Who are your favorite artists?

I don't have any favourite artists but what I do have are favourite types of painting. What captures my interest is looking at paintings that are showing realistic images of the time that the painting was created. I love history and so with photography not being invented until the mid 1800s and then not becoming widely available until the early 1900s the only of glimpsing what life was like, what the city and countryside looked like, how people dressed, what food they ate and so on is by looking at the paintings of the time.

The skill of the artist is often not very good and they may take liberties with the subject being painted to satisfy either the client, if a portrait, or to rearrange the landscape to satisfy the composition of the view, but you still get a feeling of what the period is telling you. I love the Italian painters like Canaletto who painted in the late 1700s. I like marine paintings, particularly of ships under full sail, and I find the work of L.S.Lowry fascinating - he painted the industrial towns of Northern England in the early part of the 20th century.

All of these, and others too, will find me standing for minutes on end if I come across something that catches my eye. However it has to be a window on a time gone by. I don't have any time at all for paintings of flowers or so called modern art!