Solomon Robert Guggenheim was an American businessman, art collector, and philanthropist. He started collecting the old masters in the 1890's. He retired in 1919 to become an art collector. In 1926, he met Hilla Rebay. In 1930, they visited...

Anton Chekhov wrote both plays and short stories. He is generally listed in the first rank of Russian playwrights and in the high second rank (a notch below Pushkin and Tolstoy) as a writer of prose. His most famous plays include The Seagul...

Gustav Mahler was an Austrian late-Romantic composer, and one of the leading conductors of his generation. As a composer he acted as a bridge between the 19th century Austro-German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century. Whil...

Georges-Pierre Seurat was a French post-Impressionist painter and draftsman. He is noted for his innovative use of drawing media and for devising the painting techniques known as chromoluminarism and pointillism. Seurat's artistic personali...

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was a British writer best known for his detective fiction featuring the character Sherlock Holmes. Originally a physician, in 1887 he published A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels about Holmes and Dr...

Henri-Louis Bergson was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson convinced many thinkers that immediate experience and intuition are more significant than rationalism and science for...

Selma Lagerlöf was a Swedish author and the first woman writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Known internationally for Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (a story for children, in the most common translation The Wonderful...

George Hendrik Breitner was a Dutch painter and photographer. He trained as a painter and draughtsman at the academy in The Hague. Although the Dutch painter Charles Rochussen taught the students history and landscape painting, Breitner's i...

Sir Edward William Elgar, English composer. He received his training from his father, who was an organist, music seller, and amateur violinist. In 1885 he succeeded his father as organist of St. George's Church, Worcester. Imperial March, c...

John Singer Sargent was an American artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian era luxury. During his career, he created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as...

Hendrik Petrus Berlage was a prominent Dutch architect. Berlage was born in Amsterdam. He studied architecture at the Zurich Institute of Technology between 1875 and 1878 after which he traveled extensively for 3 years through Europe. In...

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist, and political activist who held both Irish and British citizenship. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He...

Oscar Wilde, Irish poet and dramatist whose reputation rests on his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Among Wilde's other best-known works are his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gr...

George Eastman was an American innovator and entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and invented roll film, helping to bring photography to the mainstream. Roll film was also the basis for the invention of motion picture film in...

One of the four great Post-impressionists (along with Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, and Paul Cézanne), Vincent van Gogh is generally considered the greatest Dutch painter after Rembrandt. His reputation is based largely on the works of the...