PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: illustration
Italian artist, engineer, and scientist
Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer whose skill and intelligence, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal....
British writer and artist
William Blake was an English engraver, artist, poet, and visionary, author of exquisite lyrics in Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) and profound and difficult “prophecies,” such...
French artist
Henri Matisse was an artist often regarded as the most important French painter of the 20th century. He was the leader of the Fauvist movement about 1900, and he pursued the expressiveness of colour throughout...
Belorussian-born French artist
Marc Chagall was a Belorussian-born French painter, printmaker, and designer who composed his images based on emotional and poetic associations, rather than on rules of pictorial logic. Predating Surrealism,...
German painter
Lucas Cranach, the Elder was a leading painter of Saxony, and one of the most important and influential artists in 16th-century German art. Among his vast output of paintings and woodcuts, the most important...
American artist
Winslow Homer was an American painter whose works, particularly those on marine subjects, are among the most powerful and expressive of late 19th-century American art. His mastery of sketching and watercolour...
German painter
Hans Holbein the Younger was a German painter, draftsman, and designer, renowned for the precise rendering of his drawings and the compelling realism of his portraits, particularly those recording the...
Japanese artist
Hokusai was a Japanese master artist and printmaker of the ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) school. His early works represent the full spectrum of ukiyo-e art, including single-sheet prints of...
American author and illustrator
Dr. Seuss was an American writer and illustrator of immensely popular children’s books noted for their nonsense words, playful rhymes, and unusual creatures. After graduating from Dartmouth College (B.A.,...
French artist
Pierre Bonnard was a French painter and printmaker, a member of the group of artists called the Nabis and afterward a leader of the Intimists. He is generally regarded as one of the greatest colourists...
Belgian physician
Andreas Vesalius was a Renaissance physician who revolutionized the study of biology and the practice of medicine by his careful description of the anatomy of the human body. Basing his observations on...
Inca nobleman, author, and illustrator
Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala was an Inca nobleman who wrote and illustrated El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1612–15; “The First New Chronicle and Good Government”), a critical account of Spanish...
French artist
Georges Rouault was a French painter, printmaker, ceramicist, and maker of stained glass who, drawing inspiration from French medieval masters, united religious and secular traditions divorced since the...
British artist and cartoonist
Ralph Steadman is a British artist and cartoonist known for his provocative, often grotesque, illustrations frequently featuring spatters and splotches of ink and for his collaboration with American author...
American author and illustrator
Art Spiegelman is an American author and illustrator whose Holocaust narratives Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History (1986) and Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (1991)...
French illustrator
Albert Robida was an early pioneer of science fiction and founding father of science fiction art. Despite severe myopia, Robida as a child had a passion for drawing. He produced his first series of satiric...
American cartoonist
R. Crumb is an American counterculture comic book artist and social satirist, known for his distinctive artwork and excellent marriage of drawing and narrative and for creating such well-known characters...
Russian artist
Olga Vladimirovna Rozanova was a Russian artist who was one of the main innovators of the Russian avant-garde. By the time of her death in 1918, she had embraced in her painting the use of pure colour,...
Russian artist
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel was a Russian painter, sculptor, and draftsman who was a pioneer of Modernism with an original vision. An innovator by nature, Vrubel rejected tradition, but he was out of...
German artist
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a German painter and printmaker who was one of the leaders of a group of Expressionist artists known as Die Brücke (“The Bridge”). His mature style was highly personal and notable...
British sculptor
John Flaxman was an English sculptor, illustrator, and designer, a leading artist of the Neoclassical style in England. As a youth, Flaxman worked in his father’s plaster-casting studio in London while...
American children’s author and illustrator
Eric Carle was an American writer and illustrator of children’s literature who published numerous best-selling books, among them The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969), which by 2018 had sold some 50 million...
Iranian artist and writer
Marjane Satrapi is an Iranian artist, director, and writer whose graphic novels explore the gaps and junctures between Iran and the West. She lives in Paris. Satrapi was born in Rasht, Iran, in 1969. An...
English artist
Aubrey Beardsley was the leading English illustrator of the 1890s and, after Oscar Wilde, the outstanding figure in the Aestheticism movement. Drawing was a strong interest from early childhood, and Beardsley...
British artist and printer
Eric Gill was a British sculptor, engraver, typographic designer, and writer, especially known for his elegantly styled lettering and typefaces and the precise linear simplicity of his bas-reliefs. Gill...
British author
Beatrix Potter was an English author of children’s books, who created Peter Rabbit, Jeremy Fisher, Jemima Puddle-Duck, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, and other animal characters. Potter, the only daughter of heirs...
American artist
Aaron Douglas was an American painter and graphic artist who played a leading role in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. After receiving a bachelor’s degree from the University of Nebraska in 1922, Douglas...
British artist
Thomas Bewick was a printmaker and illustrator important for reviving the art of wood engraving and establishing it as a major printmaking technique. Bewick, a precocious youth, was apprenticed to a local...
American painter
William J. Glackens was an American artist whose paintings of street scenes and middle-class urban life rejected the dictates of 19th-century academic art and introduced a matter-of-fact realism into the...
Russian artist and writer
Yelena Genrikhovna Guro was a Russian painter, graphic artist, book illustrator, poet, and prose writer who developed new theories of colour in painting. These theories were implemented by her husband,...
British painter
John Everett Millais was an English painter and illustrator, and a founding member of the artistic movement known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In 1838 Millais went to London and at the age of 11...
British painter
George Stubbs was an outstanding English animal painter and anatomical draftsman. The son of a prosperous tanner, Stubbs was briefly apprenticed to a painter but was basically self-taught. His interest...
British illustrator and painter
Walter Crane was an English illustrator, painter, and designer primarily known for his imaginative illustrations of children’s books. He was the son of the portrait painter and miniaturist Thomas Crane...
American artist
Maurice Sendak was an American artist and writer best known for his illustrated children’s books. Sendak was the son of Polish immigrants and received his formal art training at the Art Students League...
British painter
Edward Burne-Jones was one of the leading painters and designers of late 19th-century England, whose romantic paintings using medieval imagery were among the last manifestations of the Pre-Raphaelite style....
Russian artist
Simon Ushakov was an iconographer, portrait painter, builder of monuments, designer, cartographer, book illustrator, theoretician, and teacher who was the most distinguished Russian artist of the 17th...
French artist
Jules Chéret was a French poster illustrator and graphic designer who has been called “the father of the modern poster.” After apprenticing as a lithographer from 1849 and studying drawing, Chéret received...
American illustrator and writer
Rose Cecil O’Neill was an American illustrator, writer, and businesswoman remembered largely for her creation and highly successful marketing of Kewpie characters and Kewpie dolls. O’Neill grew up in Battle...
American cartoonist and author
Shel Silverstein was an American cartoonist, children’s author, poet, songwriter, and playwright best known for his light verse and quirky cartoons. In the 1950s Silverstein drew for the military magazine...
British-born American artist
Alfred R. Waud was a British-born American illustrator whose lively and detailed sketches of scenes from the Civil War, which he covered as a press correspondent, captured the war’s dramatic intensity...
French painter
Jacques Villon was a French painter and printmaker who was involved in the Cubist movement; later he worked in realistic and abstract styles. Villon was the brother of the artists Suzanne Duchamp, Raymond...
American painter
Robert Havell, Jr. was an American landscape painter and printmaker who engraved many of the plates for John James Audubon’s four-volume The Birds of America (435 hand-coloured plates, 1827–38). Growing...
American artist
Frederic Remington was an American painter, illustrator, and sculptor noted for his realistic portrayals of life in the American West. Remington studied art at Yale University (1878–80) and briefly (1886)...
American graphic designer and illustrator
Milton Glaser was an American graphic designer, illustrator, and cofounder of the revolutionary Pushpin Studio. Glaser graduated from Cooper Union in New York City in 1951 and studied printmaking with...
American caricaturist
Al Hirschfeld was an American caricature artist, especially known for his drawings appearing in The New York Times, portraying show-business personalities. Hirschfeld’s family moved from St. Louis to upper...
American writer and illustrator
Edward Gorey was an American writer, illustrator, and designer, noted for his arch humour and gothic sensibility. Gorey drew a pen-and-ink world of beady-eyed, blank-faced individuals whose dignified Edwardian...
Italian painter
Giovanni Battista Piazzetta was a painter, illustrator, and designer who was one of the outstanding Venetian artists of the 18th century. His art evolved from Italian Baroque traditions of the 17th century...
American sculptor
Leonard Baskin was an American sculptor, illustrator, and printmaker noted for his impressive though bleak portrayals of the human figure. Baskin, who decided at age 14 to become a sculptor, studied at...
English painter and caricaturist
Thomas Rowlandson was an English painter and caricaturist who illustrated the life of 18th-century England and created comic images of familiar social types of his day, such as the antiquarian, the old...
Armenian painter
Martiros Saryan was a major Armenian painter of landscapes, still lifes, and portraits. Saryan received training in painting at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (1897–1903) and...