Maryam Mughal, 1987 | Figurative painter

- I am Maryam Mughal, born and brought up in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Since a child, the air in front of me was the canvas and I was brushing it with colors of my thoughts.

One day I did it on paper and the world around me said, wow, since than I was titled as a natural artist and my hands itch to create more art to beautify life around me.

Anatoly Metlan, 1964 | Impressionist painter

Anatoly Metlan è nato a Yalta, in Ucraina, vicino al Mar Nero.

Crescendo, Metlan ha sviluppato la passione per le opere degli impressionisti.

Dopo il liceo ha frequentato la Krivoi Rog University, nel sud dell'Ucraina.

Mentre era all'università, Metlan espose le sue opere e pian piano si fece un nome.

Nel 1989, era stato accettato nella Guild Artist in Ucraina.

Shafira Yablonski, 1938 | Impressionist painter

Ukrainian painter Shafira Yablonski was born in the city of Dneprodzerzhinsk.

When Shafira was 3 years old the world war II began and her family was evacuated to Kazakhstan.

When the war was over and the city of Dneprodzerzhinsk was liberated, they returned home to Ukraine.

There Shafira spent her childhood and adolescence and finished high school.

All her childhood she was fond of drawing. When Shafira was 15, she joined the art studio at the House of Culture and began learning to paint.

Zhaoming Wu 吴兆铭, 1955

Zhaoming Wu 吴兆铭 is a Chinese-born painter. Wu grew up in Guangzhou City, China and he received his BFA from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and his MFA from the Academy of Art University, San Francisco, California.

Wu is known best for his figurative paintings. Inspired heavily by 19th century French painting🎨, Wu describes his work as "representational, but not traditional classical".

This can be seen, as Wu uses modern elements of graphic design in his work.

Mariano Fortuny y Marsal | Fantasy on Faust, 1866

In this work, Mariano Fortuny y Marsal (1838-1874) establishes an eloquent link between painting and music and a clear exposition of what his friend, the Baron Davillier, called his very lively and very pure taste in music.

Fortuny depicts one of the musical evenings that he attended in Madrid during the summer of 1866 at his friend and former classmate, Catalan painter Francisco Sans y Cabot’s studio at no. 13, calle Flor Baja in Madrid.

Shen Hanwu 沈漢武, 1950 | Genre painter

Shen Hanwu was born in Wuhan, Hubei province.

In the 1980s, he became famous as a book illustrator. In 1986, Shen entered Wuhan Art Academy and became a professional artist.

Throughout the 1990s his oil paintings were frequently exhibited in national fine art exhibitions and in 1995, Shen became a member of the Chinese National Artists Association.

Paolo Troubetzkoy (1866-1938) | Impressionist sculptor

Prince Paolo Petrovich Troubetzkoy / Павел Петрович Трубецкой was an artist and a sculptor who was described by George Bernard Shaw as "the most astonishing sculptor of modern times".

By birth, he was a member of the ancient House of Trubetskoy.

He was the son of Russian diplomat, Prince Peter Petrovich Troubetzkoy and his second wife, lyric singer Ada Winans (1831-1917).

Endre Penovác, 1956 | Watercolor painter

Serbian painter Endre Penovác was born in Tornjoš. He finished Academy of fine arts in Novi Sad. He works as an independent artist.

He started to display in 1981, and since that time, he make group or independent exhibits in country and abroad, Croatia, Germany, France, Hungary, Bosnia. Endre Penovác lives in Bačka Topola.

He lives in Bačka Topola.

Renoir | Figures on the Beach, 1890

Figures on the Beach
Artist: Auguste Renoir (French, Limoges 1841–1919 Cagnes-sur-Mer)
Date: 1890
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 20 3/4 x 25 1/4 in. (52.7 x 64.1 cm)
Classification: Paintings
Credit Line: Robert Lehman Collection, 1975
Accession Number:  1975.1.198
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 961

Isaac Levitan | Spring in Italy, 1890

Isaak Ilyich Levitan🎨 / Исаак Ильич Левитан(1860-1900), Lithuanian-born Jewish painter who was one of Russia’s most influential landscape artists and the founder of what has been called the "mood landscape".

Pier Toffoletti | COVID-19 Heroes, 2020

The first person who contracted the Coronavirus was traced back on 17 November 2019.

The virus that caused the outbreak is known as SARS-CoV-2, a newly discovered virus closely related to bat coronaviruses, pangolin coronaviruses and SARS-CoV.

Health authorities in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, China, reported a cluster of pneumonia cases of unknown cause on 31 December 2019, and an investigation was launched in early January 2020.

Chen Huimin 陈慧敏, 1943 | Flowers painter

Chen Huiming 陈慧敏 is a Chinese painter🎨. In 1964 she graduated from the Beijing Institute of Arts and Design.

Chen Huiming is an outstanding representative of contemporary art.

For more than 30 years, she expresses in her works the beauty of flowers.

Alexandre Cabanel | Adam, study for Paradise Lost, 1867

French🎨 Academic and Classical painter Alexandre Cabanel (1823-1889) was born in the city of Montpellier. He showed a proclivity for drawing at a young age, and was enrolled at the local art school in his hometown of Montpellier at the age of ten.

By 17, he was given the opportunity to study at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris.

In 1844, he exhibited for the first time at the Paris Salon, and was awarded the Prix de Rome in 1845.

Following his debut, he soon became a favorite of the Paris Salon.

Alexandre Cabanel | Samson and Delilah, 1878

Delilah, also spelled Dalila, in the Old Testament, the central figure of Samson’s last love story (Judges 16).

She was a Philistine who, bribed to entrap Samson, coaxed him into revealing that the secret of his strength was his long hair, whereupon she took advantage of his confidence to betray him to his enemies. Her name has since become synonymous with a voluptuous, treacherous woman.

Alexandre Cabanel | Ophelia, 1883

Christie's | Remaining faithful to historical and literary subjects as themes for his paintings, this work depicts perhaps the most complex and vivid of characters immortalised in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Ophelia.

Such a captivating character, she has held the fascination of artists for centuries, widely portrayed by Victorian masters in particular, such as Sir Thomas Francis Dicksee, John Everett Millais and John William Waterhouse among others.

Paul Gauguin | Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin, 1889

Paul Gauguin | Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin, 1889 | National Gallery in Prague

Gustave Courbet, the perhaps most famous exponent of Realism in French painting, created a number of sensational paintings.

Standing out among them is the work “The Meeting or Bonjour Monsieur Courbet” of 1854, in which Courbet shows himself out wandering, whereby he encounters his patron Alfred Bruyas and his servant. Bruyas supported Courbet and purchased the large-format painting.

When it was exhibited at the Paris World Exhibition of 1855, the audacity of the painter, who presented himself with abundant self-confidence and in a much more favourable light than his patron, was not lost on spectators.

Paul Gauguin | Washerwomen, 1888 | MoMA

Paul Gauguin | Washerwomen, 1888 | MoMA

In October 1888, Gauguin arrived in Arles where his friend Vincent Van Gogh had invited him to come and work.

The two artists had been writing to each other for several months, recording progress on their attempts to produce a non-naturalist landscape.

Paul Gauguin | Young Man with a Flower behind his Ear, 1891

Originally in the collection of the great modern master Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin's striking and evocative portrait of a young man, clad in a pink European blouse and loose cravat, with the native adornment of a small white tiaré blossom tucked over his left ear, is among the first paintings the artist completed after arriving in Tahiti in 1891.

The forthright charm of this painting stems from Gauguin's sensitive characterization of his sitter, a handsome and thoughtful man of whom the artist was clearly quite fond.

Paul Gauguin | Petit Breton à l'Oie, 1889

This important depiction of the Breton countryside is one of the pictures that Gauguin completed in 1889, when he was working in Pont Aven.

Executed with lush colors and linear undulations that presage his pictures of the tropics, this composition presents an exoticized depiction of the region, interpreted through the stylization of Gauguin’s late Symbolist aesthetic.

The romanticizing of the natural world in this picture is indicative of Gauguin's desire to escape the trappings of industrialized France in the months prior to his departure for the South Pacific. | © Sotheby's

Guillaume Seignac | Reunited, 1918-1919

This work was probably executed by Guillaume Seignac (French Academic painter, 1870-1924) in 1918-1919.

It represents two women symbolizing France and Alsace.

Seignac painted another composition in 1914, representing "Belgium, France and England before the German invasion" (Sale, Paris, April 22nd 2009, lot 87).