Winslow Homer

popular name: George Inness

date_of_death: August 3, 1894

age: 69

cause_of_death: Heart attack

claim_to_fame: Artists

best_know_for: Often called "the father of American landscape painting", George Inness was a prominent American landscape painter during the late 1800s. Although Inness's style evolved through distinct stages over a prolific career that spanned more than forty years and 1,000 paintings, his works consistently earned acclaim for their powerful, coordinated efforts to elicit depth of mood, atmosphere, and emotion. Neither pure realist nor impressionist, Inness was a transitional figure who intended for his works to combine both the earthly and the ethereal in order to capture the complete essence of a locale. A master of light, color, and shadow, he became noted for creating highly ordered and complex scenes that often juxtaposed hazy or blurred elements with sharp and refined details to evoke an interweaving of both the physical and the spiritual nature of experience.

popular name: Vincent van Gogh

date_of_death: July 29, 1890

age: 37

cause_of_death: Suicide - Gunshot wound

claim_to_fame: Artists

best_know_for: Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art history. In a decade, he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of which date from the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and self-portraits, and are characterised by bold colours and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art. His early works, mostly still lifes and depictions of peasant labourers, contain few signs of the vivid colour that distinguished his later work. In 1886, he moved to Paris where he met members of the avant-garde, including Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin, who were reacting against the Impressionist sensibility. As his work developed he created a new approach to still life and landscape. His paintings grew brighter as he developed a style that became fully realised during his stay in Arles in the South of France in 1888. During this period he broadened his subject matter to include series of olive trees, wheat fields and sunflowers. During his lifetime van Gogh was not commercially successful and, struggling with severe depression and poverty, committed suicide at the age of 37.

popular name: Claude Monet

date_of_death: December 5, 1926

age: 86

cause_of_death: Lung cancer

claim_to_fame: Artists

best_know_for: Claude Monet was a French painter and a founder of the Impressionist movement, best known for his vibrant landscape paintings that capture the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere. Born on November 14, 1840, in Paris, Monet grew up in Le Havre, where he began his artistic journey by drawing caricatures. He later studied art in Paris and was deeply influenced by artists like Eugène Boudin and Johan Barthold Jongkind, who introduced him to painting outdoors, or en plein air. In the 1870s, Monet and other like-minded artists began exhibiting works that emphasized color, light, and movement over realistic detail, leading to the birth of Impressionism—a term derived from his painting Impression, Sunrise (1872). Despite early criticism, Monet persisted and eventually gained recognition. He spent the latter part of his life in Giverny, where he created his most famous series of water lilies, haystacks, and Rouen Cathedral paintings.