Allpaintings Art Portal

Paul Trouillebert

Fri, 09 May 2008 17:14:01 +0200

(1829 - 1900) Paul-Désiré Trouillebert was born in Paris; he was an artist of the first order and best known for his beautiful landscapes. Trouillebert paintings resembled that of his predecessor, Jean Baptiste-Camille Corot and his work was often mistaken for Corot’s throughout Trouillebert’s life. He was not just interested in painting landscapes similar to those of the Barbizon school, but also painted portraits, nudes and even experimented quite successfully with Orientalism. Trouillebert had trained under Auguste Antoine Ernest Hébert (1817-1908), an artist who worked primarily in drawing and diverse subject matter, like that of portraits, mythology, and the Roman countryside. He exhibited at the Salon from 1865 to 1884 earning rave reviews throughout the years, entering many portraits as this particular subject did not test traditions or the Salons jurors or their audiences. He was particularly fond of the river landscape at dawn or dusk approaching his with a soft brush stroke and a subdued palate. When first exposed to Corot’s work, Trouillebert took a keen interest in it and immersed himself in Corot’s techniques. He focused on landscape painting and began working in open air, so it’s no wonder that his work became more and more associated with the Barbizon school. Trouillebert enjoyed a very successful career and a continuous demand for his work in his lifetime; his paintings were included in some of the world’s greatest public and private collections including that of Edgar Degas who owned several of his canvases. He was a complete painter and never confined himself to a genre.

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Johannes Hermanus Koekkoek

Fri, 09 May 2008 17:13:09 +0200

Giovanni Fattori

Fri, 09 May 2008 17:11:09 +0200

Giovanni Fattori (September 6, 1825 – August 30, 1908) was an Italian artist, one of the leaders of the group known as the Macchiaioli. Fattori was born in modest circumstances in Livorno. His early education was rudimentary and his family initially planned for him to study for a qualification in commerce, but his skill in drawing persuaded them to apprentice him in 1845 to a local painter, Giuseppe Baldini. The following year he moved to Firenze where he studied under Giuseppe Bezzuoli. Fattori's development to maturity as a painter was unusually slow. Few examples of his early work survive; those that do are mainly portraits and sketches, as well as a few historical scenes influenced by Bezzuoli — often scenes from Medieval or Renaissance history. In the early 1850s Fattori began frequenting the Caffè Michelangiolo on via Larga, a popular gathering place for artists who carried on lively discussions of art and politics. Several of these artists would discover the work of the painters of the Barbizon school while visiting Paris for the Exposition of 1855, and would bring back to Italy an enthusiasm for the then-novel practice of painting outdoors, directly from nature. In 1859 Fattori met Roman landscape painter Giovanni Costa, whose example influenced him to join his colleagues in taking up painting en plein air, thus marking a turning point in Fattori's development. The group of painters to which Fattori belonged became known as the Macchiaioli. Their methods and aims are somewhat similar to those of the Impressionists, and, like their French counterparts, they were criticized for their paintings' lack of conventional finish. The Macchiaioli did not go as far as the Impressionists did in dissolving form in light, however, and when Fattori visited Paris in 1875 he reacted unenthusiastically to Impressionist works, expressing a preference for the artists of the Barbizon school. Military subjects dominate Fattori's output, although he also painted portraits, landscapes, and horses. His painted sketches made outdoors are typically painted on small wood panels; these were used as reference material in painting larger compositions, such as his Branding of the Colts in the Maremma (1887). He produced a significant number of etchings as well, particularly in his later years. From 1869 he taught at the Florentine Academy, where one of his late students was Amedeo Modigliani. Despite the modest income this work provided, he lived in poverty, and his old age was marked by a bitter disillusionment with the social and political order that had emerged in postunification Italy. Known for his honesty and candor, Fattori also deplored the direction he saw some of his students taking in the 1890s, as a group of them, led by Plinio Nomellini, adopted a Neo-impressionist style. He died in Florence on August 30, 1908.

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Camille Pissarro

Fri, 09 May 2008 17:10:36 +0200

Camille Pissarro (July 10, 1830 – November 13, 1903) was a French Impressionist painter. His importance resides not only in his visual contributions to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, but also in his patriarchal standing among his colleagues, particularly Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin. Jacob-Abraham-Camille Pissarro was born in Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, to Abraham Gabriel Pissarro, a Portuguese Sephardic Jew, and Rachel Manzana-Pomié, from the Dominican Republic. Pissarro lived in St. Thomas until age 12, when he went to a boarding school in Paris. He returned to St. Thomas where he drew in his free time. Pissarro was attracted to political anarchy, an attraction that may have originated during his years in St. Thomas. In 1852, he travelled to Venezuela with the Danish artist Fritz Melbye. In 1855, Pissarro left for Paris, where he studied at various academic institutions (including the École des Beaux-Arts and Académie Suisse) and under a succession of masters, such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, and Charles-François Daubigny. Corot is sometimes considered Pissarro's most important early influence; Pissarro listed himself as Corot’s pupil in the catalogues to the 1864 and 1865 Paris Salons. His finest early works (See Jalais Hill, Pontoise, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) are characterized by a broadly painted (sometimes with palette knife) naturalism derived from Courbet, but with an incipient Impressionist palette. Pissarro married Julie Vellay, a maid in his mother's household. Of their eight children, one died at birth and one daughter died aged nine. The surviving children all painted, and Lucien, the oldest son, became a follower of William Morris. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 compelled Pissarro to flee his home in Louveciennes in September 1870; he returned in June of 1871 to find that the house, and along with it many of his early paintings, had been destroyed by Prussian soldiers. Initially his family was taken in by a fellow artist in Montfoucault, but by December of 1870 they had taken refuge in London and settled at Westow Hill in Upper Norwood (today better known as Crystal Palace, near Sydenham). A Blue Plaque currently marks the site of the house on the building at 77a Westow Hill. Through the paintings Pissarro completed at this time, we can glimpse back to the days when Sydenham was a small satellite town recently connected to the capital by the arrival of the railway. One of the most appreciated of these paintings is a view of St Bartholomew’s Church at the end of Lawrie Park Avenue, commonly known as The Avenue, Sydenham, in the collection of the London National Gallery. Twelve oil paintings date to his stay in Upper Norwood and are listed and illustrated in the catalogue raisonne prepared jointly by his fifth child Ludovic-Rodolphe Pissarro and Lionello Venturi and published in 1939. These paintings include Norwood Under the Snow, and Lordship Lane Station, views of The Crystal Palace relocated from Hyde Park, Dulwich College, Sydenham Hill, All Saints Church, and a lost painting of St. Stephen’s Church. Whilst in Upper Norwood, Pissarro was introduced to the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who bought two of his ‘London’ paintings. Durand-Ruel subsequently became the most important art dealer of the new school of French Impressionism. In 1890 Pissarro returned to England and painted some ten scenes of central London. He came back again in 1892, painting in Kew Gardens and Kew Green, and also in 1897, when he produced several oils of Bedford Park, Chiswick. For more details of his British visits, see Nicholas Reed, "Camille Pissarro at Crystal Palace" and "Pissarro in West London", published by Lilburne Press. Known as the "Father of Impressionism", Pissarro painted rural and urban French life, particularly landscapes in and around Pontoise, as well as scenes from Montmartre. His mature work displays an empathy for peasants and laborers, and sometimes evidences his radical political leanings. He was a mentor to Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin and his example inspired many younger artists, including Californian Impressionist Lucy Bacon. Pissarro's influence on his fellow Impressionists is probably still underestimated; not only did he offer substantial contributions to Impressionist theory, but he also managed to remain on friendly, mutually respectful terms with such difficult personalities as Edgar Degas, Cézanne and Gauguin. Pissarro exhibited at all eight of the Impressionist exhibitions. Moreover, whereas Monet was the most prolific and emblematic practitioner of the Impressionist style, Pissarro was nonetheless a primary developer of Impressionist technique. Pissarro experimented with Neo-Impressionist ideas between 1885 and 1890. Discontented with what he referred to as "romantic Impressionism," he investigated Pointillism which he called "scientific Impressionism" before returning to a purer Impressionism in the last decade of his life. In March 1893, in Paris, Gallery Durand-Ruel organized a major exhibition of 46 of Pissarro's works along with 55 others by Antonio de La Gandara. But while the critics acclaimed Gandara, their appraisal of Pissarro's art was less enthusiastic. Pissarro died in Éragny-sur-Epte on either November 12 or November 13, 1903 and was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. On his tomb it reads 12 November 1903.

Extracted from wikipedia

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Diego de Velazquez

Fri, 09 May 2008 17:08:41 +0200

Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez (Sevilla, June 6th, 1599-Madrid, August 6th, 1660). Spanish painter, the country's greatest baroque artist. Velázquez was born in Seville on June 6, 1599, the oldest of six children; both his parents were from the minor nobility. Between 1611 and 1617 the young Velázquez worked as an apprentice to Francisco Pacheco, a Sevillian Mannerist painter who became Velázquez's father-in-law. During his student years Velázquez absorbed the most popular contemporaneous styles of painting, derived, in part, from both Flemish and Italian realism. Many of his earliest paintings show a strong naturalist bias, as does The Meal, which may have been his first work as an independent master after passing the examination of the Guild of Saint Luke. This painting belongs to the first of three categories—the bodegón, or kitchen piece, along with portraits and religious scenes—into which his youthful works, executed between about 1617 and 1623, may be placed. In his kitchen pieces, a few figures are combined with studied still-life objects, as in Water Seller of Seville. The masterly effects of light and shadow, as well as the direct observation of nature, make inevitable a comparison with the work of the Italian painter Caravaggio. Velázquez's religious paintings, images of simple piety, portray models drawn from the streets of Seville, as Pacheco states in his biography of Velázquez. In Adoration of the Magi, for example, the artist painted his own family in the guise of biblical figures, including a self-portrait as well. Velázquez was also well acquainted with members of the intellectual circles of Seville. Pacheco was the director of an informal humanist academy; at its meetings the young artist was introduced to such people as the great poet Luis de Góngora y Argote, whose portrait he executed in 1622. Such contact was important for Velázquez's later work on mythological and classical subjects. In 1622 Velázquez made his first trip to Madrid, to see the royal painting collections, but more likely in an unsuccessful search for a position as court painter. In 1623, however, he returned to the capital and, after executing a portrait of the king, was named official painter to Philip IV. The portrait was the first among many such sober, direct renditions of the king, the royal family, and members of the court. Indeed, throughout the later 1620s, most of his efforts were dedicated to portraiture. Mythological subjects would at times occupy his attention, as in Bacchus or The Drinkers. This scene of revelry in an open field, picturing the god of wine drinking with ruffian types, testifies to the artist's continued interest in realism. In 1628 Peter Paul Rubens came to the court at Madrid on a diplomatic mission. Among the few painters with whom he associated was Velázquez. Although the great Flemish master did not have a direct impact on the style of the younger painter, their conversations almost certainly inspired Velázquez to visit the art collections in Italy that were so much admired by Rubens. In August 1629 Velázquez departed from Barcelona for Genoa and spent most of the next two years traveling in Italy. From Genoa he proceeded to Milan, Venice, Florence, and Rome, returning to Spain from Naples in January 1631. In the course of his journey he closely studied both the art of the Renaissance and contemporaneous painting. Several of the works executed during his travels attest to his absorption of these styles; a notable example is Joseph and His Brothers, which combines a Michelangelesque sculptural quality with the chiaroscuro (light-and-shadow techniques) of such Italian masters as Guercino and Giovanni Lanfranco. On his return to Madrid, Velázquez resumed his duties as court portraitist with the sensitive rendition Prince Baltasar Carlos with a Dwarf, an image made poignant by the young prince's death before reaching adulthood. From the 1630s on, relatively few facts are known about the artist's personal life, although his rise to prominence in court circles is well documented. In 1634 Velázquez organized the decoration of the throne room in the new royal palace of Buen Retiro; this scheme consisted of 12 scenes of battles in which Spanish troops had been victorious—painted by the most prestigious artists of the day, including Velázquez himself—and royal equestrian portraits. Velázquez's contribution to the cycle of battle pictures included the Surrender of Breda, portraying a magnanimous Spanish general receiving the leader of defeated Flemish troops after the siege of that northern town in 1624. The delicacy of handling and astonishing range of emotions captured in a single painting make this the most celebrated historical composition of the Spanish baroque. The second major series of paintings of the 1630s by Velázquez was a group of hunting portraits of the royal family for the Torre de la Parada, a hunting lodge near Madrid. Dating from the late 1630s and early '40s are the famous depictions of court dwarfs in which, unlike court-jester portraits by earlier artists, the sitters are treated with respect and sympathy. Velázquez painted few religious pictures after entering the king's employ; Saints Anthony and Paul and Immaculate Conception are notable exceptions. During the last 20 years of his life Velázquez's work as court official and architect assumed prime importance. He was responsible for the decoration of many new rooms in the royal palaces. In 1649 he again went to Italy, this time to buy works of art for the king's collection. During his year's stay in Rome (1649-50) he painted the magnificent portraits Juan de Pareja and Pope Innocent X. At this time he was also admitted into Rome's Academy of Saint Luke. The elegant Venus at Her Toilette probably dates from this time also. The key works of the painter's last two decades are Fable of Arachne, an image of sophisticated mythological symbolism, and his masterwork, Las meninas, a stunning group portrait of the royal family and Velázquez himself in the act of painting. Velázquez continued to serve Philip IV as painter, courtier, and faithful friend until the artist's death in Madrid on August 6, 1660.

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Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Fri, 09 May 2008 17:07:48 +0200

(1848 - 1854) The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (also known as the Pre-Raphaelites) was a group of English painters, poets and critics, founded in 1848 by John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt. The group's intention was to reform art by rejecting what they considered to be the mechanistic approach first adopted by the Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo. They believed that the Classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on academic teaching of art. Hence the name "Pre-Raphaelite". In particular they objected to the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the founder of the English Royal Academy of Arts. They called him "Sir Sloshua", believing that his broad technique was a sloppy and formulaic form of academic Mannerism. In contrast they wanted to return to the abundant detail, intense colours, and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian and Flemish art. The Pre-Raphaelites have been considered the first avant-garde movement in art, though they have also been denied that status, because they continued to accept both the concepts of history painting and of mimesis, or imitation of nature, as central to the purpose of art. However, the Pre-Raphaelites undoubtedly defined themselves as a reform movement, created a distinct name for their form of art, and published a periodical, The Germ, to promote their ideas. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was started in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, as a reaction against what they saw as the stale, formula-driven art produced by the Royal Academy at the time. They aimed to go back to a more genuine art, exemplified as they saw it by the work of the Nazarenes, and rooted in realism and truth to nature. The Prc-Raphaelites adopted a high moral stance that embraced a sometimes unwieldy combination of symbolism and realism. They painted only serious - usually religious or romantic - subjects, and their style was clear and sharply focused. it entailed a unique insistence on painting everything from direct observation. The movement influenced the work of many later British artists well into the twentieth century. The movement was influential on the Arts and Crafts Movement, Symbolism, and the Classicists.

Mannerism

Fri, 09 May 2008 17:05:13 +0200

(1520 - 1600) Mannerism was an art style that focused on the human form, depicted in intricate poses and in exaggerated, not always realistic settings. The term Mannerism was derived from the Italian word maniera, translated as “style.” It developed in Florence and Rome between 1520 and 1600, as a style that rejected the balance of the Renaissance period in favor of a more emotional and distorted point of view. This art style reflected the tension in Europe at the time of its popularity. The movement eventually gained favor in northern Italy and most of central and northern Europe. Paintings contained artificial color and unrealistic spatial proportions. Figures were often elongated and exaggerated, positioned in imaginative and complex poses. Works of the movement are often unsettling and strange, probably a result of the time period’s upheaval from the Reformation, the plague, and the sack of Rome. In 1600, Mannerists were accused of disrupting the unity of Renaissance classicism. However, in retrospect, the Mannerist movement supplied the link between Renaissance perfection and the emotional Baroque art that later developed in the 17th century.

Art Nouveau

Fri, 09 May 2008 12:41:31 +0200

Art Nouveau (1890-1914), decorative-art movement centered in Western Europe. It began in the 1880s as a reaction against the historical emphasis of mid-19th-century art, but did not survive World War I. Art nouveau originated in London and was variously called Jugendstil in Germany, Sezessionstil in Austria, and Modernismo in Spain. In general it was most successfully practiced in the decorative arts: furniture, jewelry, and book design and illustration. The style was richly ornamental and asymmetrical, characterized by a whiplash linearity reminiscent of twining plant tendrils. Its exponents chose themes fraught with symbolism, frequently of an erotic nature. They imbued their designs with dreamlike and exotic forms. The movement took its name from La Maison de l'Art Nouveau in Paris, a shop keen to promote modern ideas in art. It was influenced by the Symbolists most obviously in their shared preference for exotic detail, as well as by Celtic and Japanese art. Art Nouveau flourished in Britain with its progressive Arts and Crafts movement, but was highly successful all around the world. Art Nouveau was in many ways a response to the Industrial Revolution. Some artists welcomed technological progress and embraced the aesthetic possibilities of new materials such as cast iron. Others deplored the shoddiness of mass-produced machine-made goods and aimed to elevate the decorative arts to the level of fine art by applying the highest standards of craftsmanship and design to everyday objects. Art Nouveau designers also believed that all the arts should work in harmony to create a "total work of art," or Gesamtkunstwerk: buildings, furniture, textiles, clothes, and jewelry all conformed to the principles of Art Nouveau.

Georges Lemmen

Fri, 09 May 2008 12:25:59 +0200

(1865-1916) Georges Lemmen was born on 25 November 1865 in Schaarbeek, near Brussels (Belgium). As the son of an architect, he was easily encouraged to study the artistic environment. Georges started studying at the school of drawing at Sint Joost-ten-Noode, but pretty soon dropped out. At about age 20, Georges Lemmen started painting. He soon exhibited at several different galleries in Brussels and in Ghent. In 1888 Lemmen joined the art group 'Les Vingt' (The Twenty). He met in this group Théo van Rysselberghe, which led him to move towards Neo-Impressionism. Inspired by Georges Seurat, Georges Lemmen then started to paint in a pointillist style. Lemmen continued painting in a pointillist way till 1895, 4 years after the death of Seurat. After 1895, Lemmen abandoned Pointillism to become an important figure in the development of Belgian Art Nouveau. He created numerous book illustrations, posters, ceramics, carpets, drawings, pastels and gouaches in this particular style. Georges Lemmen died in 1916 in Ukkel.

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Post-Impressionism

Fri, 09 May 2008 12:14:02 +0200

(1885 - 1905) Post-Impressionism in Western painting, movement in France that represented both an extension of Impressionism and a rejection of that style's inherent limitations. The term Post-Impressionism was coined by the English art critic Roger Fry for the work of such late 19th-century painters as Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others. All of these painters except van Gogh were French, and most of them began as Impressionists; each of them abandoned the style, however, to form his own highly personal art. Impressionism was based, in its strictest sense, on the objective recording of nature in terms of the fugitive effects of colour and light. The Post-Impressionists rejected this limited aim in favour of more ambitious expression, admitting their debt, however, to the pure, brilliant colours of Impressionism, its freedom from traditional subject matter, and its technique of defining form with short brushstrokes of broken colour. The work of these painters formed a basis for several contemporary trends and for early 20th-century modernism. The Post-Impressionists often exhibited together, but, unlike the Impressionists, who began as a close-knit, convivial group, they painted mainly alone. Cézanne painted in isolation at Aix-en-Provence in southern France; his solitude was matched by that of Paul Gauguin, who in 1891 took up residence in Tahiti, and of van Gogh, who painted in the countryside at Arles. Both Gauguin and van Gogh rejected the indifferent objectivity of Impressionism in favour of a more personal, spiritual expression. After exhibiting with the Impressionists in 1886, Gauguin renounced “the abominable error of naturalism.” With the young painter Émile Bernard, Gauguin sought a simpler truth and purer aesthetic in art; turning away from the sophisticated, urban art world of Paris, he instead looked for inspiration in rural communities with more traditional values. Copying the pure, flat colour, heavy outline, and decorative quality of medieval stained glass and manuscript illumination, the two artists explored the expressive potential of pure colour and line, Gauguin especially using exotic and sensuous colour harmonies to create poetic images of the Tahitians among whom he would eventually live. Arriving in Paris in 1886, the Dutch painter van Gogh quickly adapted Impressionist techniques and colour to express his acutely felt emotions. He transformed the contrasting short brushstrokes of Impressionism into curving, vibrant lines of colour, exaggerated even beyond Impressionist brilliance, that convey his emotionally charged and ecstatic responses to the natural landscape. In this movement appeared the Pointillism, a technique associated with Paul Signac and Georges Seurat, this partition of the movement called themselves the Neo-Impressionists because of their impressionist revival. In general, Post-Impressionism led away from a naturalistic approach and toward the two major movements of early 20th-century art that superseded it: Cubism and Fauvism, which sought to evoke emotion through colour and line.

Alphonse Maria Mucha

Fri, 09 May 2008 10:49:24 +0200

Alphonse Maria Mucha (July 24, 1860 – July 14, 1939) was a Czech Art Nouveau painter and decorative artist. Alphonse Maria Mucha was born in the town of Ivančice, Moravia. His singing abilities allowed him to continue his education through high school in the Moravian capital of Brno, even though drawing had been his first love since childhood. He worked at decorative painting jobs in Moravia, mostly painting theatrical scenery, then in 1879 moved to Vienna to work for a leading Viennese theatrical design company, while informally furthering his artistic education. When a fire destroyed his employer's business in 1881 he returned to Moravia, doing freelance decorative and portrait painting. Count Karl Khuen of Mikulov hired Mucha to decorate Hrušovany Emmahof Castle with murals, and was impressed enough that he agreed to sponsor Mucha's formal training at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. Mucha moved to Paris in 1887, and continued his studies at Académie Julian and Academie Colarossi while also producing magazine and advertising illustrations. Around Christmas 1894, Mucha happened to drop into a print shop where there was a sudden and unexpected demand for a new poster to advertise a play starring Sarah Bernhardt, the most famous actress in Paris, at the Theatre de la Renaissance. Mucha volunteered to produce a lithographed poster within two weeks, and on January 1, 1895, the advertisement for Gismonda appeared on the streets of the city. It was an overnight sensation and announced the new artistic style and its creator to the citizens of Paris. Bernhardt was very satisfied with his work and commissioned further work. Mucha produced a flurry of paintings, posters, advertisements, and book illustrations, as well as designs for jewellery, carpets, wallpaper, and theatre sets in what came to be known as the Art Nouveau style. Mucha's works frequently featured beautiful healthy young women in flowing vaguely Neoclassical looking robes, often surrounded by lush flowers which sometimes formed haloes behind the women's heads. In contrast with contemporary poster makers he used paler colors. The 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris diffused the "Mucha style" internationally. He decorated the Bosnia-Herzegovina Pavillion and collaborated in the Austrian one. His art nouveau style was often imitated. However, this was a style that Mucha attempted to distance himself from throughout his life; he insisted always that, rather than adhering to any fashionable stylistic form, his paintings came purely from within and Czech art. He declared that art existed only to communicate a spiritual message, and nothing more; hence his frustration at the fame he gained through commercial art, when he wanted always to concentrate on more lofty projects that would ennoble art and his birthplace. Mucha married Maruška (Marie/Maria) Chytilová on June 10, 1906, in Prague. The couple visited the U.S. from 1906 to 1910, when their daughter, Jaroslava, was born in New York City. There he expected to earn money to fund his nationalistic projects to demonstrate Czechs that he had not "sold out". He was supported by millionaire Charles R. Crane, who applied his fortune to promote revolutions, and after meeting Thomas Masaryk, Slavic nationalism. The family then returned to the Czech lands and settled in Prague, where he decorated the Theater of Fine Arts, contributed the murals in the Mayor's Office at the Municipal House, and other landmarks of the city. When Czechoslovakia won its independence after World War I, Mucha designed the new postage stamps, banknotes, and other government documents for the new state. He spent many years working on what he considered his masterpiece, The Slav Epic (Slovanská epopej), a series of twenty huge paintings depicting the history of the Czech and the Slavic peoples in general, bestowed to the city of Prague in 1928. He had dreamt of completing a series such as this, a celebration of Slavic history, since he was young. Since 1963 the series has been on display in the castle at Moravsky. The rising tide of fascism in the late 1930s led to Mucha's works, as well as his Slavic nationalism, being denounced in the press as 'reactionary'. When German troops marched into Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939, Mucha was among the first people to be arrested by the Gestapo. During the course of the interrogation the aging artist fell ill with pneumonia. Though eventually released, he never recovered from the strain of this event, or seeing his home invaded and overcome. He died in Prague on July 14 of a lung infection, and was interred there in the Vyšehrad cemetery.

Extracted from Wikipedia

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Robert Lewis Reid

Thu, 08 May 2008 20:09:58 +0200

Robert Lewis Reid (July 29, 1862 – December 2, 1929) was an American impressionist painter and muralist. Reid was born in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he was also later an instructor. In 1884 he moved to New York City, studying at the Art Students League, and in 1885 he went to Paris to study at the Académie Julian. Upon returning to New York in 1889, he worked as a portraitist and later became an instructor at the Art Students League and Cooper Union. Much of his work centered on the depiction of young women set among flowers. His work tended to be very decorative. In 1897, Reid was a member of the Ten American Painters, who seceded from the Society of American Artists. Around the turn of the century, Reid worked on several mural projects and when he returned to paintings, around 1905, his work was more naturalistic, even though his palette trended toward soft pastels. He died in Clifton Springs, New York.

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Tonalism

Thu, 08 May 2008 20:09:13 +0200

Tonalism (about 1880 to 1915), a distinctive style of low-toned atmospheric landscape painting, developed a sizable following among American artists in the 1880s. This first generation of tonalist artists, most born after 1845, and many foreign trained in Paris and Munich, broke with the prevailing school of Hudson River artists and their large detailed panoramic views of the American scenes. Many streams of influences fed into the growing taste for a more intimate, poetic, and expressive style of landscape art, relying on soft-edged broadly painted tonalities to communicate emotion. Initially influenced by French Barbizon painting by way of American exponents George Inness (1825-1894), William Morris Hunt (1824-1879), American tonalist painters tended to use a neutral palette of predominantly cool colors: green, blue, mauve, violet, and a delicate range of intervening grays, carefully modulated to produce a dominant tone. Preferred subjects were scenes of dawn or dusk, rising mist and moonlight in which the enveloping atmosphere is evocative of poetic and meditative states. Tonalism, was eclipsed by the popularity of Impressionism and European modernism.

Impressionism

Thu, 08 May 2008 20:09:13 +0200

(1865 - 1885) The history of modern art begins with Impressionism, a movement founded in Paris as an opposition to the rigid traditions favored by institutions such as the Academie des Beaux-Arts. In 1863, Edouard Manet exhibited his painting "Dejeuner sur l’herbe" at the Salon des Refuses. The painting caused commotion, thus founding the Impressionist movement. Although Manet is the proclaimed leader and founder of the group, he was not present at the first group exhibition or any of the other eight collective Impressionist shows. The movement gained more attention in April of 1874 when a group of artists called Societe Anonyme des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs began exhibiting outside of the official Salon. The same year, the term Impressionism was coined by criticizing journalist Louis Leroy, who worked for the magazine, Le Charivari. The Impressionist style of painting emphasized loose imagery rather than finely delineated pictures. The artists of the movement worked mostly outdoors and strived to capture the variations of light at differing times throughout the day. Their color palettes were colorful and they rarely used blacks or grays. Subject matter was most often landscape or scenes from daily life. Impressionists were interested in the use of color, tone, and texture in order to objectively record nature. They emphasized sunlight, shadows, and direct and reflected light. In order to produce vibrant colors, they applied short brush strokes of contrasting colors to the canvas, rather than mixing hues on a palette. Many critics found Impressionist work seemingly incomplete. Post-Impressionism emerged in the 1880’s, which adopted Impressionism’s use of contrasting colors but found other aspects of the movement to be too restricting.

Ernest Lawson

Thu, 08 May 2008 19:50:22 +0200

Ernest Lawson (March 22, 1873 – December 18, 1939) was a Canadian-American painter. Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1873. Ernest Lawson began to paint at the age of 16 when his family moved to Kansas City. In 1891, Lawson studied at the Arts Students’ League of New York with John N. Twatchman and J. Alden Weir. Two years later, he was in Paris taking courses at the Julian Academy. At the time, he shared a small apartment with the writer Somerset Maughan (who would later create a character by the name of Frederick Lawson who was an artist). He spent his summers at Martigues in the south of France, but also worked at Moret-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau. In 1908, he was one of the exhibitors at the exhibition of the Group of Eight, a group of American artists. Ernest Lawson died in Miami, Florida, United States in 1939.

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