Art Challenge – Test Your Knowledge of Famous Painters

Doménikos Theotokópoulos or El Greco (1541-1614) was a master of Spanish painting, whose highly individual dramatic and expressionistic style met with the puzzlement of his contemporaries but gained newfound appreciation in the 20th century.

Elisabeth Le Brun (1755 -1842) was a French painter who mostly specialized in portrait painting in the Rococo style. She was employed by Queen Marie-Antoinette; whom she painted some 30 portraits of. It was Antoinette’s intervention that led to her admittance to the Académie Royale in 1783, as women had restricted access.

Caravaggio (1571-1610) was a leading Italian painter of the late 16th and early 17th centuries who became famous for the intense and unsettling realism of his large-scale religious works.

Hieronymus Bosch was a Dutch painter from Brabant. He is one of the most notable representatives of the Early Netherlandish painting school. His work mainly contains fantastic illustrations of religious concepts and narratives.

William Blake (1757-1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognized during his life, Blake has become a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age.

Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) was a French post-impressionist painter in the Naïve or Primitive manner. He was also known as Le Douanier, a humorous description of his occupation as a toll and tax collector.

Elaine de Kooning (1918-1989) was an Abstract Expressionist and Figurative Expressionist painter in the post-World War II era. She wrote extensively on the art of the period. She was commissioned to paint a portrait of President Kennedy and noted that he never sat still.

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a Russian-born artist, one of the first creators of pure abstraction in modern painting. His forms evolved from fluid and organic to geometric and, finally, to pictographic

Georges Braque (1882-1963) was a major 20th-century French painter. His most notable contributions were in his alliance with Fauvism from 1905, and the role he played in the development of Cubism.

Born in Pittsburgh, Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937) was an American artist who spent much of his career in France. He became the first African-American painter to gain international acclaim. Tanner moved to Paris, France, in 1891 to study at the Académie Julian and gained acclaim in French artistic circles.

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) was an Irish-born figurative painter known for his raw, unsettling imagery. Focusing on the human form, his subjects included crucifixions, portraits of popes, self-portraits, and portraits of close friends, with abstracted figures sometimes isolated in geometrical structures.

Oscar-Claude Monet (1840-1926) was a French painter and founder of impressionism painting who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it.

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a Russian-born artist, one of the first creators of pure abstraction in modern painting. His forms evolved from fluid and organic to geometric and, finally, to pictographic

Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) was a French painter and a member of the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists. Her brushstrokes were often loose and feathery, depicting the play of light and shadow, where dappled sunlight filtered through trees or shimmered on water surfaces.

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) was a painter who was an important leader in the development of modern abstract art and a major exponent of the Dutch abstract art movement known as De Stijl (“The Style”). In his mature paintings, Mondrian used the simplest combinations of straight lines, right angles, primary colours, and black, white, and gray.