A concise yet comprehensive reference guide for art lovers and art students, this illustrated volume profiles major artists from classical antiquity to the modern era. All 501 artists featured in this book receive at least a one-page entry that summarizes their life, their work, and their influence. The most influential artists are discussed in entries of up to four pages. Entries are illustrated with portraits of the artists and reproductions of some of their best-known works. Included here are painters, sculptors, photographers, and performance and video artists. Among them are Renaissance artists Raphael and Michelangelo, northern European artists such as Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt van Rijn, English landscape painters Turner and Constable, French impressionists such as Degas and Renoir, Japanese artists Sesshu and Hishikawa Moronobu, American abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, twentieth-century European giants such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and modern sculptors Isamu Noguchi, Alexander Calder, Richard Serra, and many others. Important women in the arts are also included, among them, sculptor Louise Nevelson, painters Georgia O'Keeffe and Helen Frankenthaler, American impressionist in France Mary Cassatt, and many others. This informative and entertaining compendium of biographical sketches is supplemented with more than 670 illustrations, most of them in color.