Peculiarities of the artist René Magritte’s work: starting from 1926 the artist paints surrealistic canvases, each of which has a certain hidden meaning. A frequent protagonist of his paintings is the man in the kettle (Magritte himself is considered to be the prototype), often depicted without a face. Later the artist often denied Surrealism, calling the style in which he painted “magical realism.

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Art peculiarities of Salvador Dali: he is most famous for his surrealistic paintings, though he worked in different styles – beginning with impressionism and cubism in his youth and finishing with neoclassicism in his later period. He was a jack-of-all-trades: he created illustrations, advertising logos and interiors, wrote memoirs, screenplays and artwork, published cookbooks and lithographs. He did not shy away from borrowing and numerous allusions to paintings of his favorite masters – Velázquez, Vermeer and others.

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Peculiarities of the artist Vincent van Gogh’s work: the early works belong to the direction of painting as realism. They are painted in a rather gloomy color scheme. For the cycle entitled Peasant Heads and his first significant painting The Potato Eaters, Van Gogh uses mostly earthy hues. The artist’s palette changes after he moved to Paris in 1886, his paintings are saturated with clean, vibrant colors. Vincent van Gogh’s own unique style of painting was simultaneously influenced by Impressionism and Japanese prints. In his paintings in recent years, he most often favored yellow and blue.

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Peculiarities of the artist Claude Monet’s work: the main subjects of Claude Monet’s paintings were light and air, and the main principle of his work was the rapid depiction of the seen state of nature in plein air. He invented and perfected the method of painting series of landscapes with the same subject, changing depending on the time of day, weather and season. One series could consist of several dozen paintings. During the last 25 years of his life, Monet painted flowers, a Japanese bridge, water lilies and a pond in his garden and created unique large-scale panels for the Orangerie Museum that anticipate new, contemporary art.

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Leonardo da Vinci’s work: all of his portraits are executed with stunning anatomical precision. Da Vinci was interested all his life in the structure of the human body and spent many years studying this field of science. In addition, among the inventions of Leonardo da Vinci is the pictorial technique of sfumato: by applying the thinnest layers of paint, the effect of “smoke-frequency” of the image, softening the outlines of figures and objects. There are still debates about this painting technique. There is an opinion that this stunning effect in the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci confirms that he, like many other Renaissance painters, used various optical devices. Even if this is true, this assumption in no way detracts from the merits of the author, but only confirms his supreme skill, breadth of vision and the versatility of his talent.

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Features of the artist Hieronymus Bosch’s work: densely populated paintings; bold, unbridled imagination in depicting monsters and hell realized in canonical religious subjects; deft combination of vivid visuals with moral content.

The paintings of painter Hieronymus Bosch are complex multi-figure puzzles, over the solution of which generations of art historians struggle. His personality is just as much of a mystery, and an honest biographer has to use the word “probably” more often than he would like.

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Rubens’s oeuvre features: wide genre range – Rubens wrote paintings on mythological, religious, historical subjects, as well as portraits and landscapes; equally important influence on Rubens’ painting had such different artists as Peter Bruegel the Elder and Titian – so in his paintings we find both attention to detail and masterful work with color; Rubens is extremely inventive in the compositional solutions of his paintings, masterfully depicts dramatic poses and gestures; he also went down in history as the author of his own ideal of beauty – the opulent “Rubensian forms”.

The icon of Rubens, which for centuries occupied a place of honor in the red corner of European art, in the 19th century noisily crashed, and critics quickly began to construct a caricature in its place: a businessman who created a painting enterprise, a royal favorite who forgot his vocation in the pursuit of honor. Of course, this caricature did not last long, faded and lost relevance – art historians and historians have finally found a portrait of the real Rubens, the artist who embodied the very spirit of the Baroque. Eclectic, ambiguous, full of contradictions and contrasts.

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Peculiarities of Botticelli’s art: he created his masterpieces during the Renaissance period – the period in which the relation to ancient culture, religious subjects, realism was reconsidered. In Sandro Botticelli’s paintings, which you can see in the photo, the function of conveying the artist’s main intention is assigned to the line. The linearity allows to follow the contour of the depicted objects, to emphasize their beauty and importance. Botticelli’s most famous works are incredibly plastic, decorative and dramatic. Magical canvases on mythological, religious and ancient themes are painted with infinite grace and elegance.

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