(October 14, 1824 - June 29, 1886) was a French painter of the generation preceding the Impressionists. Monticelli was born in Marseille in humble circumstances. He attended the École Municipale de Dessin in Marseille from 1842 to 1846, and continued his artistic training in Paris, where he studied under Paul Delaroche at the École des Beaux-Arts. In Paris he made copies after the Old Masters in the Louvre, and admired the oil sketches of Eugene Delacroix. In 1855 he met Narcisse Diaz, a member of the Barbizon school, and the two often painted together in the Fontainebleau Forest. Monticelli frequently adopted Diaz's practice of introducing nudes or elegantly costumed figures into his landscapes. He developed a highly individual Romantic style of painting, in which richly colored, dappled, textured and glazed surfaces produce a scintillating effect. He painted courtly subjects inspired by Antoine Watteau; he also painted still lives, portraits, and Orientalist subjects that owe much to the example of Delacroix. After 1870, Monticelli returned to Marseille, where he would live in poverty despite a prolific output, selling his paintings for small sums. An unworldly man, he dedicated himself singlemindedly to his art. The young Paul Cezanne had befriended Monticelli in the 1860s, and the influence of the older painter's work can be seen in Cezanne's work of that decade. Between 1878 and 1884 the two artists often painted landscapes together, once spending a month roaming the Aix countryside. Although Monticelli experimented briefly around 1870 with a treatment of light reflecting the discoveries of the Impressionists, he found the objectivity of this approach uncongenial. Confronted with criticism of his style of painting Monticelli himself remarked, "I paint for thirty years from now". The work of this instinctive painter reached its greatest spontaneity in the decade before his death in 1886.   Related Paintings of Artist Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli :. | Weidelandschaft | Figures at a Fountain | Still Life with Sardines and Sea-Urchins | Gallant Meeting in the Park | Port of Cassis |
Related Artists:
Eugene Fromentin
1820-1876 He was born in La Rochelle. After leaving school he studied for some years under Louis Cabat, the landscape painter. Fromentin was one of the earliest pictorial interpreters of Algeria, having been able, while quite young, to visit the land and people that suggested the subjects of most of his works, and to store his memory as well as his portfolio with the picturesque and characteristic details of North African life. In 1849 he obtained a medal of the second class. In 1852 he paid a second visit to Algeria, accompanying an archaeological mission, and then completed that minute study of the scenery of the country and of the habits of its people which enabled him to give to his after-work the realistic accuracy that comes from intimate knowledge. In a certain sense his works are contributions to ethnological science as much as they are works of art.
Pavlosky, Vladimir
American, 1884-1944
Pars, William
English, 1742-82 English painter. He first established himself in London as a portrait painter, exhibiting at the Society of Artists in 1760 and at the Free Society of Artists from 1761. In 1764 he won the third premium of the Royal Society of Arts for his history painting depicting Caractacus before the Emperor Claudius (untraced). In the same year he was selected by the Dilettanti Society to accompany Richard Chandler and Nicholas Revett on an archaeological expedition to Asia Minor and Greece (1764-6). His views of Classical monuments in Asia Minor were engraved and published in Ionian Antiquities (1769), while those he made in Greece, which included pioneering drawings of the Parthenon sculptures, were used in the second volume of James Stuart's Antiquities of Athens (1777).