Careful examination of the details embedded in this portrait reveals the key to David’s success as a painter during the time of Louis XVI, Robespierre, and Napoleon: the artist’s ability …

Watson and the Shark’s exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1778 generated a sensation, partly because such a grisly subject was an absolute novelty. In 1749, 14–year–old Brook Watson had …

Perhaps more than the work of his two teachers, Boucher and Chardin, Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s bravura handling of brushwork and color embodies 18th-century painting aesthetics. In A Young Girl Reading, the …

Largillière’s father, a merchant, took him to Antwerp at the age of three. As a boy, he spent nearly two years in London. Sometime after his return to Antwerp, a …

A woman dressed in a blue jacket with fur trim stands alone before a table in a corner of a room. She holds a balance in her right hand and …

The mood and subject matter in Steen’s paintings range enormously, from intimate moments when a family says grace before a meal to festive celebrations of Twelfth Night. But to all …

Rembrandt van Rijn painted, drew, and etched so many self–portraits in his lifetime that changes in his appearance tempt us to gauge his mental state by comparing one image to …

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (February 8, 1591 – December 22, 1666), best known as Guercino or Il Guercino, was an Italian Baroque painter and draftsman from the region of Emilia, and …

According to the tenets of the 17th–century Catholic church, Mary Magdalen was an example of the repentant sinner and consequently a symbol of the Sacrament of Penance. According to legend, …