Uploaded October 2018 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
British painter Thomas Edwin Mostyn [1864-1930] was born in Liverpool. Raised in Manchester, he studied at the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts. Tom Mostyns work was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1891 as well as being shown extensively abroad. Mostyn lived in London and later in Torquay, where he died on 22nd August 1930. Mostyn is generally known for his scenes depiciting a bold romanticism based on victorian garden scenes and was strongly influenced by his mentor Sir Hubert Von Herkomer.
Mostyn's paintings are inspirational, his right to be recognised worldwide as a top class artist is purely a matter of time.
[source: tuttartpitturasculturapoesiamusica.com/2014/07/Thomas-Edwin-Mostyn.html]
Music: Oophoi "Let the Nightsky Envelope Us"
British painter Thomas Edwin Mostyn [1864-1930] was born in Liverpool. Raised in Manchester, he studied at the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts. Tom Mostyns work was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1891 as well as being shown extensively abroad. Mostyn lived in London and later in Torquay, where he died on 22nd August 1930. Mostyn is generally known for his scenes depiciting a bold romanticism based on victorian garden scenes and was strongly influenced by his mentor Sir Hubert Von Herkomer.
Mostyn's paintings are inspirational, his right to be recognised worldwide as a top class artist is purely a matter of time.
[source: tuttartpitturasculturapoesiamusica.com/2014/07/Thomas-Edwin-Mostyn.html]
Music: Oophoi "Let the Nightsky Envelope Us"
![René Magritte (Part 1)
René François Ghislain Magritte (21 November 1898 15 August 1967) was a Belgian surrealist artist. He became well known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images. His intended goal for his work was to challenge the observers preconditioned perceptions of reality and force the viewer to become hypersensitive to their surroundings.
Magritte was born in Lessines, in the province of Hainaut, in 1898, the eldest son of Léopold Magritte, who was a tailor and textile merchant,and Régina (neé Bertinchamps), a milliner until her marriage. Little is known about Magrittes early life. He began lessons in drawing in 1910. On 12 March 1912, his mother committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Sambre. This was not her first attempt; she had made many over a number of years, driving her husband Léopold to lock her into her bedroom. One day she escaped, and was missing for days. She was later discovered a mile or so down the river, dead. According to a legend, 13 year old Magritte was present when her body was retrieved from the water, but recent research has discredited this story, which may have originated with the family nurse.The image of his mother floating, her dress obscuring her face, may have influenced a 19271928 series of paintings of people with cloth obscuring their faces, including Les Amants, but Magritte disliked this explanation.
Magrittes earlist paintings, which date from about 1915, were Impressionistic in style.From 1916 to 1918 he studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, but found the instruction uninspiring. The paintings he produced during the years 19181924 were influenced by Futurism and by the offshoot of Cubism practiced by Metzinger.Most of his works of this period are female nudes.
In 1922 Magritte married Georgette Berger, whom he had met as a child in 1913.Before they were married, Magritte went overseas to serve in the Belgian infantry in Leopoldsberg, Austria, and Antwerp, Belgium from 1921 to the first half of 1922. He worked as a draughtsman in a wallpaper factory, and was a poster and advertisement designer until 1926, when a contract with Galerie la Centaure in Brussels made it possible for him to paint full-time. In 1926, Magritte produced his first surreal painting, The Lost Jockey (Le jockey perdu), and held his first exhibition in Brussels in 1927. Critics heaped abuse on the exhibition. Depressed by the failure, he moved to Paris where he became friends with André Breton, and became involved in the surrealist group.
Galerie la Centaure closed at the end of 1929, ending Magrittes contract income. Having made little impact in Paris, Magritte returned to Brussels in 1930 and resumed working in advertising.He and his brother, Paul, formed an agency which earned him a living wage.
His work was exhibited in the United States in New York in 1936 and again in that city in two retrospective exhibitions, one at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965, and the other at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1992.
Magritte died of pancreatic cancer on 15 August 1967 in his own bed, and was interred in Schaarbeek Cemetery, Brussels.
The Magritte Museum opened to the public on 30 May, 2009 in Brussels. Housed in the neo-classical Hotel Altenloh, on the Place Royale, it houses some 250 original Magritte works.
Magrittes work frequently displays a juxtaposition of ordinary objects in an unusual context, giving new meanings to familiar things. The representational use of objects as other than what they seem is typified in his painting, The Treachery of Images (La trahison des images), which shows a pipe that looks as though it is a model for a tobacco store advertisement. Magritte painted below the pipe This is not a pipe (Ceci nest pas une pipe), which seems a contradiction, but is actually true: the painting is not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe. It does not satisfy emotionally—when Magritte once was asked about this image, he replied that of course it was not a pipe, just try to fill it with tobacco.
Magritte used the same approach in a painting of an apple: he painted the fruit realistically and then used an internal caption or framing device to deny that the item was an apple. In these Ceci nest pas works, Magritte points out that no matter how closely, through realism-art, we come to depicting an item accurately, we never do catch the item itself.
[from Wikipedia]
Music: Robert Rich Memories Of Home René Magritte (Part 1)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/SWmNl1Q3TZI/mqdefault.jpg)
![Aubrey Beardsley
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (21 August 1872 – 16 March 1898) was an English illustrator and author. His drawings in black ink, influenced by the style of Japanese woodcuts, emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the Aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James A. McNeill Whistler. Beardsleys contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau and poster styles was significant, despite the brevity of his career before his early death from tuberculosis.
Beardsley was the most controversial artist of the Art Nouveau era, renowned for his dark and perverse images and grotesque erotica, which were the main themes of his later work. His illustrations were in black and white, against a white background. Some of his drawings, inspired by Japanese shunga artwork, featured enormous genitalia. His most famous erotic illustrations concerned themes of history and mythology; these include his illustrations for a privately printed edition of Aristophanes Lysistrata, and his drawings for Oscar Wildes play Salome, which eventually premiered in Paris in 1896. Other major illustration projects included an 1896 edition of The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope, and the collection A Book of Fifty Drawings by Aubrey Beardsley (1897).
Beardsley was a caricaturist and did some political cartoons, mirroring Wildes irreverent wit in art. Beardsleys work reflected the decadence of his era and his influence was enormous, clearly visible in the work of the French Symbolists, the Poster art Movement of the 1890s and the work of many later-period Art Nouveau artists such as Pape and Clarke.
Beardsley was a public as well as private eccentric. He said, I have one aim—the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing. Wilde said he had a face like a silver hatchet, and grass green hair. Beardsley was meticulous about his attire: dove-grey suits, hats, ties; yellow gloves. He would appear at his publishers in a morning coat and patent leather pumps.
In 1897 deteriorating health prompted his move to the French Riviera, where he died a year later on 16 March 1898 at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Menton, France, attended by his mother and sister. He was 25 years of age and the cause of death was tuberculosis. Following a Requiem Mass in Menton Cathedral the following day, his remains were interred in the adjacent cemetery.
[from Wikipedia]
Music: Vidna Obmana Gathering In Frozen Beauty Aubrey Beardsley](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ShQRwU3t_9o/mqdefault.jpg)
![Mike Worrall
The enigmatic, dreamlike paintings of Mike Worrall are often inspired by historical themes. Informed by his work in film, Worrall deals with the sublime in his hyperreal depictions of the mysterious. As in a dream, the quiet façade and the beauty of the large scale oil paintings masks the intriguing content and enormous energy underpinning the works.
[from http://www.mikeworrall.com/]
Music by Gustav Mahler Mike Worrall](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/TYuRoebZhic/mqdefault.jpg)
![Yoshitaka Amano (Part 2)
Yoshitaka Amano (born July 28, 1952) is a Japanese artist known for his illustrations for Vampire Hunter D and for his character designs, image illustrations and title logo designs for the Final Fantasy video game series developed by Square Enix (formerly Square).
Amano was born in Shizuoka, Japan; as a young adolescent, he was fascinated with drawing. In 1967, he began working for Tatsunoko Productions in the animation department, where he was introduced to the early Japanese anime movement.His first paid project was for the Speed Racer anime franchise (also known as Mach GoGoGo). He worked in character design for anime shows such as the Time Bokan series, the Gatchaman series, Tekkaman and the Honey Bee.
In the 1960s, Amano was exposed to Western art styles through comic books and their Japanese Western-influenced counter parts, and believes Western comics to be his artistic roots. He has cited Neal Adams as his favorite comic book artist, noting that he would often purchase used comics based on his cover artwork, only to be disappointed that the interior artist was different. Amano was also fascinated by the art styles of psychedelic art and pop art of the West, particularly the work of American Pop artist Peter Max.In the 1970s, Amanos intrigue led him to the study of the artworks of the late 19th century and early 20th century European movement of Art Nouveau, as well as the ancient Japanese hand woodblock printing work of Ukiyo-e. While concentrating on illustration, he was still at Tatsunoko Productions until he left in 1982.
In the early 1980s, he concentrated on illustrations for Science Fiction and Fantasy, while still keeping the influence of his animation and other illustration works from the 1960s and 1970s.[4] This in turn created a unique personal style, which was influenced by both modern surrealism as well as realism fluent in many classic and modern techniques.
In 1983, he was behind the illustrations for the novel Demon City Shinjuku and the first of Hideyuki Kikuchis novel series Vampire Hunter D.This was adapted to a movie in 1985 for which Amano worked as character designer. The film was one of the first anime movies to be released outside of Japan. In interviews, however, Amano has stated that he was not pleased with the final product of the movie. More involvement in illustration had led to the creation of collections of his artwork being published, such as Maten in 1984.
n 1989, he had his first exhibition called Hiten at Yurakucho Mullion in Tokyo, Japan.He continued to work with Square and their Final Fantasy series, and in 1990 he started to work as an artist for stage theater. His first work for theater was Tamasaburo Bandos Nayotake, which was in the same year.During this time while working as illustrator, character designer and set designer, he had exhibitions of his becoming well-known for his printing works.
In 1994, after Final Fantasy VI, he was no longer the main character, image and graphic designer of the series (he started to provide promotional and character artwork for the next games, as well as working on the title logo designs for most of the games), but in 1995 he started to become better known world wide with his work at the Biennale dOrléans in France, and then in his newly established workshop and exhibition Think Like Amano in New York in 1997, which followed another exhibition in New York at the Angel Orensanz Foundation entitled Hero. Amano also appeared in the 1998 movie New Rose Hotel which is loosely based on the William Gibson short story with the same name, in which he played the character Hiroshi.
[from Wikipedia]
Music: Alio Die Ancient Foresight Yoshitaka Amano (Part 2)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Uma1luw05C0/mqdefault.jpg)
![Dani Soon
Dani Soon was born in a small remote town in Korea in 1991. Living in such a remote town meant there was not much to do, so books and drawing became her biggest pastime enjoyment. Being at one with Mother Nature also allowed her imagination to run wild and the rustic environment had a critical impact on her decision to be an artist. Even though she now lives in a hectic city, she still draws inspiration from reading books and working outside which allows her to absorb her natural surroundings.
[More at: https://www.soonillustration.com/about]
Music: Vidna Obmana Streamers of Stillness Dani Soon](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/V5PdTEVJTGI/mqdefault.jpg)

![Edmund Dulac
Edmund Dulac (born Edmond Dulac; October 22, 1882 – May 25, 1953) was a French-born, British naturalised magazine illustrator, book illustrator and stamp designer. Born in Toulouse he studied law but later turned to the study of art the École des Beaux-Arts. He moved to London early in the 20th century and in 1905 received his first commission to illustrate the novels of the Brontë Sisters. During World War I, Dulac produced relief books and when after the war the deluxe childrens book market shrank he turned to magazine illustrations among other ventures. He designed banknotes during World War II and postage stamps, most notably those that heralded the beginning of Queen Elizabeth IIs reign.
Born in Toulouse, France, he began his career by studying law at the University of Toulouse. He also studied art, switching to it full-time after he became bored with law, and having won prizes at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. He spent a very brief period at the Académie Julian in Paris in 1904 before moving to London.
Settling in Londons Holland Park, the 22-year-old Frenchman was commissioned by the publisher J.M. Dent to illustrate Jane Eyre. and 9 other volumes of works by the Brontë sisters. He then became a regular contributor to the Pall Mall magazine, and joined the London Sketch Club, which introduced him to the foremost book and magazine illustrators of the day. Through these he began an association with the Leicester Gallery and Hodder & Stoughton; the gallery commissioned illustrations from Dulac which they sold in an annual exhibition, while publishing rights to the paintings were taken up by Hodder & Stoughton for reproduction in illustrated gift books, publishing one book a year. Books produced under this arrangement by Dulac include Stories from The Arabian Nights (1907) with 50 colour images; an edition of William Shakespeares The Tempest (1908) with 40 colour illustrations; The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1909) with 20 colour images; The Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales (1910); Stories from Hans Christian Andersen (1911); The Bells and Other Poems by Edgar Allan Poe (1912) with 28 colour images and many monotone illustrations; and Princess Badoura (1913).
After the war, the deluxe edition illustrated book became a rarity and Dulacs career in this field was over. His last such books were Edmund Dulacs Fairy Book (1916), the Tanglewood Tales (1918) (including 14 colour images) and the The Kingdom of the Pearl (1920). His career continued in other areas however, including newspaper caricatures (especially at The Outlook), portraiture, theatre costume and set design, bookplates, chocolate boxes, medals, and various graphics (especially for The Mercury Theatre, Notting Hill Gate).
He also produced illustrations for The American Weekly, a Sunday supplement belonging to the Hearst newspaper chain in America and Britains Country Life. Country Life Limited (London) published Gods and Mortals in Love (1935) (including 9 colour images) based on a number of the contributions made by Dulac to Country Life previously. The Daughter of the Stars (1939) was a further publication to benefit from Dulacs artwork - due to constraints related to the outbreak of World War II, that title included just 2 colour images. He continued to produce books for the rest of his life, more so than any of his contemporaries, although these were less frequent and less lavish than during the Golden Age.
Halfway through his final book commission (Miltons Comus), Dulac died of a heart attack on 25 May 1953 in London.
[from Wikipedia]
Music by Addamz, Goldmund Edmund Dulac](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/V9n4xtAJiuw/mqdefault.jpg)
![Leonor Fini
Leonor Fini (1907–1996) was an Argentinian surrealist painter, designer, illustrator, and author, known for her depictions of powerful women.
Fini had no formal artistic training, yet she was familiar with the traditional Renaissance and Mannerist styles due to her upbringing in Italy. Her first major exhibition was in 1936 in New York at Julian Levy’s Gallery. Fini was considered part of a pre-war generation of Parisian artists, and outlived most of her artist peers. Surrealist artists in France became very interested in her once she began setting herself up as an artist, and came to know her as important in the movement. She is mentioned in most comprehensive works about surrealism, although some leave her out (and she did not consider herself a surrealist). In 1943, Fini was included in Peggy Guggenheims show Exhibition by 31 Women at the Art of This Century gallery in New York. In 1949 Frederick Ashton choreographed a ballet conceptualized by Fini, Le Rêve de Leonor (“Leonors Dream) with music by Benjamin Britten. In London, she exhibited at the Kaplan gallery in 1960 and at the Hanover Gallery in 1967. In the summer of 1986 there was a retrospective at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris that drew in more than 5,000 people a day. It featured over 260 works in a variety of media. A tribute to the many artistic and creative avenues that her career took throughout her lifetime, there were 100+ watercolors and drawings, around 80 theatre/costume designs, and about 70 paintings, 5 masks, etc. Many of her paintings featured women in positions of power; an example of this is the painting La Bout du Monde where a female figure is submerged in water up to her breasts with human and animal skulls surrounding her. Madonna used the imagery in her video, Bedtime Story in 1994. In the spring of 1987 she had an exhibition at London’s Editions Graphique’s gallery. Fini was also featured in an exhibition entitled “Women, Surrealism, and Self-representation” at the San Francisco Modern Museum of Art in 1999.
She painted portraits of Jean Genet, Anna Magnani, Jacques Audiberti, Alida Valli, Jean Schlumberger (jewelry designer) and Suzanne Flon as well as many other celebrities and wealthy visitors to Paris. While working for Elsa Schiaparelli she designed the flacon for the perfume, Shocking, which became the top selling perfume for the House of Schiaparelli. She designed costumes and decorations for theater, ballet and opera, including the first ballet performed by Roland Petits Ballet de Paris, Les Demoiselles de la nuit, featuring a young Margot Fonteyn. This was a payment of gratitude for Finis having been instrumental in finding the funding for the new ballet company. She also designed the costumes for two films, Renato Castellanis Romeo and Juliet (1954) and John Hustons A Walk with Love and Death (1968), which starred 18-year-old Anjelica Huston and Moshe Dayans son, Assaf.
In the 1970s, she wrote three novels, Rogomelec, Moumour, Contes pour enfants velu and Oneiropompe. Her friends included Jean Cocteau, Giorgio de Chirico, and Alberto Moravia, Fabrizio Clerici and most of the other artists and writers inhabiting or visiting Paris. She illustrated many works by the great authors and poets, including Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire and Shakespeare, as well as texts by new writers. She was very generous with her illustrations and donated many drawings to writers to help them get published. She is, perhaps, best known for her graphic illustrations for Histoire dO.
Fini is considered a great contributor to the feminist movement because her paintings often depict impertinent young women in scenes that empower their image.
[from Wikipedia]
Music: Alio Die Honey Mushroom, Part III Leonor Fini](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/VlshNGriEnc/mqdefault.jpg)
![George Barbier
George Barbier (French: [ʒɔʁʒ baʁbje]) (1882–1932) was one of the great French illustrators of the early 20th century. Born in Nantes, France on 16 October 1882, Barbier was 29 years old when he mounted his first exhibition in 1911 and was subsequently swept to the forefront of his profession with commissions to design theatre and ballet costumes, to illustrate books, and to produce haute couture fashion illustrations. For the next 20 years Barbier led a group from the Ecole des Beaux Arts who were nicknamed by Vogue The Knights of the Bracelet—a tribute to their fashionable and flamboyant mannerisms and style of dress. Included in this élite circle were Bernard Boutet de Monvel and Pierre Brissaud (both of whom were Barbiers first cousins), Paul Iribe, Georges Lepape, and Charles Martin. During his career Barbier also turned his hand to jewellery, glass and wallpaper design, wrote essays and many articles for the prestigious Gazette du bon ton. In the mid-1920s he worked with Erté to design sets and costumes for the Folies Bergère and in 1929 he wrote the introduction for Ertés acclaimed exhibition and achieved mainstream popularity through his regular appearances in LIllustration magazine. Barbier died in 1932 at the very pinnacle of his success. He is buried in Nantes.
[from Wikipedia]
Music: Vidna Obmana A Scenic Fall George Barbier](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WJwtbE59zmw/mqdefault.jpg)
![Denis Forkas
Denis Forkas Kostromitin (1977, Russia) explores mythology and religious symbolism through the ancient Mediterranean tradition of conveying images. Denis’s work is firmly rooted in the aesthetics of antiquity and he seeks to restore the interrupted artistic legacy of nameless masters by introducing contemporary techniques – notably acrylics, – in his process. The synthesis of tradition and innovation forms a framework for the artist’s studies of dreams and philosophy. Forkas’s works have been exhibited around the globe and featured in numerous international music releases as album covers. The artist currently resides in Moscow.
[from:https://fulgur.co.uk/artists-and-writers/denis-forkas-kostromitin/]
Music: Oöphoi A Slow Beating of Wings Denis Forkas](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WjbyMGOxm_g/mqdefault.jpg)
![Jungho Lee
These whimsical illustrations will appeal to bibliophiles thanks to their surreal use of books. Created by Korean artist and illustrator Jungho Lee, the images incorporate the beauty of books into everyday environments, creating thoughtful, dream-like scenes. As an open door, a star-filled lake, a morning slice of pie or an airplane’s wing, books take on new forms in Lee’s pieces without ever being read.
Inspired by the surrealists Rene Magritte and Quint Buchholz, Lee – the winner of the 2016 World Illustration Awards – hand draws his images with charcoal and watercolors before scanning and digitally layering them to reach the desired illusory effect. Wondrous and whimsical, the pictures are the next best thing to getting lost in a book.
[from:https://plainmagazine.com/korean-illustrator-jungho-lee-book/]
Music: Hakobune Love Knows Where Jungho Lee](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XVid7dhBIS4/mqdefault.jpg)