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 Red Buoy | Paul Signac | Riverbank,Petit-Andely (mk09) | Granville | Unknown work |
Related Artists:
Adolfo Muller-Ury
(March 29, 1862 - July 6, 1947) was a Swiss-born American portrait painter and impressionistic painter of roses and still life. He was born Felice Adolfo Meller on March 29, 1862 at Airolo, in the Ticino in Switzerland, into a prominent patrician family whose lineage descended from Alfred the Great, Charlemagne and Doge Pietro Orseolo of Venice, through the von Rechburg family (a lady from which family married a Meller) and by the 18th and 19th centuries included mercenaries, lawyers, hoteliers and businessmen. His father was lawyer Carl Alois Meller (1825 - 1887), Gerichtspräsident (Presiding Judge) of the Cantonal Courts, and his mother Genovefa Lombardi (1836 - 1920), daughter of Felice Lombardi who was Director of the Hospice on the St Gotthard Pass, which he took over from the Capuchin monks who had run this for centuries. Adolfo was their sixth of nineteen children, most of whom survived infancy. The family spoke Airolese mainly, a local dialect of Ticinese Italian, as well as Swiss-German. His family were Roman Catholic.
Arthur Ignatius Keller
American , 1866-1924
William Congreve
(24 January 1670 - 19 January 1729) was an English playwright and poet. Congreve was born in Bardsey, West Yorkshire, England (near Leeds). His parents were William Congreve (1637-1708) and his wife, Mary; a sister was buried in London in 1672. He spent his childhood in Ireland, where his father, a Cavalier, had settled during the reign of Charles II. Congreve was educated at Trinity College in Dublin; there he met Jonathan Swift, who would be his friend for the remainder of his life. Upon graduation, he matriculated in the Middle Temple in London to study law, but felt himself pulled toward literature, drama, and the fashionable life.