On August 19, 1839, French artist and physicist Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, after announcing his invention to the French Academy of Sciences, went public with his newly developed photographic process called Daguerrotype, the wold's first practicable photographic process.
On July 30, 1511, Italian Renaissance painter, architect, writer and historian Giorgio Vasari was born. He is best known today for his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, considered the ideological foundation of art-historical writing.
yesterday in 1887, French-American painter, sculptor and writer Marcel Duchamp was born, he is considered one of the most important artists of the 20th century http://yovisto.blogspot.de/2013/07/marcel-duchamp-and-his-readymades.html
On July 6, 1907, Mexican painter Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón was born. She is probably best known for her impressive self-portrait and is still admired as a feminist icon.
On June 28, 1577, German-born Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens was born. He is best known for his extravagant Baroque style that emphasised movement, colour, and sensuality.
On June 21, 1948, Columbia Records introduced the long-playing record album, in short the LP, in a public demonstration at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, New York, which soon was adopted as a new standard by the entire record industry. Apart from relatively minor refinements and the important later addition of stereophonic sound capability, it has remained the standard format for vinyl "albums".
On June 7, 1848, French painter Paul Gauguin was born. He is considered a leading French Post-Impressionist artist who was not well appreciated until after his death. Then he was finally recognized for his experimental use of colors and synthetist style that were distinguishably different from Impressionism.
On May, 27, 1877, American dancer Angela Isadora Duncan was born, who restored the dance to a high place among the arts. Breaking with convention, she traced the art of dance back to its roots and developed within this idea, free and natural movements inspired by the classical Greek arts.
On May 21, 1471, German painter, engraver, printmaker, mathematician, and theorist Albrecht Dürer was born. He was considered as one of the greatest artists of the Northern Renaissance.
On April 4, 1865, Wilhelm Busch published his famous 'Max and Moritz' (in the German original: Max und Moritz - Eine Bubengeschichte in sieben Streichen), a famous German language illustrated story in verse, considered to be an early precursor of comic strips. Actually, if you are not by chance a German native speaker, you probably might never have heard of satirical author, illustrator and painter Wilhelm Busch, who was famous in the 19th century in Germany for his cynical humor and biting mockery being communicated in an artful way. His humorous drawings and caricatures are remarkable for the extreme simplicity and expressiveness of his pen-andink line. I have only limited knowledge of englisch speaking authors, but from my point of view, I would consider the works of Wilhelm Busch very much alike the style of writing of Mark Twain. It was his careful observation of the contemporary society and of the general human weaknesses, which he put into drawings and texts of ironical humor.
On March 26, 1516, Swiss naturalist and bibliographer Conrad Gessner was born. His five-volume Historiae animalium (1551–1558) is considered the beginning of modern zoology, and the flowering plant genus Gesneria is named after him. He is considered as one of the most important natural scientists of Switzerland and was sometimes referred to as the 'German Pliny'.
On March 13, 1781, Prussian architect, city planner, and painter Karl Friedrich Schinkel was born, who was one of the most prominent architects of Germany of the neoclassical and neogothic epoch. He shaped the city scapes of Berlin and Potsdam with his neoclassical buildings and palaces.
On February 8, 1819, prominent social thinker and philanthropist John Ruskin was born. He is considered the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman and watercolourist. He was hugely influential in the latter half of the 19th century up to the First World War and today, his ideas and concerns are widely recognised as having anticipated interest in environmentalism, sustainability and craft.
On January 31, 1797, the Austrian composer Franz Schubert was born. Even though his many symphonies, operas and piano pieces were not highly appreciated during his lifetime, he was posthumously praised as one of the most important composers of the Romantic era in music.
(Probably) on January 14th, 1622, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, French playwright and actor who is known by his stage name Molière was born. He is considered to be one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature.
On December 15, 1907, famous Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, who is considered to be one of the key figures in the development of modern architecture was born. Niemeyer was best known for his design of civic buildings for Brasília, a planned city which became Brazil's capital in 1960, as well as his collaboration with other architects on the United Nations Headquarters in New York City.
On December 7, 1598, Italian architect and sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini was born. He is considered to be the leading sculptor of the baroque age. In addition he designed buildings, painted, wrote plays, and designed metalwork and stage sets. Whenever you are be in Rome, for sure you will find yourself somewhere in the neighborhood of Bernini's work.
On October 31, 1632, Dutch genre painter Johannes Vermeer was born in Delft. Vermeer always worked slowly and with great care, using bright colours and sometimes expensive pigments, with a preference for cornflower blue and yellow. He is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work.
On October 25, 1881, famous Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer was born. He is considered as one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century and is widely known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore.