1907-54 Mexican painter, b. Coyoacen. As a result of an accident at age 15, Kahlo turned her attention from a medical career to painting. Drawing on her personal experiences, her works are often shocking in their stark portrayal of pain and the harsh lives of women. Fifty-five of her 143 paintings are self-portraits incorporating a personal symbolism complete with graphic anatomical references. She was also influenced by indigenous Mexican culture, aspects of which she portrayed in bright colors, with a mixture of realism and symbolism. Her paintings attracted the attention of the artist Diego Rivera, whom she later married. Although Kahlo's work is sometimes classified as surrealist and she did exhibit several times with European surrealists, she herself disputed the label. Her preoccupation with female themes and the figurative candor with which she expressed them made her something of a feminist cult figure in the last decades of the 20th cent.   Related Paintings of Frida Kahlo :. | In her earliest documented self-portrait,drawn for a schoolmate in 1922 | Votive Card | My Dress Hangs Here | Self-Portrait with Velvet Dress | The self-portrait of monkey and parrot |
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anthonis van dyck
Flemish painter and draughtsman, active also in Italy and England. He was the leading Flemish painter after Rubens in the first half of the 17th century and in the 18th century was often considered no less than his match. A number of van Dyck's studies in oil of characterful heads were included in Rubens's estate inventory in 1640, where they were distinguished neither in quality nor in purpose from those stocked by the older master. Although frustrated as a designer of tapestry and, with an almost solitary exception, as a deviser of palatial decoration, van Dyck succeeded brilliantly as an etcher. He was also skilled at organizing reproductive engravers in Antwerp to publish his works, in particular The Iconography (c. 1632-44), comprising scores of contemporary etched and engraved portraits, eventually numbering 100, by which election he revived the Renaissance tradition of promoting images of uomini illustri. His fame as a portrait painter in the cities of the southern Netherlands, as well as in London, Genoa, Rome and Palermo, has never been outshone; and from at least the early 18th century his full-length portraits were especially prized in Genoese, British and Flemish houses, where they were appreciated as much for their own sake as for the identities and families of the sitters.
Antoine Berjon
French Romantic Painter, 1754-1843,French painter, teacher and designer. According to his uncorroborated 19th-century biographer J. Gaubin, he was intended for holy orders and began studying flower painting as a novice (Rev. Lyon., i, 1856). Certainly he studied drawing under the sculptor Antoine-Michel Perrache (1726-79) and worked for Lyon's silk industry as a textile designer, visiting Paris annually, ostensibly to keep abreast of the latest fashions. He first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1791 and settled in Paris in about 1794, probably as a consequence of the catastrophic siege and destruction of Lyon by revolutionary forces the previous year. Initially he eked out a precarious living decorating snuff-boxes and painting miniatures, supported by friends such as Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, the poetess, and the miniature painter Jean-Baptiste Augustin, to whom Berjon dedicated The Gift (1797; Lyon, Mus. B.-A.). He contributed to seven Paris Salons between 1796 and 1819 and again in 1842, and he had built up a considerable reputation for his work by the early 19th century.
Francis A.Silva
American Hudson River School Painter, 1835-1886