French (1880-1950) Louis Icart was born in Toulouse, France. He began drawing at an early age. He was particularly interested in fashion, and became famous for his sketches almost immediately. He worked for major design studios at a time when fashion was undergoing a radical change-from the fussiness of the late nineteenth century to the simple, clingy lines of the early twentieth century. He was first son of Jean and Elisabeth Icart and was officially named Louis Justin Laurent Icart. The use of his initials L.I. would be sufficient in this household. Therefore, from the moment of his birth he was dubbed 'Helli'. The Icart family lived modestly in a small brick home on rue Traversi??re-de-la-balance, in the culturally rich Southern French city of Toulouse, which was the home of many prominent writers and artists, the most famous being Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Icart fought in World War I. He relied on his art to stem his anguish, sketching on every available surface. It was not until his move to Paris in 1907 that Icart would concentrate on painting, drawing and the production of countless beautiful etchings, which have served (more than the other mediums) to indelibly preserve his name in twentieth century art history. When he returned from the front he made prints from those drawings. The prints, most of which were aquatints and drypoints, showed great skill. Because they were much in demand, Icart frequently made two editions (one European, the other American) to satisfy his public. These prints are considered rare today, and when they are in mint condition they fetch high prices at auction. Art Deco, a term coined at the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Decoratifs, had taken its grip on the Paris of the 1920s. By the late 1920s Icart, working for both publications and major fashion and design studios, had become very successful, both artistically and financially. His etchings reached their height of brilliance in this era of Art Deco, and Icart had become the symbol of the epoch. Yet, although Icart has created for us a picture of Paris and New York life in the 1920s and 1930s, he worked in his own style, derived principally from the study of eighteenth-century French masters such as Jean Antoine Watteau, François Boucher and Jean Honor?? Fragonard. In Icart's drawings, one sees the Impressionists Degas and Monet and, in his rare watercolors, the Symbolists Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau. In fact, Icart lived outside the fashionable artistic movements of the time and was not completely sympathetic to contemporary art. Nonetheless, his Parisian scenes are a documentation of the life he saw around him and they are nearly as popular today as when they were first produced. In 1914 Icart had met a magical, effervescent eighteen-year-old blonde named Fanny Volmers, at the time an employee of the fashion house Paquin. She would eventually become his wife and a source of artistic inspiration for the rest of his life.   Related Paintings of Louis Lcart :. | Overture | Combustion | Rainbow Restaurant | Augury | Four Seasons Autumn |
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Mattheus Ignatius van Bree
was a Belgian painter, sculptor and architect. He was born at Antwerp in 1773, was instructed by Regemorter; he afterwards went to Paris, and after having obtained by a 'Cato in Utica' the second prize for Rome, he went to that city in 1797e returning to his native country in 1804.[1] He painted numerous historical pictures, some of which are of large dimensions, and obtained a high reputation in Flanders. His conceptions are frequently poetical, and his compositions graceful, delineated with a light, free, and spirited pencil ; but his colouring is rather too florid in some instances. He was first professor at the Academy of Fine Arts at Antwerp, and in 1827 its director. Member of several other scientific institutions like the academies of Amsterdam, Rome, Munich and New York. Among his most important works are 'The Patriotism of the Burgomaster Van der Werft,' in the Town-Hall at Leyden, and 'The Death of Rubens,' in the Museum at Antwerp. He brought forward some of the most eminent of the later Flemish painters, among whom are Wappers, De Keyser, F. de Braekeleer, and others of whom their country is justly proud. Van Bree died at Antwerp in 1839.
Nicolas-Andre Monsiau
(1754 -- 31 May 1837) was a French history painter and a refined draughtsman who turned to book illustration to supplement his income when the French Revolution disrupted patronage. His cool Poussiniste drawing style and coloring marked his conservative art in the age of Neoclassicism. His training at the school of the Academie royale de peinture et de sculpture, Paris, was under the direction of Jean-François-Pierre Peyron. An early patron, the marquis de Corberon, paid for a sojourn at Rome, where he studied at the French Academy in Rome from 1776. On his return to Paris, he was unable to exhibit in the annual Paris salons, which were closed to all but those who had been received by the Academie or were members, under the Ancien Regime. Instead he found an outlet in the smaller Salon de la correspondance, where in 1782 he showed a tenebrist Piquant effect of the light of a lamp. Two years later he was received at the Academie with a historical subject, Alexander taming Bucephalus and was made a member 3 October 1787, his second attempt, on the strength of The Death of Agis. The influence of Jacques-Louis David, an acquaintance from Monsiau's days in Rome, is most vividly represented by Monsiau's Ulysses, after returning to his palace and slaying Penelope's suitors, orders the women to remove the corpses (1791 Salon), where the action is played out in a shallow frieze-like space defined by a colonnade parallel to the picture plane. In his best-known painting, Zeuxis choosing among the most beautiful girls of Crotona, shown at the Salon of 1791,Monsiau illustrates an anecdote of the painter Zeuxis, recorded in Pliny's Natural History, that exemplifies an essential aspect of the Classical approach to artistic creation, in the artist's refining an ideal Art by selecting from among the lesser beauties of Nature. Monsiau's great public commission was a commemoration of the occasion on 26 January 1802, at which Napoleon delivered an authoritarian constitution to the Cisalpine Republic at a convocation of notables (the consulta) at Lyon. François Gerard had turned down the commission, preferring to continue his series of individual portraits of the Bonapartes. Monsiau received the commission in 1806; the finished painting was exhibited at the Salon of 1808 and was installed at the Tuileries the following year. Monsiau was among the first history painters to depict scenes from modern history that were not commemorations of battles. He showed Moliere reading Tartuffe at the house of Ninon de Lenclos at the Salon of 1802. It was engraved by Jean-Lous Anselin. His painting of Louis XVI giving instructions to the sea captain-explorer La Perouse before his attempted circumnavigation was exhibited at the Salon of 1817 and was purchased for the recently restored Louis XVIII. His portrayal of a sensational episode in which an escaped lion from the Grand Ducal menagerie in Florence had dropped a child it had picked up, without harming it, was exhibited at the Salon of 1801 and is conserved in the Louvre. Among his pupils was the portrait draughtsman Louis Letronne (1790--1842), whose pencil portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven is iconic.
Giovanni Tuccari
Giovanni Tuccari (1667-1743) was an Italian painter during the Baroque period, active in Sicily. Tuccari was born in Messina. He was the son and pupil of Antonio Tuccari, an obscure painter. He excelled as a battle painter. He died of the plague. He was responsible for the frescos in the Church of San Benedetto in Catania. Other examples of his work include four octagonal paintings in the sanctuary of the Church of S. Antonio, at Castiglione di Sicilia, and La Pinacoteca Zelantea gallery in Acireale.