Born Dec 29 1932 in New York State, Hinman is an artist and sometime professional baseball player. After his artistic training, he served in the army for two years and then taught mechanical drawing. From here he combined these skills and specialized his artistic talents, focusing on abstract representation of 3D shapes on canvas. Using a technique of underpinning the canvas with reverse ribs to provide contours to his works, he then uses colour to complement or contrast the physical shape.

Born 8 December 1922 in Berlin, Freud, grandson of Sigmund, became known as one of the foremost British portrait painters of the 20th Century. Early in his career, he was influenced by surrealism, but later, starker, paintings tended towards realism. Words like “sombre”, “unsettling” and “discomforting” are often used when describing his works. He worked almost exclusively with live models, and was known for asking for extended and punishing sittings. Here is his portrait of a fellow British great, David Hockney.

Born 4 Dec 1866 (according to the Julian calendar that the Russians were using at the time) in Moscow, Kandinsky claimed to be the first abstract painter, with this work, Composition V. It’s viewable in the MoMA in New York. His Blue Rider painting had already showed the direction he would later take, and he formed the distinguished group of the same name with artists such as Macke and Marc. Undeniably influential, he used colour as an expression of emotion, and is said to have likened the process of painting to composing music.

Born 2 Dec 1859 in Paris, Seurat is known as the founder of pointillism and used this trademark style to great effect. His paintings, Sunday Afternoon at Grand Jatte and Bathers are the best known of his works, but over 200 paintings are known to exist. Seurat took a scientific approach to his art, believing that a painter could use colour to create harmony and emotion in art in the same way that a musician uses counterpoint and variation to create harmony in music. The flat structure of his work is said to have inspired the Cubists in the early 20th Century. Here’s Entrance to the harbour at Port en Bessin.

Born Nov 21 1898 in Lessines, Belgium, Magritte is well known as a thought-provoking surrealist, and in particular for his pipe that is not a pipe. This 1962 work is appropriate for our modern world and is entitled: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905. From the series Great Ideas of Western Man. Or it might not be.

Born Nov 8 1883 in Lancaster PA, Demuth worked with fellow American artists to develop the concept of Precisionism in his mainly watercolour-centric style of painting. His works often show a range of forms in a quasi-Cubist, sharply-defined manner. Frequently occurring scenes include urban and rural landscapes, often consisting of industrial features such as bridges, smoke stacks, and skyscrapers. This is: My Egypt. It depicts a steel and concrete grain elevator in Demuth’s hometown. The majestic grain elevator gives the impression of being a pinnacle of American achievement—a modern day equivalent to the monuments of ancient Egypt.

Born Nov 7 1933 in Newark NJ, Birmelin is best known for his paintings and drawings capturing urban crowds; particularly the drama, movement and tension of close physical involvement in the city environment. Still active, he believes in drawing from life, memory and imagination as he feels it provides a more vigorous and personal visual imagery, compared to relying on photographic sources, as is common among many contemporary figurative artists. This is: The Calling – In the Empire of the Night,

Born 2 Nov 1902 in Ukraine, Margo was a painter of surrealist imagery. In 1919 he enrolled at the Polytechnik of Art at Odessa, and in 1924 received a grant to study at the Workshop for the Art of the Future in Moscow. He then studied the work of the old masters in the Hermitage. In 1928 Margo emigrated to Montréal, where he worked as a muralist for a year. Moving to New York City in 1930, he studied at the Roerich Museum and two years later began teaching there. He experimented with celluloid and acetone in his printmaking and was an early user of the “decalomania” technique in oil painting. In 1943 he became an American citizen. This is: Reconstruction, from the Portfolio #1

Born 31 Oct 1632 in Delft – Vermeer. Girl in the pearl earring, and all those other famous highly-detailed interior studies. But how did he paint them? Were they traced using a camera obscura? Does it matter? Vermeer mainly painted indoors, but he also painted this: View of Delft. For further reading on the cheat or genius question, this is a good start: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/10/vermeer-artistic-genius-cheat-painter

Born October 31 1760 in Edo, Japan, Katsushika Hokusai, known simply as Hokusai, was a Japanese painter and printmaker. He is best known for the woodblock print series – Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, including the iconic print: The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Undoubtedly one of the greatest artists of all time. This is: Fine wind, clear morning, although it is often known as: Red Fuji.

Born 30 October 1839 in Paris, Sisley counts as one of THE great impressionsists. Although he was born and spent most of his life in France, he still retained British citizenship. He was possibly the most consistent of the Impressionists in his dedication to painting landscape “en plein air”. He deviated into figure painting only rarely and, unlike other big name Impressionists such as Renoir and Pissarro, he found that Impressionism fulfilled his artistic needs. Some of his important works are paintings of the River Thames, mostly around Hampton Court, painted in the 1870s, and many landscapes depicting rivers in France, often in or near Moret-sur-Loing. His paintings of the Seine and its bridges in the former suburbs of Paris are like many of his landscapes, characterised by tranquillity, in pale shades of green, pink, purple, dusty blue and cream. Here’s one of the Hampton Cour series, from 1874.