Pierre-Auguste Renoir | L'Église à Essoyes, 1890

The great impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir🎨 lived in the charming little village of Essoyes, in the Aube department of Champagne-Ardennes (in north-central France) from 1896-1907.

The village, hometown of his wife Aline and model and governess of his children Gabrielle Renard, is represented in many of his paintings.

Marc Chagall | Music and Colour

• "Mozart never composed anything, ever! He copied what was written on his soul".
• "Mozart non ha mai composto nulla, mai! Ha copiato ciò che è stato scritto sulla sua anima".
• "Color is all. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration".
• "Il colore è tutto. Quando il colore è giusto, anche la forma è giusta. Il colore è tutto, il colore è vibrazione come la musica; tutto è vibrazione".

Francis Picabia | Paysages

Francis Picabia, born Francis-Marie Martinez de Picabia (1879-1953), was a French avant-garde painter, poet and typographist.

After experimenting with Impressionism and Pointillism, Picabia became associated with Cubism.

His highly abstract planar compositions were colourful and rich in contrasts.

He was one of the early major figures of the Dada movement in the United States and in France.

He was later briefly associated with Surrealism, but would soon turn his back on the art establishment.

Marc Chagall (1887-1985) | Les Amoureux

"When you did catch a glimpse of his eyes, they were as blue as if they’d fallen straight out of the sky. They were strange eyes.. ..long, almond-shaped.. ..and each seemed to sail along by itself, like a little boat"!

- Quote of Bella Chagall - her description of their first encounter in Vitebsk, 1909.

Michele Lehmann, 1940 | Abstract painter

Michele Lehmann was born in Switzerland but moved to Mijas in southern Spain over 30 years ago.

After arriving there, Michele opened an art gallery as an outlet for local artists.

Although not an artist herself she began sketching to pass the time.

It began with a sketch of an old woman in black who passed the gallery every day.

She moved too fast for Michele to draw so the image captured her from behind.

Gari Melchers (1860-1932) | Naturalist painter

Julius Garibaldi Melchers was an American artist🎨. He was one of the leading American proponents of naturalism. He won a 1932 Gold medal🎨 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The son of German-born American sculptor Julius Theodore Melchers, Gari Melchers was a native of Detroit, Michigan, who at seventeen studied art at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under von Gebhardt and is associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting.

Virginia Woolf | Quotes about Women

• "As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking".

• "Finché pensa ad un uomo, nessuno si oppone ad una donna che pensa".

• "Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size".

• "Per tutti questi secoli le donne hanno svolto la funzione di specchi, dotati della magica e deliziosa proprietà di riflettere la figura dell’uomo a grandezza doppia del naturale".

Dame Laura Knight (British Impressionist painter, 1877-1970) | A girl reading