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 :. | Impression | Impression | Bridge | Granville | La Rochelle |
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Giovanni Antonio Fumiani
(1645-1710) was an Italian painter of the Baroque period. Born in Venice in 1645, he trained in Bologna under Domenico degli Ambrogi, a specialist in quadratura, but by 1668 he was back in Venice, where he painted a Virgin and Saints in San Benedetto. He was influenced by Ludovico Carracci and Alessandro Tiarini, and soon also became interested in the work of Paolo Veronese, so that he started to use elaborate architectural settings and brighter colours. He painted a Virgin Appearing to Pius V (1674; Vicenza, S Lorenzo), whose monumentality foreshadows Tiepolo, whereas mosaics in San Marco, created in 1677 from Fumianies cartoons, are closer to the idiosyncratic art of Pietro della Vecchia. He contributed to the decoration of San Rocco (1675, 1676, 1678), where he painted a large canvas of the Charity of St Roch on the ceiling of the nave, In his smaller paintings, however, such as the modelli (Florence, Uffizi) painted for the Ferdinand de Medici, Grand Prince of Tuscany, for whom he worked for a long time, with Niccole Cassana acting as intermediary, Fumiani revealed a lively decorative sense and a taste for animated, sensual subjects that produced works of great quality. His last work is the large lunette depicting Frederick III visiting St Zacharyes Convent in the Company of the Doge (Venice, San Zaccaria). The decoration of San Pantalon with scenes from the Life of St Pantaleon (1680-1704) utilized canvases to cover a large ceiling (25x50 m), an ambitious undertaking, both in its scale and in the unity of the magniloquent images, that parallels Andrea Pozzoes decoration at the church of Sant'Ignazio in Rome. Fumiani was responsible for painting what is claimed to the largest painting on canvas in the world and covers the whole of the ceiling of the church Chiesa di San Pantaleone Martire, known as San Pantalon, in Venice. The painting depicts The Martyrdom and Apotheosis of St Pantalon, which he painted from 1680 until 1704. He putatively died from a fall from a scaffold, although some sources date his death to six years after he stopped work on the canvas
Lockey, Rowland
English Baroque Era Painter, active ca.1593-1616
Peter Birmann
Swiss, 1758-1844,He began his career as a portrait painter in Basle and Pruntrut but in 1775 moved to Berne, where he took up landscape painting. From 1777 to 1781 he worked with Johann Ludwig Aberli and was also a colour-printer with the publisher Abraham Wagner (1734-82). In 1781 he went to Rome, where he remained for ten years working for Louis Ducros and for Giovanni Volpato. While in Rome he painted landscapes in watercolour and drew in bistre, using a soft brush and making little use of the pen. He also sketched in the Alban Hills, being particularly attracted to the waterfalls at Tivoli and Terni. He became a member of Goethe's circle in Rome, and, under the influence of its members, he adopted Claude as his model. His watercolours and bistre drawings, enlivened by Greco-Roman or contemporary staffage, became more tranquil, more classical in style and increasingly strengthened with pen outlines. In 1792 he returned to Basle to teach. He soon became an art dealer, opened his own shop and set up his own publishing house, and in 1802 he printed his best-known work, a series of aquatints of Voyage pittoresque de Basle ? Bienne par les vallons de Mottiers-Grandval. From 1802 to 1804 he showed at the annual exhibitions of the K?nstlergesellschaft in Zurich, and in 1804 and 1810 in Berne he exhibited work in oils, a medium that was becoming increasingly important for him. In 1805 he was commissioned by the publishing house of Artaria & Co. in Vienna to sketch the scenery in the region of the north Italian lakes. For the next 30 years he continued to paint and draw, but after 1834 he tended to repeat the locales and compositions of his earlier landscapes.