Daily Art Fixx

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Paul Cézanne: 1839-1906

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Les Joueurs de Carte (The-Card-Players) - Paul CezanneBorn on January 19, 1839 in Aix-en-Provence, France, Paul Cézanne is considered by many to be one of the most important painters of the second half of the 19th century. From 1849 – 1852,  he studied at the Ecole Saint-Joseph and from 1852 to 1858 at the Collège Bourbon. In 1857 he attended  the Ecole Municipale de Dessin in Aix-en-Provence, where he studied under Joseph Gibert. In 1859,  to satisfy his father’s wishes, he began to study law at the Université d’Aix. He also attended the Ecole Municipale de Dessin again from 1858 – 1861. In 1861 Cézanne abandoned his law studies and moved to Paris to pursue his career as a painter.

In 1862 Cézanne met Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir with whom he formed lasting friendships. In 1863, his paintings were shown in the Salon des Refusés, which exhibited works rejected by the Paris Salon.  The Salon rejected all of Cézanne’s submissions between 1864 to 1869.

With the onset of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Cézanne returned to Aix-en-Provence and then L’Estaque, where he continued painting. In the 1870’s he was influenced by Impressionism, particularly the work of Camille Pissarro.   Like the Impressionists, Cézanne considered the study of nature essential to painting, however, he opposed many aspects of the Impressionist aesthetic. “Believing colour and form to be inseparable, he tried to emphasize structure and solidity in his work, features he thought neglected by Impressionism. For this reason he was a central figure in Post-impressionism.” In 1874, he participated in the first Impressionist Exhibition, as well as the third in 1877.

In 1882 the Salon accepted his work for the first and only time. Beginning in 1883 Cézanne lived in the South of France, returning to Paris occasionally.  Cézanne’s first solo show was held at Ambroise Vollard’s gallery in Paris in 1895. Following that exhibition,  his recognition increased, and in 1899 he participated in the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. In 1900 he participated in the Centennial Exhibition in Paris and, in 1903, the Berlin and Vienna Secessions. In 1904 he exhibited at the Salon d’Automne, Paris and had a solo exhibition at the Galerie Cassirer in Berlin.

Between 1883 and 1895, Cézanne’s paintings accented mass and structure, and his composition therefore became more architectural. His move away from Impressionism stemmed from his belief that a painter must interpret as well as record the scene before him. His brushstrokes became broader and thicker, and the use of a palette knife was sometimes evident.

In the final years of Cézanne’s life,  many of his landscapes “emphasized the rough appearance of sites, mixing wild vegetation with rocks in unusual, asymmetric framing. His composition became less serene and his colour more violent.” In several works, parts of the canvas were left bare and were painted with highly diluted oils. His fascination with nature continued but “the objective sought is no longer to describe reality but to express a spiritual concept”.

Cézanne rarely dated and often did not sign his paintings making it difficult to determine the chronology of his works with any precision.  In his last years his work began to influence many younger artists, including the Fauvists and the Cubists. His influence reached well into the 20th century as well.

Paul Cézanne died of pneumonia on October 22, 1906. He was buried in his hometown of Aix-en-Provence.

For a more detailed biography of Cézanne, visit the MoMA website.

Paul Cézanne on Amazon

Sources: Guggenheim Collection, MoMA, Wikipedia

Berthe Morisot: 1841-1895

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BBerthe Morisot - photograph by Charles Reutlingerorn to a prosperous family on January 14, 1841, in Bourges, Cher, France, Berthe Morisot was a central member of the Paris Impressionists.  Morisot, as well as her sisters, were encouraged at an early age to pursue art and studied with neoclassical painter Geoffroy-Alphonse Chocarne. In 1858 she and her sister Edma studied at the studio of Joseph-Benoît Guichard, and through him met the leading landscape painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot who encouraged the siblings to paint outdoors.

Morisot exhibited at the Salon from 1864 to 1873.  Around 1867, she met Édouard Manet with whom she developed a close friendship. Morisot modeled for Manet numerous times and in 1874 she married his brother, Eugène.  That same year she refused to show her work at the Salon and instead participated in the first independent show of Impressionist paintings. In 1878, Morisot had a daughter Julie who became a main source of inspiration for her paintings.

Morisot painted her daily experiences and reflected 19th century cultural expectations of her class and gender. Her works included landscapes, family and domestic life, portraits, garden settings and boating scenes. She avoided urban and street scenes as well as the nude figure. Morisot worked with pastels, watercolors, and oil, and in her later years, she experimented with lithography and drypoint etching.

Morisot became an important member of the Impressionist group. Painters and writers would meet at her home including Renoir, Degas, and Mary Casssatt. Morisot was never commercially successful in her lifetime. At the time however, her paintings sold for slightly higher prices than those of Renoir, Monet, and Sisley.

Berthe Morisot died of pneumonia on March 2, 1895 in Paris at the age of 54. She was interred in the Cimetière de Passy.

Sources: Wikipedia, Cleveland Museum of Art, Biography.com

Henri Matisse: 1869-1954

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Henri-Matisse-PortraitPainter, sculptor, printmaker, designer, draughtsman, and writer, Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse was born on December 31, 1869 in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, France. Before studying art, Matisse worked as a solicitor’s clerk in Saint-Quentin and took a law degree from 1887 to 1889 in Paris.

Matisse studied drawing at Ecole Quentin Latour and began painting in the winter of 1889 while recovering from appendicitis. He gave up law to study painting at the Académie Julian in 1891 under painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and took drawing and perspective courses at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs. Matisse joined the studio of Gustave Moreau in 1892 and passed the entrance examination of Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1895. In 1898, he married Amélie Parayre with whom he had two sons.

Matisse’s early works were essentially based on the study of the Old Masters “firmly based on reality, in a restricted tonal palette influenced above all by his copies after Dutch masters and Chardin and by exhibitions he had seen of the work of Jean Baptiste Camille Corot and Edouard Manet.”

Matisse exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1901 and had his first solo show at the Galerie Vollard in 1904.

Matisse, along with André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck  became one of the principal figures of Fauvism, which has its base in Impressionism. “In reviving the study of the nude human figure, Matisse’s work was partially a reaction against what he perceived as Impressionism’s neglect of this traditional subject.”

Like other avant-garde artists in Paris at the time, Matisse was interested in influences beyond the realist tradition. In 1904 and 1905, he spent summers painting in the Mediterranean which resulted in his abandonment of the traditional Impressionist palette in favour of what would become his characteristic style of “flat, brilliant colour and fluid line”.

From 1906 to 1910, Matisse became increasingly successful and his art began to be exhibited and published outside of France. Writer and art collector Gertrude Stein, as well as art collectors Etta and Claribel Cone, began acquiring Matisse’s work. During this time, he was also introduced to Picasso with whom he would have an “intermittent rivalry”.

“Matisse’s work during this period falls into three categories: figure compositions, still-lifes and interiors, and portraits. He moved away from the Fauve style and experimented with a new language of the human figure stimulated primarily by Gauguin’s primitivism, but also by Cézanne’s compositions of bathers, by classical decorations, by African tribal sculpture and by the challenge of Picasso.” (MoMA)

Between 1010 and 1917, Matisse created what many critics say are the best works of his career. Inspired by his travels to Spain, Russia, Morocco, his further response to Cubism was to create larger, more exotic and colourful paintings.

In 1918, Matisse relocated to Nice, France where creatively he focused on the female form, landscapes, interiors, still-lifes of flowers, and light itself. During this period, he maintained a habit of working outdoors but this production did not result in major works.  In 1925, Matisse traveled to Italy and Sicily after which he painted fewer canvases and seemingly gave himself the “task of resolving in drawings, sculptures, prints and paintings the articulation and balance of mass of the seated and reclining female nude.”

Matisse virtually gave up painting in 1929 to focus on a series of over 200 etchings, drypoints and lithographs. “Drawing was essential to Matisse’s paintings of the later 1930s, as was an expressive distortion of the female form in order to capture the mood or personality of the model, for example by exaggerating the length of her body in languid repose.”

In 1928, Matisse moved to Cimiez, a suburb above Nice. In 1941, surgery for a tumor left him disabled and unable to travel. This led to his grand interior paintings between 1946 and 1948, the decoration of the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence from 1948 to 1951, and to his final works – a series of paper cut-outs.

Matisse died of a heart attack on November 3, 1954 at the age of eighty-four. He is buried at the cemetery of the Monastère Notre Dame de Cimiez, near Nice.

For an in depth biography, visit the MoMA website.

Sources: MoMA, Guggenheim, Wikipedia (images) 

Video: Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (SmartHistory)

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Born on December 2,  1859, French artist Georges Seurat was a post-Impressionist painter and draftsman known for his unique method drawing and for creating the painting techniques chromoluminarism and pointillism. The video below by SmartHistory.org‘s Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris discuss Seurat’s best-known and largest painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, depicting people relaxing in a suburban park on an island in the Seine River called La Grande Jatte.

Credits: Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris, “Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte – 1884,” in Smarthistory, December 4, 2015, accessed December 2, 2016, https://smarthistory.org/georges-seurat-a-sunday-on-la-grande-jatte-1884/.

Claude Monet: 1840 – 1926

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Claude MonetBorn on November 14, 1840, in Paris, France, Oscar Claude Monet was a founder and leader of the Impressionist art movement in France. The name Impressionism is derived from his 1873 painting Impression, Sunrise. Monet grew up in Le Havre on the Normandy coast. His mother died in 1857 and it was his aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre, who supported his desire to become an artist.

From 1862 to 1864, Monet studied art intermittently in Paris under Charles Gleyre where he met fellow students Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille and Alfred Sisley. Also during this time, he developed a friendship with the painter Johann Barthold Jongkind that influenced his direction as a landscape painter. In these early years, Monet became known for his charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for a small fee. In 1856 or 1857, he met the artist Eugène Boudin who introduced Monet to plein-air painting.

Monet gained some recognition in 1865, when two of his works were exhibited at the Salon. The latter half of the 1860s was a period of experimentation for Monet. He pursued his interested in contemporary subject matter and “he further explored the nature of Realism as embodied in plein-air painting.” However, Monet’s financial difficulties led him to return to Le Havre, leaving his pregnant companion, Camille-Léonie Doncieux, in Paris. She gave birth to their first son, Jean in 1867, and their second son Michel in 1868. The couple married in 1870.

In the summer of 1870, the Franco-Prussian war broke out and Monet fled with his family to London  that autumn to avoid conscription. Monet remained in London for about nine months, and he painted numerous views of the Thames River. He reconnected with Camille Pissarro and met Paul Durand-Ruel, who became his first dealer.  After spending the summer painting in Holland in 1871, Monet returned to Argenteuil, an industrial town and boating centre on the Seine, west of Paris. He remained here until 1878.

Monet joined with other artists in the formation of the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs etc, which held its first exhibition in April 1874. Monet showed his painting Impression, Sunrise and the group emerged from the exhibition with the name “the Impressionists” dubbed by the critic Louis Leroy.

In 1878, Monet’s financial troubles and his wife’s illness led the family to enter a household arrangement in Vétheuil with the family of former patron Ernest Hoschedé. After Camille’s death in 1879, Monet and Alice Hoschedé continued to live together, waiting until Ernest Hoschedé died before marrying in 1892.

Monet exhibited with the Impressionists intermittently and showed his work at the Salon in 1880.  He had a solo exhibition at Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1883, and at several of Georges Petit’s Expositions Internationales de Peinture. In 1889, Galerie Georges Petit held a major retrospective of his work, showing 145 paintings. In 1891, Durand-Ruel had an exhibition of Monet’s first series paintings, Grainstacks, which were met with great critical acclaim.

“By 1890 Monet was financially secure enough to purchase a house at Giverny, later adding adjacent land and installing both the water-lily garden and Japanese bridge, which he would later famously paint in series. Over the next decade he completed more series studies of the lily garden at Giverny, which he continued to enlarge.”

“From 1903 to 1908 Monet concentrated on the enlarged pond with its floating pads and blossoms set in orderly clusters against the reflections of trees and sky within its depths. The results were seen in the largest and most unified series to date, a suite of 48 canvases known as Waterlilies, a Series of Waterscapes shown at Durand-Ruel’s gallery in May 1909.”

After the death of his wife Alice in 1911 and subsequent death of his son Jean in 1914, Monet began work on an expansive new garden studio, in which he would fabricate his Grandes-Décorations, the large-scale water-lily series that he worked on until his death. He continued his work despite suffering increasingly from cataracts, for which he had three operations on his right eye in 1923.

In 1918 Monet announced that he would donate Grandes-Décorations to the State. The Orangerie at the far end of the Tuileries Gardens from the Musée du Louvre was decided as the location for the murals.

Claude Monet died on December 5, 1926 of lung cancer at the age of 86. He is buried in the Giverny church cemetery. On May 16. 1927, five months after Monet’s death, Grandes-Décorations opened to the public for the first time. The Musée Claude Monet, his house and gardens at Giverny, was refurbished and opened to the public in 1981.

For a full biography of Claude Monet, visit the source links below.

Sources: MoMA, Guggenheim, Wikipedia, Artcyclopedia

Auguste Rodin: 1840-1917

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Auguste Rodin - photo by Edward Steichen ca 1911

Auguste Rodin – photo by Edward Steichen ca 1911

Born on November 12, 1840, in Mouffetard, a working-class district of Paris, France, Auguste Rodin is considered to be one of the most important sculptors of modern times. He began drawing at the age of 10, and at 14, attended the Petite Ecole – a special school for drawing and mathematics. Rodin was a promising student but failed three times to gain admission to the Ecole des Beaux Arts.

From 1858, and for the next two decades, Rodin worked for several masons, and ornamentalists, who supplied decorative objects and embellishments for buildings.

The death of Rodin’s sister in 1862, led him to join the Catholic Order of the Pères du Saint-Sacrement. However, it was to be a brief stay. He was encouraged by its head, Pierre-Julien Eymard, to devote himself to art, and so Rodin  left the order in 1863. The following year, in 1864, he met and began living with Rose Beuret, who would become his life-long companion. She gave birth to their son Auguste Beuret that year.

Rodin’s reputation as a modeler grew, and from 1864-1872, he worked with the sculptor Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, as his chief assistant. During this time they traveled to Brussels, Belgium where Rodin participated in the decoration of the Palais des Académies, painted a series of landscapes of the Soignes forest, and made some lithographs to illustrate the satirical magazine Le Petit Comique.

In 1875, Rodin spent two months in Italy studying Donatello and Michaelangelo both of whom had a significant affect on his work. Rodin said, “It is Michelangelo who has freed me from academic sculpture.”

The Bronze Age, Rodin’s first recognized masterpiece, was exhibited in 1877 at the Cercle Artistique et Littéraire in Brussels, and then at the Salon des Artistes Français in Paris. The life-sized male nude was such a departure from academic sculpture that Rodin was accused of casting from a live model – a charge that was disproved by photographs the artist kept on which the sculpture was based.

The 1880s proved to be Rodin’s most productive period in his life. During this time he began The Gates of Hell, a monumental sculptural group depicting scenes from Dante’s Inferno in high relief.  He also created a series of realistic portraits that were exhibited in the Salons after which critics began to describe him as a “great artist and the best young sculptor in modern France”. He also created such well-known works as The Monument to the Burghers of Calais, The Thinker, and The Kiss. It was also during this period that Rodin met Camille Claudel with whom he had a stormy affair until 1898.

In 1895, Rodin purchased the Villa des Brillants in Meudon which he had rented since 1893, and started to build up his collection of antiques and paintings. By this time, Rodin had become one of the most famous artists of the time. He was host to royalty, politicians, young artists and writers, and the social elite. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, published a study of Rodin in 1903 and served as his secretary from 1905 to 1906. Rodin’s work was exhibited throughout Europe and the United States and he received honorary degrees from universities including Oxford, Jena, and Glasgow.

Rodin’s popularity as a sculptor often overshadows his total creative output. He created thousands of busts, figures, and sculptural fragments over his lifetime. He also painted in oils and in watercolours, and the Musée Rodin holds 7,000 of his drawings and prints in chalk, charcoal, and drypoints.

Wanting to give permanence to his work, Rodin offered France his entire collection if they agreed to establish a Musée Rodin. In 1916, after much negotiation, the French government designated the Hôtel Biron on the Rue de Varenne, where Rodin had been renting rooms since 1908, as a future Musée Rodin, and received in turn donations of work owned by the artist.

Rodin suffered a severe stroke in March of 1916. In February 1917, he married Rose Beuret, two weeks before her death. Rodin died that same year on November 17, 1917. He was buried next to Rose and a cast of The Thinker was placed next to their tomb in Meudon.

For more information about Rodin, visit the Musée Rodin website which presents a collection of his sculptures, sketches, and paintings. For a more in-depth biography, visit the source links below.

Sources: MoMA, National Gallery of Art, Wikipedia

Jacques-Louis David: 1748-1825

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Jacques-Louis David - Death of Marat -1793Born on August 30, 1748, Jacques-Louis David was the leading painter of the Neoclassical movement – a reaction against the Rococo art and interior design in France. Preoccupied with drawing from an early age, David studied under Joseph-Mari Vien at the Académie Royale in 1766 and won the Prix de Rome art scholarship to the French Academy in Rome in 1774.

David returned to Paris in 1780 where he prospered. He was made a member of the Royal Academy and exhibited successfully at the Salon. His paintings were interpreted as moral allegories of the political events and the corruption of the aristocracy of the time. His neoclassical style – rigorous contours, sculpted forms, even lighting, polished surfaces, and pure colours, were admired and would set the standard for academic painting for decades to come.

In the 1790s, David’s paintings served the aims of the French Revolution by glorifying its leaders and martyrs. He painted portraits of the Revolutionary government’s leaders and designed their festivals and funerals. He was active in the Jacobin Club – the largest and most powerful political club of the Revolution. He was closely allied with Maximilien Robespierre, one of the Revolution’s most influential figures. He was also president of the National Convention and voted for the execution of Louis XVI. David was a key figure in the attack against the Académie Royale that in part led to its abolishment in 1794. After Robespierre’s loss of power, David was denounced as “tyrant of the arts” and was imprisoned.

In the late 1790’s, David formed a new alliance with Napoléon Bonaparte who supplied David with large commissions and in 1804, was appointed first painter to the Emperor. After Napoléon’s defeat in 1816, and the reinstatement of the Monarchy, David chose exile over court painter and spent the last years of his life in Brussels, Belgium where he painted portraits and mythological subjects.

Although David’s political allegiances shifted over the course of his life, he remained faithful to the style of Neoclassicism which he passed on to a generation of students, as well as to most 19th century painters.

Jacques-Louis David died on December 29, 1825.  He was denied a burial in France.

Sources: Met Museum, Wikipedia, Louvre

Henri Cartier-Bresson: 1908 – 2004

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Henri Cartier-Bresson photo-by-Arnold-Newman-New-York-1946Born on August 22, 1908, in Chanteloup, Seine-et-Marne, near Paris, Henri Cartier-Bresson is considered by many to be the father of modern photo-journalism.

In 1927, Cartier-Bresson studied painting at the Lhote Academy in Paris under Cubist painter and sculptor André Lhote. He turned to photography in 1931 when he acquired a Leica 35mm camera – a camera that, unlike its bulky predecessors, was ideal for capturing action.

Cartier-Bresson preferred an unobtrusive (“a fly on the wall”) approach to photography. This approach helped to develop the real-life reporting (candid photography), that has influenced generations of photo-journalists.

Cartier-Bresson traveled the world photographing “the times” in Russia, China, Cuba, India, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Turkey, Europe, and the United States. He photographed events such as the funeral of Gandhi, the fall of Beijing, and the liberation of Paris. Cartier-Bresson’s main body of work however was of human activities and the institutions of society. In every country, he sought out market places, weddings, funerals, people at work, children in parks, adults in their leisure time, and other every-day activities.

During the Battle of France, in June 1940, Cartier-Bresson was captured by German soldiers and spent 35 months in prisoner-of-war camps doing forced labour under the Nazis. He escaped in 1943 and began working for MNPGD, a secret organization that aided prisoners and escapees. At the end of the war, Cartier-Bresson directed “Le Retour” (The Return), a documentary on the repatriation of prisoners of war and detainees.

In 1947, along with Robert Capa, David Seymour, William Vandivert, and George Rodger, Cartier-Bresson founded the co-operative agency “Magnum Photos”. The aim of Magnum was to allow photographers to “work outside the formulas of magazine journalism”.

In 1952, Cartier-Bresson published a book of his photographs entitled ” Images à la Sauvette” (images on the run),  with the English title “The Decisive Moment”. In the 1960s he created 16 portraiture stories entitled “A Touch of Greatness” for the the London magazine “The Queen”. The stories profiled personalities such as Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Miller, Robert Kennedy and others.

In 1968, Cartier-Bresson left Magnum Photos and photography in general, focusing once again on drawing and painting. He retired from photography completely by 1975 and had his first exhibition of his drawings at the Carlton Gallery in New York in 1975.

From 1975 on, Cartier-Bresson continued to focus on drawing. In 1982 he was awarded the Grand Prix National de la Photographie in Paris, and in 1986, the Novecento Prize in Palermo, Italy.  In 1988, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held an exhibition of his photographs, “Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Early Work”.

In 2003, Cartier-Bresson, along with his wife Martine Franck and their daughter Mélanie, launched the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, to provide a permanent home for his collected works and an exhibition space for other artists. Cartier-Bresson died peacefully on August 3, 2004 in Montjustin, Provence. He was buried in the cemetery of Montjustin, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, France.

For a complete biography of Henri Cartier-Bresson, visit the HCB Foundation or for a good source of photos visit Magnum Photos.

Sources: Met Museum,  HCB Foundation, Wikipedia

Gustave Caillebotte: 1848-1894

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Gustave Caillebotte-Portrait-de-l'artiste-1882-©photo-musée-d'Orsay Gustave Caillebotte has only recently been recognized as a significant contributor to the Impressionist movement, more than seventy years after his death. His independent wealth, allowing him to be a major art collector and financial supporter of some of the most well-known Impressionist artists, overshadowed his own contribution to and impact on the art movement of his time. Art historians who have reevaluated his paintings and drawings now assert that his unusual use of varying perspective is particularly commendable and sets him apart from his more famous peers.

Caillebotte was born on August 19, 1848 to Martial Caillebotte and Celeste Daufresne. Gustave’s father had inherited the family’s military textile business and was also a judge at the Seine department’s Tribunal de Commerce. Gustave had two younger brothers Rene (1851-1876) and Martial (1853-1910). The family were well off and in 1860 purchased a summer home just south of Paris, in Yerres. Though Gustave didn’t spend much time focused on art as a child, it is believed that the summers spent at Yerres correspond with the time that Caillebotte began to draw and paint.

Caillebotte went to law school, earning his degree in 1868 and his license to practice in 1870. However, not long after he was drafted into the Garde Nationale Mobile de la Seine to fight in the Franco-Prussian war. Caillebotte was never to return to law. He began instead to study painting seriously, perhaps inspired by his visits to the studio of painter Leon Bonnat. He also attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1872, but did not stay long.

In 1874, he inherited his father’s fortune, followed by his mother’s in 1878, providing him with the opportunity to study art and paint without the need or burden to sell his work to support himself. The lack of sales of his paintings contributed to the lack of recognition of his work. In fact, many of his paintings are still owned by his heirs.

His financial situation also allowed him to help fund Impressionist exhibitions and support his fellow artists and friends. He amassed a collection of more than seventy works, including masterpieces by Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, and Alfred Sisley. Interestingly, a self-portrait shows some of the works he had purchased in the background of his painting. Though he donated his personal collection to the Musée d’Orsay, only two of his own works were included, another contributing factor to his relative unidentified influence on Impressionist art.

Caillebotte was also able to explore other interests because of his freedom from financial obligations including stamp collecting (his collection is now in the British Museum), orchid horticulture, yacht building, and textile design.

Gustave Caillebotte The-Floor-Scrapers-Les-raboteurs-de-parquet-1875Over a period of six years, Caillebotte participated regularly in and supported Impressionist exhibitions. In 1876 in the second such exhibition, Caillebotte showed eight of his own works. One of the works, Floor-scrapers (1875), now seen as an early masterpiece, was considered “vulgar” by some critics because if its subject of laborers working on a wooden floor. It has been suspected that that is the reason it was rejected by the Salon of 1875. Caillebotte’s subjects of his exhibited work were the people and places he saw in and around Paris. Featuring skewed perspectives and modern subjects, the canvases reflect the changing landscape of the capital following the devastating war and the necessary rebuilding, and the new vision of a modern city.

Caillebotte’s style is most closely linked to Realism but his work was also strongly influenced by his Impressionist associates, and his style and technique varies considerably among his works. Caillebotte painted many domestic and familial scenes, interiors, and portraits. Many of his paintings depict members of his family; scenes of boating, fishing, swimming, dining, card playing, piano playing, reading and sewing all done in an intimate, unobtrusive manner which observes the quiet ritual of upper-class life. Caillebotte also painted some still-life food and flowers, and a few nudes.

CGustave Caillebotte-Paris-Street-Rainy-Day-1877-Art-Institute-of-Chicagoaillebotte’s paintings of urban Paris are his most striking and most well-known: The Pont de l’Europe (Le pont de l’Europe) (1876), and Paris Street; Rainy Day (Rue de Paris; temps de pluie, also known as La Place de l’Europe, temps de pluie) (1877). Photography was just coming into common use at the time, and Caillebotte may have used this new technology in planning and executing his works.

Caillebotte had purchased a home on the Seine River at Petit-Gennevilliers near Argenteuil, in 1881. He moved there permanently in 1888. Caillebotte’s stopped painting large canvases in the early 1890s and also stopped showing his work at just 34 years old – another factor in keeping his work in the background compared to that of his colleagues. He spent much of his time gardening, building and racing yachts with his brother, Martial, and visiting with his friend Renoir. Though Caillebotte did not marry, the fact that he left a large annuity to Charlotte Berthier, a woman eleven years his junior and of the lower class, seems to support other evidence that he had a long-term serious relationship with her.

Caillebotte died of pulmonary congestion while working in his garden in 1894, at age 45, and was interred at Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Sources: gustavcaillebotte.org, bbc.com, nga.gov

Edgar Degas: 1834-1917

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L'absinthe Edgar Degas 1876Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas was born on July 19, 1834, to a wealthy banking family in Paris, France. Educated in Latin, Greek, and ancient history at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Degas initially intended to study law, briefly attending the Sorbonne’s Faculté de Droit in 1853.

In 1855, he studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts with Louis Lamothe, learning the traditional Academic style with its emphasis on line and the importance of draftsmanship. Degas was also influenced by the paintings and frescoes he saw during several trips to Italy in the late 1850s.

Degas exhibited his history painting “The Misfortunes of the City of Orléans “ at the Salon in 1865, but following that he began focusing on painting scenes of modern life. He favoured themes of ballet dancers, laundresses, milliners, horse racing and other every day scenes. His interest in ballet dancers increased in the 1870s and he produced over 600 works on the subject. In his later years, Degas created works of women bathing, entirely without self-consciousness and un-posed.

From the late 1860s onward, Degas also produced many small sculptures in wax. He concentrated on the subjects seen in his paintings–horses, dancers and women washing. His interest in this medium increased in the mid-1880s in part as a result of his failing eyesight.

Before 1880, he generally used oils for his completed works, which were based on preliminary studies and sketches made in pencil or pastel. After 1875, he began using pastels more frequently, even in finished works, and by 1885, most of his more important works were done in pastel.  In the mid-1870s Degas returned to the medium of etching and began experimenting with printmaking media such as lithographs and monotypes.

Degas saw his work as “Realist” or “Independent” and did not like being labeled an “Impressionist” even though he was considered to be one of the group’s founders, an organizer of its exhibitions, and one of its core members. Like the Impressionists, his aim was to capture moments of modern life, yet he had little interest in painting plein air landscapes and his use of clear, hard outlines, set his works apart from the other Impressionists. An observer of everyday scenes, Degas captured in his works, natural positions and movement of the human body.

Degas continued working until about 1912, when he was forced to leave his long-time studio in Montmartre. He never married and any emotional relationships he may have had, remain uncertain. Edgar Degas died on September 27, 1917, at the age of 83.

 

Sources: MET Museum, MOMA, Wikipedia