Baron Munchausen is a fictional German nobleman created by the German writer Rudolf Erich Raspe in his 1785 book Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia. The character is loosely based on a real baron,...

Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach was a French-German author, philosopher, encyclopedist and a prominent figure in the French Enlightenment. He was born Paul Heinrich Dietrich in Edesheim, near Landau in the Rhenish Palatinate, but lived an...

Sir Joshua Reynolds, English portrait painter and aesthetician who dominated English artistic life in the middle and late 18th century. Through his art and teaching, he attempted to lead British painting away from the indigenous anecdotal p...

Claude Balbastre was a French composer, organist, harpsichordist and fortepianist. He was one of the most famous musicians of his time. Balbastre's father, Bénigne, a church organist in Dijon, had 18 children from two marriages; Claude w...

John Newton was an English clergyman and hymn writer. Until 1755, his life was spent chiefly at sea, where he eventually became the captain of a slave ship plying the waters between Liverpool and Sierra Leone. For the subsequent five years...

François-André Danican Philidor, often referred to as André Danican Philidor during his lifetime, was a French composer and chess player. He contributed to the early development of the opéra comique. He was also regarded as the best chess p...

Thomas Gainsborough was an English portrait and landscape painter, draughtsman, and printmaker. He surpassed his rival Sir Joshua Reynolds to become the dominant British portraitist of the second half of the 18th century. He painted quickly...

Johann Gottfried Müthel was a German composer and noted keyboard virtuoso. Along with C.P.E. Bach, he represented the Sturm und Drang style of composition. As far as is known, he was the first to use the term fortepiano in a published wo...

Ignatius Sancho was a composer, actor, and writer. He is the first known Black Briton to vote in a British election. He gained fame in his time as "the extraordinary Negro", and to 18th century British abolitionists he became a symbol of th...

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the first of the truly German dramatists, was born in a Lutheran clergyman's family. As was a frequent custom in clergymen's families, his father looked after his early education, later sending him to a famous scho...

Josiah Wedgwood was an English potter, founder of the Wedgwood company, credited with the industrialization of the manufacture of pottery. A prominent abolitionist, Wedgwood is remembered for his "Am I Not A Man And A Brother?" anti-slavery...

Carl Gotthard Langhans was a Prussian builder and architect. His works are among the earliest buildings in the German classicism movement. His best-known work is the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. It was commissioned by King Frederick William...

Joseph Haydn was a prominent and prolific composer of the Classical period. He was instrumental in the development of chamber music such as the piano trio and his contributions to musical form have earned him the epithets "Father of the Sym...

James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck was a Scottish lawyer, diarist, and author born in Edinburgh. He is best known for the biography he wrote of one of his contemporaries, the English literary figure Samuel Johnson, which the modern John...

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker regarded both as the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns. Goya was court painter to the Spanish Crown; throughout the Peninsular War he remain...