She is the pattern maker. There are echoing triangles everywhere.
Vincent van Gogh is an 1886 oil on canvas portrait painting by Australian artist John Russell. It depicts Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh, who befriended Russell after meeting him at Fernand Cormon's atelier in Paris, which they both attended. Painted in a realist and academic manner, the portrait shows hints of the impressionist techniques that Russell and Van Gogh began experimenting with in the latter half of the 1880s.
Anzacs Bathing is a 1916 painting by Australian artist George Washington Lambert. The painting depicts three Anzac soldiers bathing at Anzac Cove during the Gallipoli Campaign during World War I.
Three young men frolic in the foaming blue sea, in a break from the brutalities of battle; the light gilds and defines, in scrupulous detail, the musculature of the soldiers’ bodies
The Squatter's Daughter is a 1924 painting by Australian artist George Washington Lambert. It is part of the collection of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.
Chesham Street is a 1910 oil-on-canvas painting by Australian artist George Washington Lambert. The work depicts a doctor performing an auscultation on a man with his shirt lifted and torso exposed. The work was painted at the Rossetti Studios on Flood Street in London. The painting is one of a set of "puzzle pictures" painted by Lambert between 1910 and 1914. These paintings are said to "appear to have a meaning and yet are not strictly narrative; they invite the viewer to provide their own interpretation.".
The man sits boldly in front of the viewer, holding up his shirt and revealing his entire torso. His head is held high, his lips are closed and he looks down at the viewer, seeming somewhat superior. His pale flesh, with the play of light on it, gleams against the dark surroundings.
