French Symbolist Painter, 1840-1916 Bertrand-Jean Redon, better known as Odilon Redon (April 20, 1840 ?C July 6, 1916) was a Symbolist painter and printmaker, born in Bordeaux, Aquitaine, France. Odilon was a nickname derived from his mother, Odile. Redon started drawing as a young child, and at the age of 10 he was awarded a drawing prize at school. At age 15, he began formal study in drawing but on the insistence of his father he switched to architecture. His failure to pass the entrance exams at Paris?? Ecole des Beaux-Arts ended any plans for a career as an architect, although he would later study there under Jean-L??on Gerôme. Back home in his native Bordeaux, he took up sculpture, and Rodolphe Bresdin instructed him in etching and lithography. However, his artistic career was interrupted in 1870 when he joined the army to serve in the Franco-Prussian War. At the end of the war, he moved to Paris, working almost exclusively in charcoal and lithography. It would not be until 1878 that his work gained any recognition with Guardian Spirit of the Waters, and he published his first album of lithographs, titled Dans le R??ve, in 1879. Still, Redon remained relatively unknown until the appearance in 1884 of a cult novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans titled, À rebours (Against Nature). The story featured a decadent aristocrat who collected Redon's drawings. In the 1890s, he began to use pastel and oils, which dominated his works for the rest of his life. In 1899, he exhibited with the Nabis at Durand-Ruel's. In 1903 he was awarded the Legion of Honor. His popularity increased when a catalogue of etchings and lithographs was published by Andr?? Mellerio in 1913 and that same year, he was given the largest single representation at the New York Armory Show. In 1923 Mellerio published: Odilon Redon: Peintre Dessinateur et Graveur. An archive of Mellerio's papers is held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2005 the Museum of Modern Art launched an exhibition entitled "Beyond The Visible", a comprehensive overview of Redon's work showcasing more than 100 paintings, drawings, prints and books from The Ian Woodner Family Collection. The exhibition ran from October 30, 2005 to January 23, 2006.   Related Paintings of Odilon Redon :. | Reflexion | Vase with Flowers | Crucifixion | Phaethon | the cyclops |
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Francis Grant
Scottish Painter, 1803-1878 Scottish portrait painter. He was self-taught in painting, for which he abandoned a career in law. He began as a painter of hunting scenes (The Melton Hunt and The Cottesmore Hunt) but gained success as a fashionable portrait painter. Among his sitters were Scott, Macaulay, Disraeli, Palmerston, and Landseer. Sir Francis was president (1866 C 78) of the Royal Academy.
Edouard Castres
Swiss 1838 - 1902 Swiss painter. His father was a clock engraver, and he initially trained as an enamellist. He took drawing lessons from Barthelemy Menn and attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1859. He soon decided to concentrate on oil painting. He was assistant to the genre and figure painter Eduardo Zamacois y Zabala (1842-71). In the Franco-Prussian War he joined the Red Cross, moving into Switzerland at the beginning of February 1871 with the army led by Gen. Bourbaki. He painted military scenes from sketches carried out on the battlefield and received consistently good reviews, which also brought financial success. He was commissioned by a Belgian panorama company to record the entry of the French army into Switzerland, which he had witnessed in 1871. He spent the winter of 1876-7 on site at Les Verrieres, painting preparatory studies, and in 1881 he completed the panorama, Gen. Bourbaki's Army Retreating into Switzerland (Lucerne, Panorama). He was aided by nine assistants, recruited from among Menn's pupils, who included Ferdinand Hodler. The work was exhibited in Geneva and was brought to a rotunda in Lucerne in 1889. Among panorama paintings it is a work of a high order: despite the colossal dimensions and the barely comprehensible mass of people depicted, the dominant impression is of individual suffering.
Eugeen Van Mieghem
(1 October 1875-1930) was a Belgian artist born in the port of Antwerp. As a boy Van Mieghem was confronted with the harsh reality of life at the waterfront. Even at primary school he showed a talent for drawing. He was introduced to the work of Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, Camille Pissarro, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and others at an exhibition organised by Flemish painter and architect Henry van de Velde at the Antwerp Academy around 1892. He attended the Antwerp Academy but was sent from school because his conservative teachers disliked his subject matter and his free, spontaneous way with it. He threw his lot in with progressive political and cultural movements, and joined an anarchist group. By the early 1900s was recognized as one of the most promising young artists of the Antwerp school. He would never renounce his idealism. He became the artist of the typical harbour folk: sack porters, sack makers, emigrants, dockers, bargees, and tramps. Van Mieghem had his first taste of real success at La Libre Esthetique in Brussels, where his pastels and drawings hung alongside works by French impressionists such as Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Camille Pissarro, Jean Renoir and Edouard Vuillard.