The first line in our image caption example reads "Edward Hopper (American, 1882-1967)." This tells us that the artist was named Edward Hopper, he was a citizen of the United States, was born in 1882 and died in 1967. There are variations on this line of information, of course.
Occasionally a caption will include the discipline(s) in which the artist worked, as seen in "French painter." This can get unwieldy for multi-talented artists, so it's more than acceptable not to include it.
If we think a certain artist painted, drew or sculpted something, you'll see the words "Attributed to" included.
If the work was a collaborative effort of apprentices under the direction of a master, you'll see the words "Workshop of."
Sometimes an artist was born in one country, but either became a naturalized citizen or spent his or her active years in another. In cases like these, you'll see things such as "American, born Germany," or "Greek, active in Spain."
Record keeping being spotty many centuries ago, there are instances where educated guesses have been made about when so-and-so lived. In the "dates" part, you may find qualifiers like "ca.," "fl.," "1337/42-" (born, sometime, during these years), "died before" (records indicate the artist was definitely dead at this point) or even the last-resort usage of question marks as with "b?" or "d?".
If the artist is, happily, still among us, you'll only see a "b." followed by the year in which he or she was born.
Now, art history stretches back many thousands of years, and even in recent centuries the names of individual artists have not always been recorded. This leaves us with countless works whose image captions have no need of this first line of information. So fear not if you don't see an artist's name, just skip to the next step.
