1863-1935 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.  Related Paintings of Paul Signac :. | the gas tanks at clichy | milliners | Big canal | the jun ction at bois colombes | The Papal Palace, Avignon |
Related Artists:
SIRANI, Elisabetta
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1638-1665 Italian painter. She was the daughter of Giovanni Andrea Sirani (1610-70), who had been Guido Reni's principal assistant. Encouraged by Carlo Malvasia, her mentor and eventual biographer, she was painting professionally by the age of 17. Her prolific talent, as well as her reputed beauty and modesty, soon brought her European renown. The details of her training are unclear, but as a woman she would not have had access to an academy and (like many other professional women painters prior to the 20th century) she was probably taught by her father. Her sisters Anna Maria (1645-1715) and Barbara (alive in 1678) were also practising artists and Elisabetta herself is known to have had female students. As women, they could not undertake any formal study of the male nude, and Sirani's weakness in depicting male anatomy is sometimes clearly detectable in her work Sirani's drawings employ a highly individual pen-and-wash method, eschewing outline and employing quick, blunt strokes of barely dilute ink to create striking chiaroscuro effects
Berghe, Christoffel van den
Dutch, approx. 1590-1645
Jan Weissenbruch
painted Johan Hendrik Louis Meijer in 1850 - 1866