Famous Artists

40 items

The fastest way to understand a painter is to try to paint like them for an afternoon and fail informatively. Draw an artist, find three of their works, and make something in their manner: the failures teach you exactly where the difficulty lives, which is a thing no gallery label will tell you. Forty names spanning the Renaissance to the twentieth century, across painting and sculpture. Art teachers run whole terms on this draw, and the copied-badly results make a better exhibition than the polished ones.