Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) | Quotes

Marie Alexandre Valentin Sellier (French, 19th/20th Century) | La farandole de Pétrarque, 1900

• "Love is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul, the golden link which binds us to duty and truth, the redeeming principle that chiefly reconciles the heart to life, and is prophetic of eternal good".

• "L'amore è la grazia incoronante dell'umanità, il diritto più santo dell'anima, il legame d'oro che ci lega al dovere e alla verità, il principio redentrice che principalmente riconcilia il cuore con la vita ed è profetico del bene eterno".

Aloysius O'Kelly | Breton girls on a beach

Aloysius O'Kelly (1853-1936) was an Irish painter.

Early life

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Aloysius was the youngest of four boys and one girl to the Kelly family of Dublin. His grandparents on his father's side were natives of County Roscommon and his father ran a blacksmith's shop and dray making business in Peterson's Lane. It was his mother who directed him towards a career in the arts.

Cecile Walton (1891-1956) Symbolist painter

From an artistic family, Scottish painter Cecile Walton was the daughter of Glasgow Boys artist Edward Arthur Walton.

She studied in London, Edinburgh, Paris and Florence and became a member of the Edinburgh Group, practising in the capital as a painter, sculptor and illustrator.

Influenced by the Symbolist style, her book illustrations for the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen perfectly capture the fanciful characters and stories of the Danish author. | © National Galleries of Scotland

Jules-Élie Delaunay (1828-1891) Academic painter

Jules-Élie Delaunay was a French🎨 academic painter.

He was born at Nantes in the Loire-Atlantique département of France. Delaunay studied under Flandrin, and at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris under Lamothe.

He worked in the classicist manner of Ingres🎨 until, after winning🎨 the Prix de Rome, he went to Italy; in 1856, and abandoned the ideal of Raphaelesque perfection for the sincerity and severity of the quattrocentists.

William W. Churchill (1858-1926)

William Worcester Churchill was born in Jamaica Plains, Massachusetts, in 1858 and died in Washington, DC in 1926. He was a painter of figure studies, portraits and landscapes in oil and pastel, and entered the Boston Museum School in 1877.

He then trained in Paris in the late 1870s with the French Salon artist Léon Bonnat for two years.

While still in Paris, Churchill also took lessons from his fellow-Bostonian Tarbell, who was himself in France studying at the Académie Julian.

Frederic Payet, 1960 | Impressionist painter

Born on the French Island of Madagascar where the sunny, colorful and exotic atmosphere and a quality of light found nowhere else, has influenced his art to this day; Frederic was reared in Paris and moved to the United States, in 1989.

His defining style is impressionism which he uses to encapsulate his perceptions of the world. Frederic’s work conveys the long-lost environments of a calm countryside and cityscape whether French or North American.

Metropolitan Museum of Art: Why Study Art from the Past?

Art from the past holds clues to life in the past.

By looking at a work of art's symbolism, colors, and materials, we can learn about the culture that produced it.

For example, the two portraits above are full of symbolism referring to virtues of an ideal marriage during the fifteenth century.

Maestro delle Storie del Pane (Italian (Emilian), active late 15th century) | Portrait of a Man, possibly Matteo di Sebastiano di Bernardino Gozzadini and Portrait of a Woman, possibly Ginevra d'Antonio Lupari Gozzadini, 1494