1865-1925was a Swiss painter and printmaker associated with Les Nabis. He was an important figure in the development of the modern woodcut. He was born into a conservative middle class family in Lausanne, and there he attended College Cantonal, graduating with a degree in classical studies in 1882. In that year he moved to Paris to study art under Jules Joseph Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger at the Academie Julian. He spent many hours in the Louvre, where he greatly admired the works of Holbein, Derer and Ingres; these artists would remain exemplars for Vallotton throughout his life.[1] His earliest paintings, such as the Ingresque Portrait of Monsieur Ursenbach (1885), are firmly rooted in the academic tradition, and his self portrait of 1885 (seen at right) received an honorable mention at the Salon des artistes français in 1886. During the following decade Vallotton painted, wrote art criticism and made a number of prints. In 1891 he executed his first woodcut, a portrait of Paul Verlaine. The many woodcuts he produced during the 1890s were widely disseminated in periodicals and books in Europe as well as in the United States, and were recognized as radically innovative in printmaking. They established Vallotton as a leader in the revival of true woodcut as an artistic medium; in the western world, the relief print, in the form of commercial wood engraving, had long been mainly utilized unimaginatively as a medium for the reproduction of drawn or painted images and, latterly, photographs. Vallotton's starkly reductive woodcut style features large masses of undifferentiated black and areas of unmodulated white. While emphasizing outline and flat patterns, Vallotton generally made no use of the gradations and modeling traditionally produced by hatching. The influences of post-Impressionism, symbolism and the Japanese woodcut are apparent; a large exhibition of ukiyo-e prints had been presented at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1890, and Vallotton, like many artists of his era an enthusiast of Japonism, collected these prints. He depicted street crowds and demonstrations including several scenes of police attacking anarchists bathing women, portrait heads, and other subjects which he treated with a sardonic humor. His graphic art reached its highest development in Intimit's (Intimacies), a series of ten interiors published in 1898 by the Revue Blanche, which deal with tension between men and women. Vallotton's prints have been suggested as a significant influence on the graphic art of Edvard Munch, Aubrey Beardsley, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner .By 1892 he was affiliated with Les Nabis, a group of young artists that included Pierre Bonnard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Maurice Denis, and Edouard Vuillard, with whom Vallotton was to form a lifelong friendship. During the 1890s, when Vallotton was closely allied with the avant-garde, his paintings reflected the style of his woodcuts, with flat areas of color, hard edges, and simplification of detail.  Related Paintings of Felix Vallotton :. | The Visit | Cagne Valley | The Corpse | Roger Liberates Angelica | The Wind |
Related Artists:
John Cecil Clay
Illustrator and genre, caricature painter American 1875-1930 American illustrator known for genre and caricature paintings. Clay was born in Ronceverte, West Virginia to an long-time Southern family. He was a student of Henry Siddons Mowbray at the Art Students League of New York and had a graphic style that was suited to illustration. A reoccurring subject was pretty young women. During his life he worked for Life and Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly. He was a member of Society of Illustrators and was represented at the St. Louis Exposition-World's Fair 1904. Apart from the above mentioned magazines he also worked as an illustrator for The Century Magazine, Saturday Evening Post and Good Housekeeping.
Ayne Bru
Ayne (Aine) Bru (probably a Catalanization of Hans Bren) was a 16th century Renaissance painter of German origin who worked in Catalonia. He may have proceeded from Lummen, in the Duchy of Brabant. He is sometimes also called Lucius de Brun. His surname may also suggest provenance from the town of Brenn. In 1502, he was hired to paint the main altar (retablo) in the church of the monastery of Sant Cugat del Valles, for which he was paid a staggering wage between 1504 and 1507. On the central panel, Bru depicted the martyrdom of Saint Cucuphas (in Catalan, Sant Cugat) with enormous realism. The executioner cuts the saint's throat while Cucuphas remains tied to a tree trunk. Nearby, there appear another knife (in a basket) and a dog sleeping peacefully. This work is now at the National Art Museum of Catalonia (Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya). The dog from Bru's painting of Cucuphas' martyrdom was later borrowed by Salvador Dale for a painting called "Dale Contemplating Nude" or "Dale Dale Dale". The vast countryside that serves as a background anachronistically includes the actual monastery of Sant Cugat. Another panel, depicting Saint George (sometimes identified as Saint Candidus or simply as "Warrior Saint"), was attached to this one. It has been rejoined and is visible at the National Art Museum of Catalonia. Marcel Durliat believes that though the expressionism in this painting is evidence of a Germanic artistic tradition, Bru's Quattrocento depiction of the standing figures in contemporary dress, as well as other details, indicate that the painter may have lived or studied in Northern Italy before moving to Barcelona.
Le Sidaner Henri
Ile Maurice 1862-Versailles,1939 was an impressionist painter born to a French family in Port Louis, Mauritius. In 1870 he and his family settled in Dunkirk. Le Sidaner received most of his tutelage from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under the instruction of Alexandre Cabanel but later broke away due to artistic differences. He traveled extensively throughout France and also visited many cities around the globe such as London, New York, Venice and Paris as well as some small villages throughout Europe. Le Sidaner exhibited at the Salon, the Galeries Georges Petit in Paris and the Goupil Gallery in London. He lived in Gerberoy, France. Le Sidaner's work was referenced in Marcel Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time.