My favourite painters ❤️🖌👨🏼‍🎨

Self-portrait, by JMW Turner, 1799

At Tate Britain one can enjoy the largest collection of paintings and other artworks by JMW Turner, as the painter left a bequest upon his death to the United Kingdom of his huge private collection, now exhibited at the Close Gallery of the London museum. Visitors can get a comprehensive idea of Turner and his contemporary’s art. In his later years the painter started experimenting with the effects of light in the sky and over water and his private collection is showcasing his artistic journey towards ever more ethereal paintings.

Self-portrait, by Claude Monet

With his revolutionary painting, Impression, Sunrise, exhibited for the first time in Paris in 1874, Claude Monet gave the name to the nascent Impressionist movement that also included fellow contemporary artists like Pissarro, Manet, Renoir and Sisley. Monet is internationally known for his series of late paintings inspired by his garden in Giverny, in the outskirts of Paris. One can appreciate the source of his inspiration visiting the country house and the gardens where he spent the last part of his life.

Self-portrait, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1875

Pierre-August Renoir was born in Limoges on the 25th of February 1841 in a familiy of modest means that moved to Paris, close by to the Louvre Museum, when the little Pierre-Auguste was three years old. Since very young he demonstrated artistic talent but as a singer and attracted the attention of the musician Charles Gounod, who tried to enrol him in the choir of the Opéra in Paris. Pierre-Auguste’s father was not supportive of Gounod’s musical plans but encouraged his son’s figurative skills, hoping he would become one day a porcelain decorateur in his home town of Limoges. He actually became a leading painter for the impressionist movement in Paris.

Self-portrait, by De Nittis

Giuseppe De Nittis was born in Apulia, Italy, but spent most of his prolific artistic life in Paris, where he become part of the French impressionist movement, although maintaining a clear personal style of painting, Since the very beginning of his career De Nittis wanted to develop his own specific style of painting, distant from academic approaches and closer to the plain depiction of nature stemming from direct observation, rather than workshop study. During this initial time he paints primarily landscapes with limpid and clear light inspired by nature around Naples. This will be known as a new artistic movement inspired by realism and later as “macchiaioli” (from the Italian word for stain).

Paul Gauguin started painting relatively late in life, with his first paintings dating to the time when he was working as a stockbroker in Paris. It was only in his mid-thirties that he decided to dedicate himself completely to professional painting, after a profound crisis of his marriage with Mette-Sophie Gad, a Danish woman he married in 1873. From this phase onwards he became a full-time painter and started experimenting with primitivism and artistic expression that was progressively more distant from his initial closeness to impressionism.

Van Gogh started his career as art dealer rather than a painter and only later in life started progressively dedicating his energies to expressing himself through painting. This surely influenced the very original way he used paint and brushes, that may have not resonated well with his contemporaries. In later years, when he started becoming a famous painter, and prevailingly after his death, his original artistry would influence many painters and art lovers all over the world.

Born in Moscow on 18 December 1866, Wassily Kandinsky is typically credited as the founding father of abstract art. Interestingly enough, he started painting studies only at the age of 30, after an initial academic career as professor of law. At this point in his life he moved to Munich, in Germany, where he also taught at the Bauhaus school from 1922 until its closure by the Nazis in 1933. He finally settled in Paris, where he continued his work as a painter and art theorist until his death in 1944.