1. Rodolfo Amoedo (11 December 1857 - 31 May 1941)
The famous Brazilian painter and decorator, Rodolfo Amoedo was one of the key heads responsible for the rebirth of teaching and academic aesthetics at the National School of Fine Arts (Enba). Though Amoedo was a staunch traditionalist in his style, he contributed significantly to step up academic art to new artistic trends, that marked the end of Neoclassical and Romantic movements that dominated Brazil until then.
Often deemed as an ambiguous artist, he was someone who was both innovative, at the same time, fiercely defensive about old standards. During his lifetime, he was intensely influenced by the lectures of Alexandre Cabanel (1823 - 1889), Paul Baudry (1828 - 1886) and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824 - 1898), all of whom inspired him to use discreet colors to come up with meticulous and objective drawing. Rodolfo Amoedo attempted to eliminate the ideal trappings and painted based on the theme of traditional academics.
2. Jacopo Amigoni (1682)
Best fêted for his religious and mythological paintings, Jacopo Amigoni, also known as Giacomo Amiconi, was a prolific 18th century Venetian painter. One of the iconic Rococo artists to have ever walked on the earth, Jacopo Amigoni is much admired for his mythic representation in oil color. Primarily celebrated for his quintessential Venetian Rococo style of painting, his artworks combined the influences of Sebastiano Ricci, French Rococo and Tiepolo. Although Jacopo Amigoni flagged off his artistic career in Venice, he became intellectually productive during his Europe tour. He initially engaged himself in painting mythological and religious scenes. As his display of portraits attracted customers from the north, he extended his works onto presenting gods in sensuous dreaminess or in games. For several years, he painted decorative cycles and portraits, although he hardly enjoyed them.
3. Lizzy Ansingh (13 March 1875 - 14 December 1959)
Lizzy Ansingh was a famous Dutch painter, noted for her doll paintings. What made her paintings so unique was her representation of dolls not as mere objects, but as animate things. In the history of Dutch art, her paintings belonged to a unique genre. Her early paintings and drawings were heavily influenced from her religious upbringing, which mostly consisted of images of angels and biblical scenes. She learned painting from her aunt, Therese Schwartze, who was a noted painter in her own right and who encouraged Lizzy to take up painting as a career.
Also, her aunt encouraged Lizzy to carry on working on her doll themes. With this aim in view, she joined the Amsterdam Royal Academy for Visual Arts to hone her craft. At the academy, she joined a group of female painters, who later became famous as the Amsterdamse Joffers. Apart from dolls, she was also quite skilled at portrait paintings.
4. Milton Avery (07 March 1885 - 03 March 1965)
Milton Avery was one of the most distinguished American modern painters of the 20th century. Primarily a colorist, Avery's work mainly focused on color relations and was not concerned with creating the illusion of depth similar to those of conventional Western paintings. Avery was often thought of as an American Matisse, especially due to his colorful and innovative landscape paintings. His poetic, bold and creative use of drawing and color set him apart from more conventional painting of his era.
Early in his career, his work was considered too radical for being too abstract; when 'Abstract Expressionism' became dominant, his work was ignored for being too representational. Although he was never associated with any particular movement, Avery was a key modernist who influenced succeeding generations of artists including Color Field painters like Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb. As a magnificent painter, graphic artist and ceramist, Milton Avery received numerous awards from American art institutions during his lifetime, but became really famous posthumously. Now he is acclaimed as one of the most influential US 20th-century artists.
5. Karel Appel (25 April 1921 - 03 May 2006)
Karel Appel was an expressionist Dutch painter. He was a member of the famous COBRA, the European group of the late 1940s to early 1950s, which promoted spontaneous expressionism and abstract features in painting. Appel's paintings incorporate applications of vibrant, violent colors often possessing a primal, childlike quality or a schizophrenic innocence. Later in life, Appel turned to creating figurative sculptures. Examples of his work can be seen in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, Boymans-Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, and other collections.
Expressionist painter Karel Appel made a name for himself in the world of painting by creating a majestic collection of highly distinguishable work for which he became internationally renowned. From the start, art curators could not ignore Appel's work, which has been exhibited at major museums around the world, including New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Manhattan-based Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Tate Gallery in London. Though Appel is widely recognized as one of the best-known Dutch Expressionist painters of all time, he was also a passionate printmaker, sculptor, and ceramicist.
6. Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527 - 11 July 1953)
Giuseppe Arcimboldo was an Italian painter, a mannerist of the 16th century. The 'Mannerism' was a transitional period from 1520 to 1590, which embraced some artistic elements from the High Renaissance and tempted the other elements in the Baroque period. The 'Mannerism' was the art of portraying a close relationship between human and nature. He was best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made of elements such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books, i.e., he painted representations of these objects on the canvas arranged in such a way that the whole collection of objects formed a recognizable likeness of the portrait subject.
Although Giuseppe Arcimboldo was extremely famous during his lifetime, but unfortunately his work fell into obscurity soon after his death without any known reason. It may be that his work was misapprehended by the following generations. However, towards the end of the 19th century, there was a sudden surge of interest in his abstruse and fantastic pictures, of which there are very few original copies available. Apart from the fantastic pictures, it is also said that he painted quite a few more traditional ones. But many of these, too, seem to have disappeared.
7. Michael Ancher (09 June 1849 - 19 September 1927)
The legendary Danish painter and one of the most prized members of the Skagen School, Michael Peter Ancher was a master artist best known for his realistic depictions of the lives of the fishing folk in Skagen. Michael wasn't born in Skagen, but visited there in the year 1874 and was so enormously fascinated by the fisherman's town that he decided to spend the rest of his life there. He found the local conducive to his artistic temperament.
As opposed to the rigid formations and composition methods which he learned through his formal education, Ancher came in contact with the new methods and philosophy sweeping over Denmark while he was at Skagen. His marriage to Anna Brondum, a painter, who was also a native of Skagen, is seen as a major factor in his shift in perspective. Ancher went on to become one of the most popular of Danish artists and an eminent face of the Skagen painters.
8. Anna Ancher (18 August 1859 - 15 April 1935)
Anna Ancher (August 18, 1859 - April 15, 1935) was a Danish painter. Anna Ancher is considered one of Denmark's great pictorial artists. She along with her contemporaries oversaw a shift in the artistic landscape of Denmark. They brought about a more realistic approach as compared to the previous generations. She was the face of the women in a group that was pre-dominantly male.
In fact, some say that she was the sole female in the group. As a painter, she was a pioneer among women who were tied down by the traditional constrains of marriage. She was also a pioneer in realistic art involving the interplay of colors in natural light. Ancher went against conventions and social constrains when she pursued her artistic career even after her marriage, no easy task taking in to account that she lived in a period when women, especially those who were married stayed at home and took care of household chores.
9. John Altoon (05 November 1925 - 08 February 1969)
John Altoon was an influential avant-garde American artist of his time who dominated the art scene of 1950s and '60s Los Angeles. Most of his works came under abstract expressionism, the first true artistic movement that emerged out of America. He rose to prominence as a part of a group of artists referred to as the 'Ferus Group' because of their association with the Ferus Gallery. This group included artists like Edward Keinholtz, Robert Irwin, Ed Ruscha, Ed Moses and Larry Bell among others.
A highly popular figure in all his circles, this boisterous painter was a very passionate individual whose personality left a far greater legacy than his artistic works. By the end of his thirties, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and he was only 43 when he passed away following a massive heart attack. This marked the tragic end to the life of a lively, boozing, skirt-chasing man harried by bouts of depression and episodes of mania that was often destructive and violent.
10. Louis Anquetin (26 January 1861 AD - 19 January 1932 AD)
Louis Anquetin was regarded as the most promising artist of the 19th century and he was a major influence on other artists of his time and later generations. In Paris, he was a part of a group of artists that included stalwarts like Vincent van Gough, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Emile Bernard and George Seurat. His early work was heavily influenced by 'Impressionism' but later, along with Bernard, developed a new method of painting called 'Cloisonnisme' that quickly gained him the reputation of an innovator in the Paris art scene.
Anquetin never stayed put with any style and throughout his career, he experimented with different styles. This may partly be due to his innovative nature and restless spirit. During his later life, he was largely out of the art scene and after his death, he was nearly forgotten. However, in recent years his works have seen an uprise in interest, particularly his paintings of the mysterious women of the night, a subject that he worked on when he was in Rome.
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