Maurice Prendergast

Walter Richard Sickert , born in Munich, Germany, was a painter who was a member of the Camden Town Group in London. He was an important influence on distinctively British styles of avant-garde art in the 20th century. Sickert was a cosmopolitan and eccentric who often favoured ordinary people and... urban scenes as his subjects. His oeuvre also included portraits of well-known personalities and images derived from press photographs. He is considered a prominent figure in the transition from Impressionism to Modernism. Sickert's father, Oswald Sickert, was a Danish-German artist. His mother, Eleanor Louisa Henry, was an illegitimate daughter of the British astronomer Richard Sheepshanks. The family had left Munich to settle in Britain at the time of the Great Exhibition, Oswald's work having been recommended by Freiherrin Rebecca von Kreusser to Ralph Nicholson Wornum, who was Keeper of the National Gallery at the time. The young Sickert was sent to University College School from 1870-1871, before transferring to King's College School, Wimbledon, where he studied until the age of 18.
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Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was an English illustrator and author. His drawings in black ink, and influenced by the style of Japanese woodcuts, emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the Aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James A.... McNeill Whistler. Beardsley's contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau and poster styles was significant, despite the brevity of his career before his early death from tuberculosis. Beardsley was born in Brighton, England, on 21 August 1872, and christened on 24 Oct 1872. His father, Vincent Paul Beardsley , was the son of a tradesman; Vincent had no trade himself, however, and instead relied on a private income from an inheritance that he received from his maternal grandfather when he was twenty-one years of age. Vincent's wife, Ellen Agnus Pitt , was the daughter of Surgeon-Major William Pitt of the Indian Army. The Pitts were a well-established and respected family in Brighton, and Beardsley's mother married a man of lesser social status than might have been expected.
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