Hieronymus Bosch (1450 – 9 August 1516) was a Dutch/Netherlandish draughtsman and painter from Brabant. He is one of the most notable representatives of the Early Netherlandish painting school. His work contains fantastic illustrations of religious concepts and narratives. Within his lifetime his work was collected in the Netherlands, Austria, and Spain, and widely copied, especially his macabre and nightmarish depictions of hell.

His most famous triptych is The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1495–1505) whose outer panels are intended to bracket the main central panel between the Garden of Eden depicted on the left panel and the Last Judgment depicted on the right panel. It is attributed by Fischer as a transition painting rendered by Bosch from between his middle period and his late period. In the left hand panel God presents Eve to Adam; innovatively God is given a youthful appearance. The figures are set in a landscape populated by exotic animals and unusual semi-organic hut-shaped forms. The central panel is a broad panorama teeming with socially engaged nude figures seemingly engaged in innocent, self-absorbed joy, as well as fantastical animals, oversized fruit and hybrid stone formations.

(Source: Wikipedia)

John William Waterhouse RA (6 April 1849 – 10 February 1917) was an English painter known for working first in the Academic style and for then embracing the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s style and subject matter. His artworks were known for their depictions of women from both ancient Greek mythology and Arthurian legend.

Born in Rome to English parents who were both painters, Waterhouse later moved to London, where he enrolled in the Royal Academy of Art. He soon began exhibiting at their annual summer exhibitions, focusing on the creation of large canvas works depicting scenes from the daily life and mythology of ancient Greece.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Evelyn De Morgan, (30 August 1855 – 2 May 1919) was an English painter whose works were influenced by the style of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. She was a follower of Pre-Raphaelist Edward Burne-Jones. Her paintings exhibit spirituality; use of mythological, biblical, and literary themes; light and darkness as metaphors; life and death; and allegories of war.

She was also a pupil of her uncle John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, who was a great influence on her works. Beginning in 1875, Evelyn often visited him in Florence where he lived. This also enabled her to study the great artists of the Renaissance; she was particularly fond of the works of Botticelli. This influenced her to move away from the classical subjects favored by the Slade school and to make her own style. She first exhibited in 1877 at the Grosvenor Gallery in London and continued to show her paintings thereafter.

(Source: Wikipedia)

John Albert Bauer (4 June 1882 – 20 November 1918) was a Swedish painter and illustrator. His work is concerned with landscape and mythology, but he also composed portraits. He is best known for his illustrations of early editions of Bland tomtar och troll (Among Gnomes and Trolls), an anthology of Swedish folklore and fairy tales.

Bauer was born and raised in Jönköping. At 16 he moved to Stockholm to study at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts. While there he received his first commissions to illustrate stories in books and magazines, and met the artist Ester Ellqvist, whom he married in 1906. He traveled throughout Lappland, Germany and Italy early in his career, and these cultures deeply informed his work. He painted and illustrated in a romantic nationalistic style, in part influenced by the Italian Renaissance and Sami cultures. Most of his works are watercolors or prints in monochrome or muted colours; he also produced oil paintings and frescos. His illustrations and paintings broadened the understanding and appreciation of Swedish folklore, fairy tales and landscape.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Domenico Zampieri, known as Domenichino for his shortness (October 21, 1581 – April 6, 1641), was an Italian Baroque painter of the Bolognese or Carracci School of painters.

Domenichino’s work, developed principally from Raphael’s and the Carracci’s examples, mirrors the theoretical ideas of his friend Giovanni Battista Agucchi, with whom the painter collaborated on a Treatise on Painting. The portrait of Agucchi in York used to be attributed to Domenichino, but is now thought to be by Annibale Carracci, another friend.

It represents what would become known as classic-idealist art, which aims to surpass the imperfections of nature by developing an “Idea of Beauty” (idea del bello) through the study and imitation of the best examples of ancient and Renaissance art. Imitation in this sense is not copying but a creative process inspired by rhetorical theory whereby revered models are not only emulated but surpassed. One of the most famous incidents in the history of art that centered on concepts of Imitation arose when Lanfranco accused Domenichino of plagiarism, specifically of having stolen the design of his great Last Communion of St. Jerome from an altarpiece of the same subject in Bologna by his former teacher, Agostino Carracci. To prove his point, Lanfranco circulated a print after Agostino’s painting, prompting painters and critics to take sides, most of whom—including Poussin and the antiquarian-critic-biographer Bellori—strongly defended Domenichino’s work as being praiseworthy imitation.

Sir William Blake Richmond (29 November 1842 – 11 February 1921) was a portrait painter, sculptor and a designer of stained glass and mosaic. He is best known for his portrait work and decorative mosaics in St Paul’s cathedral in London.

Richmond was influential in the early stages of the Arts and Crafts Movement in his selection of bold colours and materials for the Cathedral mosaics and in his collaboration with James Powell and Sons, glass makers, in creating new colours and materials. This new material expanded the glassmaker’s palette and was favored by artists of the Arts and Crafts Movement, primarily in the creation of stained glass windows and decorative art work. Richmond was the Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford from 1878 to 1883, succeeding his friend and mentor John Ruskin.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Alonso del Arco (1635 – 1704), born at Madrid, he was a disciple of Antonio de Pereda. He was deaf from birth and was called “El Sordillo de Pereda”. He was an eminent painter, both of history and portraits. Several of his pictures are mentioned by Palomino, particularly the Miraculous Conception, and the Assumption of the Virgin, in the cloister of the Trinitarios Descalzos at Madrid, and in the church of San Salvador is a fine picture of Santa Teresa. Cean Bermudez enumerates a great number of his works in the churches at Madrid, and in other public buildings throughout Spain. He died at Madrid in 1704. (Source: Wikipedia)

Carlo Facchinetti (1870 – 1951) was an Italian visual artist.

Gabriel Joseph Marie Augustin Ferrier (29 September 1847 in Nîmes – 6 June 1914 in Paris) was a French portrait painter and orientalist. Named a Professor of Design at the Maison d’éducation de la Légion d’honneur, then became a lecturer at the École des Beaux-arts, succeeding Jean-Léon Gérôme. He also taught at the Académie Julian. In 1906, he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He was also a member of the Société des Artistes Français. In 1911, he became a Knight in the Légion d’honneur.

Among his best-known students may be numbered Paul-Émile Bécat, Roger Bissière, André Fau and Albert Lynch.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Nicolas Camille Flammarion FRAS (26 February 1842 – 3 June 1925) was a French astronomer and author. He was a prolific author of more than fifty titles, including popular science works about astronomy, several notable early science fiction novels, and works on psychical research and related topics. He also published the magazine L’Astronomie, starting in 1882. He maintained a private observatory at Juvisy-sur-Orge, France.

The “Flammarion engraving” first appeared in Flammarion’s 1888 edition of L’Atmosphère. In 1907, he wrote that he believed that dwellers on Mars had tried to communicate with the Earth in the past. He also believed in 1907 that a seven-tailed comet was heading toward Earth. In 1910, for the appearance of Halley’s Comet, he believed the gas from the comet’s tail “would impregnate [the Earth’s] atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the planet.”

(Source: Wikipedia)