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 :. | Sailboat | Bulwark | River's Edge The Seine at Herblay | woman with a parasol | pont neuf |
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JANSSENS, Abraham
Flemish painter (b. 1575, Antwerpen, d. 1632, Antwerpen). Flemish painter. He painted historical, religious and mythological subjects, often on a large scale, derived principally from antique sculpture and the art of Michelangelo and Raphael and, to a lesser degree, from certain contemporaries, including the Dutch late Mannerists and the Bolognese school. He was highly esteemed in Antwerp but suffered, then and subsequently, from the inevitable comparison with his contemporary and formidable rival Rubens
Juan Manuel Blanes
(June 8, 1830 - April 15, 1901) was a noted Uruguayan painter of the Realist school. Blanes was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1830. He was raised by his mother, with whom he relocated to the countryside in his early teens. Blanes took an interest in drawing at this point, and shortly afterwards, was hired as an illustrator for a Montevideo newsdaily, El Defensor de la Independencia Americana. Earning extra income with watercolors, he returned to his mother and, in 1854, established his first atelier. He married Marea Linari, and in 1855, the couple settled in Salto, where he worked as a portrait painter. They relocated to Concepcien del Uruguay (across the Uruguay River, in Argentina) in 1857, and Blanes was commissioned by Argentine President Justo Jose de Urquiza to complete a number of portraits, allegories and landscapes to grace his nearby estancia, the Palacio San Jose. Returning to Montevideo in 1861, the talented painter obtained a scholarship from the Uruguayan government, and with it, traveled with his family to Florence, Italy, where he studied under Antonio Ciseri until 1864. The experience became a valuable calling card for Blanes, who became of Uruguay's most sought-after portraiteurs. The 1871 outbreak of a yellow fever epidemic in Buenos Aires inspired his first renowned work, which he exhibited to acclaim in the recovering city. His 1872 portrait of the Argentine War of Independence hero, General Jose de San Marten (The Review in Rancagua), was also a success in Buenos Aires, and Blanes was invited to Chile to display the historic depiction.
John Gould
1804 - 1881. (Born Sept. 14, 1804, Lyme Regis, Dorsetshire, England. Died Feb. 3, 1881, London) was an English ornithologist. The Gould League in Australia was named after him. His identification of the birds now nicknamed "Darwin's finches" was pivotal in the inception of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, though they are barely mentioned in Charles Darwin's book, On the Origin of Species.Gould was born in Lyme Regis, Dorset, the son of a gardener, and the boy probably had a scanty education. Shortly afterwards his father obtained a position on an estate near Guildford, Surrey, and then in 1818 became foreman in the Royal Gardens of Windsor. The young Gould started training as a gardener, being employed under his father at Windsor from 1818 to 1824, and he was subsequently a gardener at Ripley Castle in Yorkshire. He became an expert in the art of taxidermy and in 1824 he set himself up in business in London as a taxidermist,