Diego Velazquez was an idiosyncratic painter who became the offical court painter for the Spanish king Philip IV. Velazquez's unique composition style, love of odd subjects, and expressive portrait style found its culmination in Las Meninas, a 1656 painting that shows the daughters of the King with their attendants and the painter in a large room with people coming and going. The painting was so remarkable that Pablo Picasso made a cubist version of it in the twentieth century.

Goya created these etchings as a series of criticisms leveled at the frivolity of Spanish society at the time. This fits with Goya's other work, in which social commentary was a frequent presence. Rembrandt and Velasquez were 17th century painters, while Tiepolo and Guardi were not quite contemporaries of Goya, both being from a previous generation and dying before these etchings were made.

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While an etching rather than his signature paintings, this work shows many hallmarks of the artist Rembrandt van Rijn, which were also signature elements of his fellow artists working in the Netherlands. Self-Portrait with Saskia, which is shown here, not only pictures Rembrandt, but also focuses on everyday people in everyday clothing. The work also has a number of examples of strong contrast, which was a hallmark of Dutch Golden Age painting.

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This work by Rembrandt van Rijn, known as Self-Portrait with Saskia, is one of his many etchings. An etching, which involved carving an image into a metal plate, then printing it onto paper, was an easier work to produce than a large-scale painting and easier to reproduce. Etchings were much more commonly passed around Europe, making Rembrandt's fame in the seventeenth century much more than his paintings.

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Rembrandt van Rijn was one of the great masters of the Dutch Golden Age of painting during the seventeenth century. His style was notable for featuring bold colors and dramatic lighting in "everyday scenes" of commonfolk, as well as portraits and scenes out of the Bible. Almost all of Rembrandt's paintings featured people, and he almost never drew landscapes.

Joseph Wright of Derby painted A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery. It was painted between 1763 and 1765 CE. He was later considered the unofficial artist of the Enlightenment as a result of his paintings that largely had to do with scientific topics.

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Rembrandt van Rijn was one of the great masters of the Dutch Golden Age of painting during the seventeenth century. His style was notable for featuring bold colors and dramatic lighting in "everyday scenes" of commonfolk, as well as portraits and scenes out of the Bible. Almost all of Rembrandt's paintings featured people, and he almost never drew landscapes.

While Diego Velazquez had many similarities to his Baroque contemporaries, notably a strong contrast between light and dark elements, he also had a number of distinguishing characteristics. Velazquez' portrayal of his subjects was much more unflinching than other seventeenth century artists, demonstrating an ability to accurately but sympathetically show the faults of his subjects. Additionally, the color palette used by the Spaniard Velazquez was more muted than painters in other parts of Europe in the 1600s.

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Philip IV ruled Spain and its territories and colonies when it was the largest power on the globe, during the seventeenth century. Philip IV wished to present himself as a magnificent figure, and he hired the best painter in Spain, Diego Velazquez. Velazquez's portraits of the royal family and its attendants conveyed their wealth and prestige, along with an inner psychology that made Velazquez one of the masters of Baroque painting.

Anthony van Dyck was born in the Netherlands in 1599, but moved to Italy to study art in 1621 and became the official court painter in London in 1632. Van Dyck performed the normal function of a court painter by painting portraits of the royal family and associated people, but in a beautiful style. Van Dyck also made interesting compositional choices, such as his portrait of King Charles with three different profiles of the monarch in one painting.