Bierstadt: I've liked him all the better since I realized that those mountains aren't really intended to be real!
I love Botticelli. I like the transparency of his tempera technique more than almost any oil technique: more luminous, more like refractions of something shining through, more how I see reality. (My own goal, as best I can articulate it, is to refract a little beauty into the world.) Botticelli combines Ideals with sex and wistfulness; how could I resist?? I've been lucky enough to spend many years living close to the National Gallery in DC, where Fra Angelico and the brothers Filippino and Filippo Lippi also show translucency transcending time.
Cezanne's watercolors too show a separation of color from line which is almost like a look into the hidden world behind reality. I love his oils too, most especially the rougher landscapes (e.g. http://www.oir.ucf.edu/wm/paint/auth/cezanne/st-victoire/). Supposedly he painted so that his unfinished paintings were themselves balanced compositions, which I find intriguing.
Chagall: I think of Chagall as a true pioneer of our century: the flex and surprise of dreams brought into representational art.
Dufy: Again, I like his dreamwork best: see e.g. http://www.si.umich.edu/Art_History/UMMA/1963/1963_2.53.jpg.
Frederic Church is an interesting artist: arguably the most talented follower of Turner; a priest of Nature (in some ways, despite his painterly care, he reminds me as much of Henri Rousseau as of e.g. Corot or of Audubon); the redeemer of the Hudson Valley School; and a pioneer of some basic Western American landscape ideas, which have been incessantly vulgarized from Thomas Moran to the art shows of today. And yet I somehow feel that Church never cut loose enough to become the artist he could have.
Ingres: I adore his calmly sensual colors and curvatures - and the intelligence of la Princesse de Broglie - and wouldn't Madame de Moitessier be a cozy armful on a winter night??
Kandinsky: after his Post-impressionist years, some of the compositions are almost a shamanist view of a very modern world: full of mystic signs in unknown alphabets.
Klee
Klimt
I love Dutch landscape artists: Both Ruysdaels, Maurits Hobbema, Rubens (occasionally), and even sometimes their English descendants Gainsborough and Constable.
I don't know Georges Mathieu except from one painting in the Philips - hanging in a staircase! - but that one really sticks in my memory. It's a totally nonrepresentational abstract, done in a very heavy impasto technique, which has some depth to it. I see from the Internet that he's a "tachist", whatever that is.
Miro
Mondrian is another I've sometimes felt embarrassed about liking - but I like him better as I've learned to see his art as more than merely geometric (decorative) balance. I still think of him as minor, but I enjoy his stuff. The recent Mondrian show in Dallas had an extra room, not listed in the catalog, on followers of Mondrian - and one who really caught my eye was Ilya Bolotowsky. I don't recall seeing any of his stuff before, but he seems to do some interesting abstract stuff.
Of course I like much of Picasso's work - how could one not? - and yet I sometimes wish he had focussed that immense talent more. In some ways he reminds me of Carl Gauss, whose notebooks full of secret advances killed much of the joy in mathematics for at least a few generations following: great creators are not necessarily benign influences.
I'm almost embarrassed to like Renoir - but I do. I guess I like him more as a visual fantasist more than for anything painterly - many of his paintings glow with life, laughter, and a huge affection for women! Mmm! (I'm even more embarrassed to like Peter Lely - some of his portrait subjects look like they might jump out of the picture at you - so let's don't mention him!)
Seurat: Pointillism too, to my odd eyes, seems like another way of seeing two worlds at once.
J.M.W. Turner was not only a very great painter, but also, I claim, the father of Impressionism - it is the later and blurrier Turners which I love most. The several versions of the Burning of the Houses of Parliament were a real turning point, but from there he just got stronger for almost two decades. Is it inconceivable that art students from Paris might have been exposed to this doyen of the Royal Academy, who was active into the 1840s, at some point in the 60s or 70s? I am similarly curious about connections between Turner and the more sophisticated American Luminists, e.g. Church and Bierstadt.
Utrillo: some of his paintings really call to me, but I don't know his oeuvre very well.
Van Dyck shows his world as passing while yet present - look at the great Charles I paintings, and then you can follow that wistful strain into many of the other paintings.
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