(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 :. | Les Precieuses Ridicules | Figures at a Fountain | Port of Cassis | Weidelandschaft | Still Life with Sardines and Sea-Urchins |
Related Artists:
KONRAD von Soest
German painter (active between 1394 and 1422 in Westphalie).
William Hamilton
English Painter, 1751-1801, was an English painter and illustrator. Hamiliton was born in Chelsea, London, but travelled and worked in Italy with Antonio Zucchi for several years. He trained first as an architectural draftsman, but soon moved to theatrical portraits and scenes from plays. Hamilton became very well known for his paintings depicting episodes from the plays of Shakespeare and for his illustrations of poems. He was commissioned to create works for John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery, Macklin's Bible and Bowyer's English History. These were widely reproduced in popular prints. Francesco Bartolozzi engraved a number of Hamilton??s best known works. He also painted modern events, such as the execution of Marie Antoinette, in the manner of epic historical drama. Hamilton's style shows the influence of the cult of sentiment typical of the period, resembling the work of Angelica Kauffmann. He also sometimes adopts aspects of Fuseli's dramatic distortions in composition and figure drawing. He became an associate member of the Royal Academy from 1784, and was made a full member in 1789.
Jean-Paul Laurens
1838-1921 French Jean Paul Laurens Gallery was a French painter and sculptor, and one of the last major exponents of the French Academic style. Born in Fourquevaux, he was a pupil of L??on Cogniet and Alexandre Bida. Strongly anti-clerical and republican, his work was often on historical and religious themes, through which he sought to convey a message of opposition to monarchical and clerical oppression. His erudition and technical mastery were much admired in his time, but in later years his hyper-realistic technique, coupled to a highly theatrical mise-en-sc??ne, came to be regarded as overly didactic and even involuntarily comical. Laurens was commissioned to paint numerous public works by the French Third Republic, including the steel vault of the Paris city hall, the monumental series on the life of Saint Genevieve in the apse of the Panth??on, the decorated ceiling of the Od??on Theater, and the hall of distinguished citizens at the Toulouse capitol. He also provided illustrations for Augustin Thierry's R??cits des temps m??rovingiens ("Accounts of Merovingian Times"). Laurens was a professor at the École nationale sup??rieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he taught Andr?? Dunoyer de Segonzac and George Barbier. Two of his sons, Paul Albert Laurens (1870-1934) and Jean-Pierre Laurens (1875-1932), became painters and teachers at the Acad??mie Julian. He died in Paris in 1921.