A concise yet comprehensive reference guide for art lovers and art students, this illustrated volume profiles major artists from classical antiquity to the modern era. All 501 artists featured in this book receive at least a one-page entry that summarizes their life, their work, and their influence. The most influential artists are discussed in entries of up to four pages. Entries are illustrated with portraits of the artists and reproductions of some of their best-known works. Included here are painters, sculptors, photographers, and performance and video artists. Among them are Renaissance artists Raphael and Michelangelo, northern European artists such as Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt van Rijn, English landscape painters Turner and Constable, French impressionists such as Degas and Renoir, Japanese artists Sesshu and Hishikawa Moronobu, American abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, twentieth-century European giants such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and modern sculptors Isamu Noguchi, Alexander Calder, Richard Serra, and many others. Important women in the arts are also included, among them, sculptor Louise Nevelson, painters Georgia OaKeeffe and Helen Frankenthaler, American impressionist in France Mary Cassatt, and many others. This informative and entertaining compendium of biographical sketches is supplemented with more than 670 illustrations, most of them in color.

史蒂芬•法辛，畫傢，倫敦藝術大學魯特斯坦•霍普金斯基金繪畫研究教授。1990年當選為牛津大學拉斯金繪畫學院院長兼牛津聖•埃德濛學院高級研究員。1998年當選為倫敦皇傢藝術學會成員。他最初求學於倫敦聖•馬丁藝術學院，於倫敦皇傢藝術學院完成繪畫碩士學位，自1977年一直從事美術教育。法辛的畫作在全球各地都有展齣，尤其是在英國、日本和南美洲的畫廊。