1824-1898 French Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Art Galleries Born in Lyons on Dec. 14, 1824, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes belonged to the generation of Gustave Courbet and ??douard Manet, and he was fully aware of their revolutionary achievements. Nevertheless, he was drawn to a more traditional and conservative style. From his first involvement with art, which began after a trip to Italy and which interrupted his intention to follow the engineering profession that his father practiced, Puvis pursued his career within the scope of academic classicism and the Salon. Even in this chosen arena, however, he was rejected, particularly during the 1850s. But he gradually won acceptance. By the 1880s he was an established figure in the Salons, and by the 1890s he was their acknowledged master. In both personal and artistic ways Puvis career was closely linked with the avant-grade. In the years of his growing public recognition, when he began to serve on Salon juries, he was consistently sympathetic to the work of younger, more radical artists. Later, as president of the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts - the new Salon, as it was called - he was able to exert even more of a liberalizing influence on the important annual exhibitions. Puvis sympathy to new and radical artistic directions was reflected in his own painting. Superficially he was a classicist, but his personal interpretation of that style was unconventional. His subject matter - religious themes, allegories, mythologies, and historical events - was clearly in keeping with the academic tradition. But his style eclipsed his outdated subjects: he characteristically worked with broad, simple compositions, and he resisted the dry photographic realism which had begun to typify academic painting about the end of the century. In addition, the space and figures in his paintings inclined toward flatness, calling attention to the surface on which the images were depicted. These qualities gave his work a modern, abstract look and distinguished it from the sterile tradition to which it might otherwise have been linked. Along with their modern, formal properties, Puvis paintings exhibited a serene and poetic range of feeling. His figures frequently seem to be wrapped in an aura of ritualistic mystery, as though they belong in a private world of dreams or visions. Yet these feelings invariably seem fresh and sincere. This combination of form and feeling deeply appealed to certain avant-garde artists of the 1880s and 1890s. Although Puvis claimed he was neither radical nor revolutionary, he was admired by the symbolist poets, writers, and painters - including Paul Gauguin and Maurice Denis - and he influenced the neoimpressionist painter Georges Seurat. During his mature career Puvis executed many mural paintings. In Paris he did the Life of St. Genevieve (1874-1878) in the Panth??on and Science, Art, and Letters (1880s) in the Sorbonne. In Lyons he executed the Sacred Grove, the Antique Vision, and Christian Inspiration (1880s) in the Mus??e des Beaux-Arts. He painted Pastoral Poetry (1895-1898) in the Boston Public Library. These commissions reflect the high esteem with which Puvis was regarded during his own lifetime. Among his most celebrated oil paintings are Hope (1872) and the Poor Fisherman (1881). He died in Paris on Oct. 10, 1898.  Related Paintings of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes :. | Mad Woman at the Edge of the Sea | The Poor Fisherman | Poor fisherman | The Poor Fisherman | Young Girls on the Edge of the Sea |
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COURTOIS, Jacques
French Baroque Era Painter, 1621-1676 was a French painter. He was born at Saint-Hippolyte, near Besançon. His father was a painter, and with him Jacques remained studying up to the age of fifteen. Towards 1637 he went to Italy, was received at Milan by a Burgundian gentleman, and entered, and for three years remained in the French military service. The sight of some battle-pictures revived his taste for fine art. He went to Bologna, and studied under the friendly tutelage of Guido Reni; thence he proceeded to Rome, where he painted, in the Cistercian monastery, the "Miracle of the Loaves." Here he took a house and after a while entered upon his own characteristic style of art, that of battle-painting, in which he has been accounted to excel all other old masters; his merits were cordially recognized by the celebrated Cerquozzi, named Michelangelo delle Battaglie. He soon rose from penury to ease, and married a painter's daughter, Maria Vagini; she died after seven years of wedded life. Prince Matthias of Tuscany employed Courtois on some striking works in his villa, Lappeggio, representing with much historical accuracy the princes military exploits. In Venice also the artist executed for the senator Sagredo some remarkable battle-pieces. In Florence he entered the Society of Jesus, taking the habit in Rome in 1655; it was calumniously rumoured that he adopted this course in order to escape punishment for having poisoned his wife. As a Jesuit Brother, Courtois painted many works in churches and monasteries of the society. He lived piously in Rome, and died there of apoplexy on 20 May 1676 (some accounts say 1670 or 1671). His battle-pieces have movement and fire, warm colouring (now too often blackened), and great command of the brush, those of moderate dimensions are the more esteemed. They are slight in execution, and tell out best from a distance.
Paul-Albert Besnard
(2 June 1849 --4 December 1934) was a French painter and printmaker. He was born in Paris and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, studied with Jean Bremond and was influenced by Alexandre Cabanel. He won the Prix de Rome in 1874 with the painting Death of Timophanes Until about 1880 he followed the academic tradition, but then broke away completely, and devoted himself to the study of colour and light as conceived by the Impressionists. The realism of this group never appealed to his bold imagination, but he applied their technical method to ideological and decorative works on a large scale, such as his frescoes at the Sorbonne, the Ecole de Pharmacie, the ceiling of the Comedie-Française (main theatre in Paris), the Salle des Sciences at the Hôtel de Ville, the mairie of the Ier arrondissement, and the chapel of Berck hospital, for which he painted twelve Stations of the Cross in an entirely modern spirit. A great virtuoso, he achieved brilliant successes alike in watercolour, pastel, oil and etching, both in portraiture, in landscape and in decoration. His close analysis of light can be studied in his picture La femme qui se chauffe at the Luxembourg in Paris, one of a large group of nude studies of which a later example is Une Nymphe au bord de la mer; and in the work produced during and after a visit to India in 1911. A large panel, Peace by Arbitration, was completed seven days before the outbreak of war in 1914.
Mura, Francesco de
Italian, 1696-1782 Italian painter. He was educated initially in the workshop of Domenico Viola at Naples, but in 1708 he entered the school of Francesco Solimena, whose favourite pupil and most trusted collaborator he became. At first he followed closely Solimena's monumental Baroque manner, as in the frescoes (1715) in S Nicola alla Carit? in Naples, but later developed a more controlled and refined style of rhythmical lines, light and airy colours and delicate psychological overtones. He employed this new style in his ten canvases of the Virtues and his vast Adoration of the Magi (all 1728; Naples, S Maria Donnaromita) and, above all, in his frescoes of the Adoration of the Magi in the apsidal dome of the church of the Nunziatella, Naples (1732; in situ). De Mura was also active as a portrait painter; his Portrait of the Artist's Wife