The forty artists whose work is focused on in ^i{Great Artists^i} may have worked alone in their studios, but they were not the only artists of their times. Their contemporary artists were their teachers, students, friends and sometimes members of their own families. In other countries there were artists whose lifetimes spanned exactly the same years as their own. Sometimes our forty were great friends with these foreign artists -- many times they never knew eachother at all. It is a fascinating part of the study of the history of art to be able to look back over the lifetime of an artist and to see which fellow artists touched the life of a great artist and which contemporaries they were destined never to meet.
