Famous artists in the context of this article will be taken from those most popular. Famous or best artists is something too hard for a mere mortal like me to quantify simply whereas popularity, particularly on the internet can be calculated. Art is all about subjectivity, so i dont claim for the following list to be exhaustive or fullyprehensive, but please treat it as a fun way to discover more about artists you already know about, and to perhaps find some new artists that you had not heard of before. This is the main purpose of this article. The artists are not listed in any particuar order, so the final entry would not necessarily be the 50th most famous artist, it is more a general collection to browse through.
Michelangelo
Michelangelo was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer. Despite making few forays beyond the arts, his versatility in the disciplines he took up was of such a high order that he is often considered a contender for the title of the archetypal Renaissance man.Michelangelo's most famous paintings include The Torment of Saint Anthony, Manchester Madonna, Doni Tondo, The Entombment, Battle of Cascina, Leda and the Swan, The Last Judgment, The Martyrdom of St Peter & The Conversion of Saul (1542-50)
Leonardo Da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian polymath, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer. Leonardo is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived.Da Vinci most famous paintings include The Adoration of the Magi, Salai as John the Baptist & Annunciation.
Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt was an Austrian Symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Art Nouveau (Vienna Secession) movement. His major works include paintings, murals, sketches, and other art objects, many of which are on display in the Vienna Secession gallery. Klimt's primary subject was the female body.Klimt most famous paintings include The Kiss, Judith & Dana_.
Vincent Van Gogh
Vincent Van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist artist. He was a pioneer of Expressionism with enormous influence on 20th century art, especially on the Fauves and German Expressionists. Some of his paintings are now among the world's best known, most popular and expensive works of art.Van Gogh most famous paintings include Sunflowers, Starry Night, Potato Eaters & Van Gogh Self-portraits.
Claude Monet
Claude Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise.Claude Monet most famous paintings include Water Lilies, Japanese Bridge & Camille Monet Portraits.
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. As one of the most recognized figures in 20th-century art, he is best known for co-founding the Cubist movement and for the wide variety of styles embodied in his work. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and Guernica (1937), his depiction of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.
David Hockney
David Hockney is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer, based in Yorkshire, United Kingdom, although he also maintains a base in London. An important contributor to the Pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth century.David Hockney most famous paintings include Los Angeles Pool, Garrowby Hill & Malibu.
Alfred Sisley
Alfred Sisley was an English Impressionist landscape painter who was born and spent most of his life in France. Sisley is recognized as perhaps the most consistent of the Impressionists, never deviating into figure painting or finding that the movement did not fulfill his artistic needs.
Joan Miro
Joan Mir_ was a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramist born in Barcelona. Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride.
John William Waterhouse
John William Waterhouse was an English Pre-Raphaelite painter most famous for his paintings of female characters from mythology and literature. He belonged to the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall was a Jewish Belarusian artist, born in Belarus (then Russian Empire) and naturalized French in 1937, associated with several key art movements and was one of the most successful artists of the twentieth century. He forged a unique career in virtually every artistic medium, including paintings, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and fine art prints.
Salvador Dali
Salvador Dal_ was a Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres. Dal_ was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Dal_'s expansive artistic repertoire includes film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.
Friedensreich Hundertwasser
Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser was an Austrian painter, architect and sculptor. Born in Vienna, he became one of the best-known contemporary Austrian artists, although controversial, by the end of the 20th century.
Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian painter, and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first modern abstract works.
Piet Mondrian
Piet Mondriaan was a Dutch painter. He was an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neo-Plasticism. This consisted of a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines and the use of the three primary colors.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty, and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that "Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to Watteau".
Jackson Pollock
Paul Jackson Pollock was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. In October 1945, he married the artist Lee Krasner. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist, but had a volatile personality and struggled with alcoholism all of his life. He died at the age of 44 in an alcohol-related, single-car crash.
Peter Paul Rubens
Sir Peter Paul Rubens was a prolific seventeenth-century Flemish Baroque painter, and a proponent of an exuberant Baroque style that emphasized movement, color, and sensuality. He is well-known for his Counter-Reformation altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and history paintings of mythological and allegorical subjects.
Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker. While most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching. In both his urban and rural scenes, his spare and finely calculated renderings reflected his personal vision of modern American life.
Francisco Goya
Francisco Goya was a Spanish painter and printmaker regarded both as the last of the Old Masters and as the first of the moderns. Goya was a court painter to the Spanish Crown and a chronicler of history. The subversive and subjective element in his art, as well as his bold handling of paint, provided a model for the work of later generations of artists, notably Manet and Picasso.
Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker and an important forerunner of expressionistic art. His best-knownposition, The Scream is part of a series The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of life, love, fear, death, and melancholy.
Botticelli
Sandro Botticelliwas an Italian painter of the Florentine school during the Early Renaissance (Quattrocento). Less than a hundred years later, this movement, under the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici, was characterized by Giorgio Vasari as a "golden age", a thought, suitably enough, he expressed at the head of his Vita of Botticelli. His posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th century; since then his work has been seen to represent the linear grace of Early Renaissance painting, and The Birth of Venus and Primavera rank now among the most familiar masterpieces of Florentine art.
Georges Braque
Georges Braque was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art movement known as cubism.
Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is perhaps most famous for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovativebinations. While thebines are both painting and sculpture, Rauschenberg also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance.
Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Fox Lichtenstein was a prominent American pop artist, his work heavily influenced by both popular advertising and theic book style. He himself described Pop art as, "not 'American' painting but actually industrial painting".
Willem De Kooning
Willem de Kooning was an abstract expressionist artist, born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In the post-World War II era, de Kooning painted in a style that came to be referred to variously as Abstract expressionism, Action painting, and the New York School. Other painters that developed this school of painting include Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston and Clyfford Still among others.
Ansel Adams
Ansel Easton Adams was an American photographer and environmentalist, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West and primarily Yosemite National Park. For his images, he developed the zone system, a way to determine proper exposure and adjust the contrast of the final print. The resulting clarity and depth characterized his photographs. Although his large-format view cameras were difficult to use because of their size, weight, setup time, and film cost, their high resolution ensured sharpness in his images.
Robert Doisneau
Robert Doisneau was a French photographer noted for his frank and often humorous depictions of Parisian street life. Robert Doisneau was one of France's most popular and prolific reportage photographers.
Andrew Wyeth
Andrew Newell Wyeth was a visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century and was sometimes referred to as the "Painter of the People, " due to his work's popularity with the American public.
Norman Rockwell
Norman Percevel Rockwell was a 20th century American painter and illustrator. His works enjoy a broad popular appeal in the United States, where Rockwell is most famous for the cover illustrations of everyday life scenarios he created for The Saturday Evening Post magazine over more than four decades. Among the best-known of Rockwell's works are the Willie Gillis series, Rosie the Riveter (although his Rosie was reproduced less than others of the day), Saying Grace (1951), and the Four Freedoms series.
Alphonse Mucha
Alphonse Mucha was a Czech Art Nouveau painter and decorative artist.Jack VettrianoJack Vettriano OBE is a Scottish painter.
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