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 :. | Fishing Boats | Bay | the harbor at marseilles | The still life having fruit | Forest |
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Antonio Viladomat y Manalt
Spanish, 1678-1755,Spanish Catalan painter. He was the most significant figure in Catalan painting from the end of the 17th century to the first half of the 18th. He trained with P. B. Savall and J. B. Perram?n in Barcelona. The arrival of the Archduke Charles (later Charles VI) of Austria in Barcelona in 1703 as a pretender to the throne during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13), accompanied by such Italian artists as Ferdinando Galli-Bibiena, acquainted Viladomat y Manalt with artistic trends in Italy. He experienced problems with the artists' guild in Barcelona because of his refusal to participate in the traditional work system. Despite this, his workshop-academy became a centre for the training of numerous painters, sculptors and engravers. Viladomat y Manalt was principally a religious painter, and his oil paintings include Christ Appearing to St Ignatius of Loyola (c. 1711-20; Barcelona, Jesuit Convent) and St Augustine and the Holy Family (Madrid, Prado). He also painted such murals as the tempera Angels with the Sudarium (c. 1727; Matare, S Mar?a, Capilla de los Dolores), but most of the others have disappeared. He painted an extensive series of monastic and evangelical works, in which his revival of compositions characteristic of the Spanish Golden Age is apparent. Examples include the Stigmatization of St Francis (c. 1724; Barcelona, Mus. A. Catalunya), part of a cycle of paintings on the life of St Francis commissioned for the cloister of the convent of S Francisco de As?s in Barcelona. His late Baroque style is related to the severe and realistic trend in Spanish painting in the early 17th century. Some interesting profane allegories by the artist are extant, notably the series Four Seasons (c. 1720-30; Barcelona, Mus. A. Catalunya), which consists of landscapes with genre scenes. Several of the still-lifes by Viladomat y Manalt such as the realistic Still-life with Dead Turkey (Barcelona, Mus. A. Catalunya), which has strong contrasts of light, bear an affinity with Neapolitan painting of the last decades of the 17th century.
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.
MASTER of Saint Cecilia
Italian Byzantine Style Painter, active 1300-1320