Katsushika Hokusai (1760 - 1849)

Katsushika Hokusai was born in Edo (now Tokyo), Japan, in 1760 (exact date questionable). He was a Japanese artist, ukiyo-e painter and printmaker influenced by such painters as Sesshu, and other styles of Chinese painting.
Hokusai is best known as author of the woodblock print series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji which includes the internationally recognized print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, created during the 1820s.

Ilya Yefimovich Repin (1844 - 1930)

Ilya Yefimovich Repin was born in Chuguyev, Russia, in 1844. He was a realist painter and the most renowned Russian artist of the 19th century. He played a major role in bringing Russian art into the mainstream of European culture. Repin persistently searched for new techniques and content to give his work more fulness and depth. His method was the reverse of impressionism. He produced works slowly and carefully. They were the result of close and detailed study. With some of his paintings, he made one hundred or more preliminary sketches.

Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900)

Frederic Edwin Church was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters. While committed to the natural sciences, he was "always concerned with including a spiritual dimension in his works."

Church used extraordinary detail, romanticism, and luminism in his paintings. He focused on scenes composed of rich reds, purples, and oranges to give depth to his work and emphasize the richness and fantasy of the scenery.

John Bauer (1882-1918)

John Bauer (June 4, 1882 – November 20, 1918) was a Swedish painter and illustrator best known for his illustrations of Bland tomtar och troll (Among Gnomes and Trolls). Princess Tuvstarr and the Fishpond (named after Carex cespitosa), painted in 1913, is perhaps Bauer's most notable work.

Bauer's early work was influenced to a large extent by Albert Engström and Carl Larsson, two contemporaries and influential painters. Bauer's first major work was commissioned in 1904, when he was asked to illustrate a book on Lappland. It was not until 1907 that he would become known for his illustrations of Bland tomtar och troll, the yearly fairy tale book, in which his most highly acclaimed works would be published in the 1912-1915 editions.

Arthur Rackham (1867-1939)

Rackham was born in London as one of 12 children. In 1884, at the age of 17, he was sent on an ocean voyage to Australia to improve his fragile health, accompanied by two Aunts. At the age of 18, he worked as a clerk at the Westminster Fire Office and began studying part-time at the Lambeth School of Art.

In 1892 he left his job and started working for The Westminster Budget as a reporter and illustrator. His first book illustrations were published in 1893 in To the Other Side by Thomas Rhodes, but his first serious commission was in 1894 for The Dolly Dialogues, the collected sketches of Anthony Hope, who later went on to write The Prisoner of Zenda. Book illustrating then became Rackham's career for the rest of his life.

In 1903 he married Edyth Starkie, with whom he had one daughter, Barbara, in 1908. Rackham won a gold medal at the Milan International Exhibition in 1906 and another one at the Barcelona International Exposition in 1912. His works were included in numerous exhibitions, including one at the Louvre in Paris in 1914. Arthur Rackham died in 1939 of cancer in his home in Limpsfield, Surrey.