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 :. | Naked Brown Torso | clair de lune | Interior with red armchair and figure | Self portrait, | High Alps,Glacier and Snowy Peaks |
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alexej von jawlenskij
Alexej Georgewitsch von Jawlensky (13 March 1864 ?C 15 March 1941) was a Russian expressionist painter active in Germany. He was a key member of the New Munich Artist's Association (Neue Kunstlervereinigung M??nchen), Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group and later the Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four). Alexej von Jawlensky was born in Torzhok, a town in Tver Governorate, Russia, as the fifth child of Georgi von Jawlensky and his wife Alexandra (n??e Medwedewa). At the age of ten he moved with his family to Moscow. After a few years of military training, he became interested in painting, visiting the Moscow World Exposition circa 1880. In 1896 he moved to Munich, where he studied in the private school of Anton Ažbe. In Munich he met Wassily Kandinsky and various other Russian artists, and he contributed to the formation of the Neue K??nstlervereinigung M??nchen. His work in this period was lush and richly coloured, but later moved towards abstraction and a simplified, formulaic style. Alexej von Jawlensky. Abstract Head, c. 1928Von Jawlensky died in Wiesbaden, Germany on 15 March 1941. He and his wife Helene are buried in the cemetery of St. Elizabeth's Church, Wiesbaden.
Adrian Ludwig Richter
German, 1803-1884 German painter, printmaker and illustrator. He ranks with Moritz von Schwind as the most important representative of late Romantic painting and printmaking in Germany. In contrast to the work of such leading masters of early Romanticism as Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich, which was ambitious in content and innovative in form, Richter's art was more modest in its aims, in line with the restrained intellectual climate of the Biedermeier period.
BERCKHEYDE, Job Adriaensz
Dutch painter (b. 1630, Haarlem, d. 1693, Haarlem). He was apprenticed on 2 November 1644 to Jacob Willemsz. de Wet, whose influence is apparent in his first dated canvas, Christ Preaching to the Children (1661; Schwerin, Staatl. Mus.), one of the few biblical scenes in his oeuvre. On 10 June 1653 he repaid a loan from the Haarlem Guild of St Luke, which he subsequently joined on 10 March 1654. During his stay in Heidelberg, Job painted portraits and hunting scenes at the court of the Elector Palatine, who rewarded him with a gold chain, perhaps the one he wears in his early Self-portrait (c. 1655; Haarlem, Frans Halsmus.), his only documented work from the 1650s. Job is better known for his later work, which consists mainly of interior views of St Bavo's church in Haarlem and simple genre scenes recalling those of his Haarlem contemporaries Adriaen van Ostade and Jan Steen.