Glazunov was a leading Russian composer of the generation after Tchaikovsky. Doubtless owing to his exceptional mastery of and attentiveness to form, exemplified by his exceptional grasp of counterpoint, he has been described as a Romantic...

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, mystic and civil servant. Yeats was one of the driving forces behind the Irish Literary Revival and was co-founder of the Abbey Theatre. His early work tended towards romantic lushness...

Baroness Emma Orczy was a British novelist, playwright and artist of Hungarian noble origin. She was most notable for her series of novels featuring the Scarlet Pimpernel. In 1903, she and her husband wrote a play based on one of her short...

Johan Julius Christian Sibelius was a Finnish composer of classical music and one of the most notable composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His music played an important role in the formation of the Finnish national identity....

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a French painter, printmaker, draftsman, and illustrator, whose immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of fin de siècle Paris yielded an œuvre of exciting, elegant and provocative images of the modern a...

Herman Heijermans was a Dutch writer. His novels and tales include Trinette (1892), Fles (1893), Kamertjeszonde (2 vols, 1896), Interieurs (1897), Diamantstad (2 vols, 1903). He created great interest by his play Op Hoop van Zegen (1900), a...

Richard Georg Strauss was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras. He is known for his operas, which include Der Rosenkavalier, Elektra, Die Frau ohne Schatten and Salome; his Lieder, especially his Four Last So...

Louis Marie-Anne Couperus was a Dutch novelist and poet of the late 19th and early 20th Century. He is usually considered one of the foremost figures in Dutch literature. Born in the Netherlands in 1863, Couperus grew up in a wealthy pat...

Constantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski was a Russian actor and theatre director. His innovative contribution to modern European and American realistic acting has remained at the core of mainstream western performance training for much of the l...

Edvard Munch was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker and an important forerunner of expressionistic art. His best-known composition, The Scream, is part of a series The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of life, love,...

Claude Debussy was a French composer. He and Maurice Ravel were the most prominent figures associated with Impressionist music, although Debussy disliked the term when applied to his compositions. He was made Chevalier of the Legion of Hono...

Théo van Rysselberghe, Belgian painter, was born in Ghent in 1862. He studied art at the Academies in Ghent and Brussels, and in 1881 exhibited for the first time at the Salon in Brussels. After the success of the French Impressionists exhi...

The Lumière brothers Auguste and Louis, were among the earliest filmmakers. (Appropriately, "lumière" translates as "light" in English.) Their father, Charles Antoine Lumière (1840-1911), ran a photographic firm and both brothers worked for...

Georges Méliès was a French filmmaker famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the earliest cinema. He was very innovative in the use of special effects. He accidentally discovered the stop trick, or substitution, in...

Aristide Joseph Bonaventure Maillol was a French Catalan sculptor, painter, and printmaker. The subject of nearly all of Maillol's mature work is the female body, treated with a classical emphasis on stable forms. The figurative style of hi...