Selection of Famous Artists

Francis Bacon was born in Dublin, Ireland to English parents. The family moved back and forth between Dublin and London several times while he was growing up. He was a sickly child, predominantly suffering from asthma, which carried into his adult life. His father, a retired serviceman turned horse-trainer, attempted to "toughen him up" by having his son horsewhipped. He was expelled from his family in 1925 for several reasons. Most notably, the discovery of his homosexuality- and an incident in which his father found him in front of a mirror dressed in his mother's clothes.

Bacon then spent a few months with his uncle in Berlin, then a year and a half in Paris, before returning to London and starting out as an interior designer. As a painter, Bacon was self taught in that he never attended any formal art school or training. He began work in watercolour about 1926–27, moving onto oils in the fall of 1929. An exhibition of works by Pablo Picasso inspired him to make his first drawings and paintings. The influence of the biomorphic figures in Picasso's works is apparent in Bacon's first major painting of his mature period, "Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion" (1944). This painting is also representative of some of Bacon's methods and subjects: the triptych, the scream, and the lone figure against a stark backgroud.

Disheartened by lack of interest in his work, Bacon painted relatively little after his solo show in 1934 until the late 1940's. He considered the time after this to be the true start of his career. Bacon was disdainful of his work from before 1944 and destroyed the majority of it. He also destroyed an unknown number of works throughout his lifetime, and fragments of canvases were found in his studio after his death.

Paul Cezanne (January 19, 1839 – October 22, 1906) was a French painter who represents the bridge from impressionism to cubism. Cezanne was born in Aix-en-Provence and went to school there. From 1859 to 1861 he studied law, while continuing drawing lessons. Against the objections of his father, he decided to pursue an artistic career and left for Paris with his friend emile Zola in 1861. Gradually, his father reconciled to his course of life and supported him in it. He later received a large inheritance, on which he could live with ease. In Paris, he met Camille Pissarro and other impressionists. Cezanne began with the light, airy painting of the impressionists, but gradually solidified it and made it more architectural. In his words: "I want to make of impressionism something solid and lasting like the art in the museums." He structurally ordered whatever he perceived into simple forms and colour planes to create the most telling image of the subject matter. His geometric essentialisation of forms influenced cubism, in particular.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (September 28, 1573 – July 18, 1610), named after his hometown Caravaggio near Milan, was an Italian Baroque painter, whose large religious works portrayed saints and other biblical figures as ordinary people. Though his paintings were controversial in the church, the weathly people purchased them for their drama, their spectacular technical accomplishment, their startling originality, and even their brazen homoeroticism. Though his life (1571 -1610) nearly coincides with that of William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), their two worlds were distinctly different.

Salvador  Dali (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989) was an important Catalan-Spanish painter, best known for his surrealist works. Dali's work is noted for its striking combination of bizarre dreamlike images with excellent draftsmanship and painterly skills influenced by the Renaissance masters. Dali was an artist of great talent and imagination. He had an admitted love of doing unusual things to draw attention to himself, which sometimes irked those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, since his eccentric theatrical manner sometimes overshadowed his artwork in public attention.