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 House | Erik Satie | The fem hold gingham | Dunkirk | basin of san marco |
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Franz Pforr
German 1788-1812 He received his earliest training from his father, the painter Johann Georg Pforr (1745-98), and his uncle, the art professor and first inspector of the painting gallery in Kassel, Johann Heinrich Tischbein the younger (1742-1808). In 1805 he became a student at the Akademie der Bildenden Kenste in Vienna, which was dominated by the severe Neo-classicism of its director, Heinrich Feger; he was taught by Hubert Maurer (1738-1818), Franz Cauzig (1762-1828) and Johann Martin Fischer. During the war with France in 1805, Pforr volunteered as a guard in the Vienna militia. He suffered a nervous breakdown, brought on by the conflict between his passionate longing for a contemplative life and a desire to see military action. He probably turned to religion to help sustain his mental equilibrium. In 1806 he resumed his academic studies and, believing himself destined to become a battle painter, made numerous drawings of historical battles, for example his still schoolish and baroquely composed Wallenstein in the Battle of L?tzen (1806; Frankfurt am Main, Stedel. Kstinst. & St?dt. Gal.). However, it was not until 1807, with Drawing with Twelve Travel Sketches (Frankfurt am Main, Stadt- & Ubib.), that he first began to overcome his beginner style and to develop his own. This resulted in reduced detail, simplified continuous contours, a structuring by means of planar rather than illusionistic criteria, a new clarity of vision and a chastened balance between nature and artistic conception.
Balthasar Anton Dunker
German, 1746-1807
Giambattista Tiepolo
1696-1770 Italian painter, master of Venetian school. Tiepolo was famous in his own lifetime as a superb painter in fresco and a brilliant draftsman. A highly inventive artist, he could create spectacular effects in difficult sites, from the narrow gallery at the patriarchal palace at Udine in the mid-1720s to the vast staircase ceiling in the Residenz at Werzburg in the early 1750s. Contemporaries recognized his spirited, dynamic approach to subject matter and his frankly sensuous manner of painting. Tiepolo is comparable in his restless energy and imaginative power to Peter Paul Rubens, and essentially he worked with a similar baroque language of myth, allegory, and history, which he infused with a sense of freshness and modernity. His approach to religious art is characterized by candor and naturalism, while he was responsive to the different concerns of patrons and viewers at a time when the church was faced with new kinds of devotion and criticism. With the advent of neoclassicism, Tiepolo's art fell from favor: In an age that prized archaeological correctness, rationality, and ideals of improvement, his witty, Veronese-inspired conception of historical or classical subjects seemed frivolous, while his visually seductive qualities were seen as inimical to the serious intellectual aims of the new art. Nevertheless, his drawings and oil sketches continued to appeal to collectors, including Antonio Canova. The son of a Venetian shipping merchant, Tiepolo was apprenticed in 1710 to Gregorio Lazzarini (1655C1730), an artist of international reputation patronized by prominent Venetian families. Before becoming an independent master, he worked in the household of Doge Giovanni Corner; members of the Corner family were to be his most steadfast and liberal patrons. Lazzarini encouraged his pupils to study Venetian sixteenth-century art, and Tiepolo made drawings of some famous works for publication in Domenico Lovisa's Gran Teatro di Venezia of 1717. His early involvement with the thriving Venetian engraving and publishing world was renewed in 1724 when he made drawings of antique sculpture as illustrations for Scipione Maffei's Verona Illustrata, an experience that gave Tiepolo an imaginative empathy with fragmentary antique remains, which recur in his drawings, etchings, and paintings. As well as studying the art of the past, Tiepolo looked to the tenebrism of Federico Bencovich (1677C1753) and the realism and monumentality of Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (1682C1754). In 1719 Tiepolo married Cecilia Guardi, with whom he was to have nine children. By then, the artist was working for a network of mercantile and noble patrons on religious and secular subjects.