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 :. | Entrance to the Port of Honfleur | La Rochelle, the Quartermaster's Tower | Comblat-le-Chateau, Le Pre | Audierne, Return of the Fishing Boats | Railway junction near Bois Colombes |
Related Artists:
James Tissot
French Painter, 1836-1902 French painter, printmaker and enamellist. He grew up in a port, an experience reflected in his later paintings set on board ship. He moved to Paris c. 1856 and became a pupil of Louis Lamothe and Hippolyte Flandrin. He made his Salon d?but in 1859 and continued to exhibit there successfully until he went to London in 1871. His early paintings exemplify Romantic obsessions with the Middle Ages, while works such as the Meeting of Faust and Marguerite (exh. Salon 1861; Paris. Mus. d'Orsay) and Marguerite at the Ramparts (1861; untraced, see Wentworth, 1984, pl. 8) show the influence of the Belgian painter Baron Henri Leys. In the mid-1860s Tissot abandoned these tendencies in favour of contemporary subjects, sometimes with a humorous intent, as in Two Sisters (exh. Salon 1864; Paris, Louvre) and Beating the Retreat in the Tuileries Gardens (exh. Salon 1868; priv. col., see Wentworth, 1984, pl. 45). The painting Young Ladies Looking at Japanese Objects (exh. Salon 1869; priv. col., see Wentworth, 1984, pl. 59) testifies to his interest in things Oriental, and Picnic (exh. Salon 1869; priv. col., see 1984 exh. cat., fig. 27), in which he delved into the period of the Directoire, is perhaps influenced by the Goncourt brothers. Tissot re-created the atmosphere of the 1790s by dressing his characters in historical costume.
eduard hanslick
German music critic, aesthetician and pioneer of musical appreciation. He studied music with Tom??šek and read law at Prague University, writing his earliest essays for the Prague journal Ost und West and for the Wiener Musikzeitung, the Sonntagsblätter and the Wiener Zeitung. From 1849 to 1861 he was a civil servant, chiefly for the ministry of culture, meanwhile writing for the Presse, publishing his important book Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854) and lecturing on music appreciation at Vienna University, becoming full professor in 1870. He was also active as a musical emissary and helped promote the standardization of musical pitch. Among his long-standing friends were Brahms and the philosopher Robert Zimmermann. Though his aesthetic enshrined the classical ideals of orderliness and formal perfection, his interests were limited to the music of his own time.
Jacques Sablet
Jacques Sablet (1749 - 1803) was a Swiss painter. Son of a decorator and gilder from Lausanne, he studied with his father before moving to Paris in 1772; there he worked with Joseph-Marie Vien for three years. When in 1775 Vien was named director of the French Academy in Rome, Sablet accompanied him there. His ambition was to be a history painter, but facing competition from Jacques-Louis David and Pierre Peyron, among others, and lacking solid academic training, he could win no commissions. Instead he turned to portraiture , genre painting, and landscape painting. Most of his genre scenes depicted the city's everyday life and customs of the Campagna. Sablet shared a studio with history painter Hubert Drouais and was friends with Simon Denis. He fled to Florence in 1793 with the rise of anti-French sentiment in the Papal States, but perhaps because of the competition he would face there from Louis Gauffier he soon returned to Paris.