Ruff studied photography from 1977 to 1985 with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where fellow students included the photographers Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Struth, Angelika Wengler, and Petra Wunderlich.
Francesco Hayez was an Italian painter, the leading artist of Romanticism in mid-19th-century Milan, renowned for his grand historical paintings, political allegories and exceptionally fine portraits.
Austin Osman Spare was an English artist who developed idiosyncratic magical techniques including automatic writing, automatic drawing and sigilization based on his theories of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious self. His artistic work is characterized by skilled draughtsmanship exhibiting a mastery of the use of the line, and often employs monstrous or fantastic magical and sexual imagery.
Joseph Wright of Derby was an English landscape and portrait painter. He has been acclaimed as "the first professional painter to express the spirit of the Industrial Revolution.
Pudlo Pudlat was a widely known Inuit artist whose preferred medium was a combination of acrylic wash and coloured pencils.
The Ripley Scroll is an important 15th century work of emblematic symbolism. Twenty one copies are known, dating from the early 16th century to the mid-17th.
Marinus Boezem's The Green Cathedral (1978-1996) is a site-specific artwork.
The Raft of the Medusa is an oil painting by Théodore Géricault. Completed when the artist was just 27, the work has become an icon of French Romanticism.
The Lion Monument is a sculpture in Lucerne, Switzerland, designed by Bertel Thorvaldsen. It commemorates the Swiss Guards who were massacred in 1792 during the French Revolution, when revolutionaries stormed the Tuileries Palace in Paris, France. Mark Twain praised the sculpture of a mortally-wounded lion as "the most mournful and moving piece of stone in the world."
Gaspar van Wittel was a Dutch landscape painter.