1868-1940
French
Edouard Vuillard Galleries
Jean-Edouard Vuillard, the son of a retired captain, spent his youth at Cuiseaux (Saone-et-Loire); in 1878 his family moved to Paris in modest circumstances. After his father\'s death, in 1884, Vuillard received a scholarship to continue his education. In the Lycee Condorcet Vuillard met Ker Xavier Roussel (also a future painter and Vuillard\'s future brother in law), Maurice Denis, musician Pierre Hermant, writer Pierre Veber and Lugne-Poe. On Roussel\'s advice he refused a military career and entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he met Pierre Bonnard.
In 1885, Vuillard left the Lycee Condorcet and joined his closest friend Roussel at the studio of painter Diogene Maillart. There, Roussel and Vuillard received the rudiments of artistic training. Related Paintings of Edouard Vuillard :. | In front of the fireplace vuillard mother | Detail of In a Room | Le Dejeuner a Villeneuve-sur-Yonne | Thread | KaiPuFu Mrs | Related Artists:
Thomas FaedScottish Painter,
1826-1900
was a Scottish painter born in Gatehouse of Fleet, Kirkcudbrightshire, and was the brother of John Faed. He received his art education in the school of design, Edinburgh and was elected an associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1849. He came to London three years later, was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1861, and academician in 1864, and retired in 1893. He had much success as a painter of domestic genre, and had considerable executive capacity. Three of his pictures, The Silken Gown, Faults on Both Sides, and The Highland Mother are in the Tate Gallery and a further two, Highland Mary and The Reaper hang in the Aberdeen Art Gallery. The Last of the Clan, completed in 1865.
Paul Signac1863-1935
French
Paul Signac Galleries
Paul Victor Jules Signac was born in Paris on November 11, 1863. He followed a course of training in architecture before deciding at the age of 18 to pursue a career as a painter. He sailed around the coasts of Europe, painting the landscapes he encountered. He also painted scenes of cities in France in his later years.
In 1884 he met Claude Monet and Georges Seurat. He was struck by the systematic working methods of Seurat and by his theory of colours and became Seurat's faithful supporter. Under his influence he abandoned the short brushstrokes of impressionism to experiment with scientifically juxtaposed small dots of pure colour, intended to combine and blend not on the canvas but in the viewer's eye, the defining feature of pointillism.
Many of Signac's paintings are of the French coast. He left the capital each summer, to stay in the south of France in the village of Collioure or at St. Tropez, where he bought a house and invited his friends. In March 1889, he visited Vincent van Gogh at Arles. The next year he made a short trip to Italy, seeing Genoa, Florence, and Naples.
The Port of Saint-Tropez, oil on canvas, 1901Signac loved sailing and began to travel in 1892, sailing a small boat to almost all the ports of France, to Holland, and around the Mediterranean as far as Constantinople, basing his boat at St. Tropez, which he "discovered". From his various ports of call, Signac brought back vibrant, colourful watercolors, sketched rapidly from nature. From these sketches, he painted large studio canvases that are carefully worked out in small, mosaic-like squares of color, quite different from the tiny, variegated dots previously used by Seurat.
Signac himself experimented with various media. As well as oil paintings and watercolours he made etchings, lithographs, and many pen-and-ink sketches composed of small, laborious dots. The neo-impressionists influenced the next generation: Signac inspired Henri Matisse and Andr?? Derain in particular, thus playing a decisive role in the evolution of Fauvism.
As president of the Societe des Artistes Ind??pendants from 1908 until his death, Signac encouraged younger artists (he was the first to buy a painting by Matisse) by exhibiting the controversial works of the Fauves and the Cubists.
Arshile GorkyArmenian
1904-1948
Arshile Gorky Gallery
Gorky was born in the village of Khorkom near Van, Turkey. It is not known exactly when he was born: it was sometime between 1902 and 1905. (In later years Gorky was vague about even the date of his birth, changing it from year to year.) In 1910 his father emigrated to America to avoid the draft, leaving his family behind in the town of Van. Gorky fled Van in 1915 during the Armenian Genocide and escaped with his mother and his three sisters into Russian-controlled territory. In the aftermath of the genocide, Gorky's mother died of starvation in Yerevan in 1919. Gorky was reunited with his father when he arrived in America in 1920, aged 16, but they never grew close. At age 31, Gorky married. He changed his name to Arshile Gorky, in the process reinventing his identity (he even told people he was a relative of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky).
In 1922, Gorky enrolled in the New School of Design in Boston, eventually becoming a part-time instructor. During the early 1920s he was influenced by impressionism, although later in the decade he produced works that were more postimpressionist. During this time he was living in New York and was influenced by Paul Cezanne. In 1927, Gorky met Ethel Kremer Schwabacher and developed a life lasting friendship. Schwabacher was his first biographer.