Before the advent of photography, if you wanted a picture of something or someone, you had to draw it yourself -- or hire someone to do it for you. Artists (at least the good ones) could make a good living painting portraits, cityscapes, scenes of commoners, or still lifes; and also preserving for us the particulars of their lives, the styles of their clothes and houses and the details of their world. Here are some whose works have lived beyond their lifetimes.
a Spanish Baroque painter. His exact year of birth is not known. Not much is known about his life. He initially studied under Lucas de Valdes. He painted religious-themed works for church commissions.
a painter, designer, and engraver, was born at Augsburg about 1624. He was cabinet painter to the Bishop of Augsburg, and produced many landscapes with cattle, also kitchen pieces, feathered game, and a few historical subjects in chiaroscuro. He also etched 230 plates of biblical, historical, and mythological scenes and landscapes.
a Flemish early Renaissance painter who worked in Antwerp and Lübeck. From 1519 to 1525 he is recorded as a member of the Leonardsbruderschaft ("Leonard's Brotherhood"), a religious confraternity of merchants in Lübeck among whose ranks the leaders of the Protestant Reformation in the 1530s could be found
