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 :. | Woman at the Piano | Cagne Valley | The Beach Promenade in Etretat | Felix Jasinski Holding His Hat | Perseus Slays the Dragon |
Related Artists:
Fritz von Uhde
German, 1848-1911 was a German painter of genre and religious subjects. His style lay between Realism and .Uhde was born in Wolkenburg, Saxony. In 1866 he was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden, but later that year he left his studies for military service, and from 1867 to 1877 he was a professor of horsemanship to the regiment of the assembled guard. He moved to Munich in 1877 to attend the Academy of Fine Arts. In Munich he particularly admired the Dutch old masters, and in 1879 he travelled to Paris where his studies of the Dutch painters continued under Mihely Munkecsy's supervision. In 1882 a journey to Holland brought about a change in his style, as he abandoned the dark chiaroscuro he had learned in Munich in favor of a colorism informed by the works of the French Impressionists. His work was often rejected by the official art criticism, and by the public, because his representations of ordinary scenes were considered vulagar or ugly. The critic Otto Julius Bierbaum was more sympathetic; in 1893, he wrote, "As a painter of children, for example, Uhde is extraordinarily distinguished. He does not depict them as sweetly as used to be popular; in other words not as amusing or charming dolls, but with extreme, very strict naturalness." In about 1890, Uhde became a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.
Sharp Joseph Henry
American Painter, 1859-1953 was a painter credited with influencing the creation of the Taos, New Mexico Society of Artists. Sharp may have been the first artist to discover Taos when he visited in 1883. He painted American Indian portraits and cultural life, and Western landscapes. As a youth he permanently damaged his hearing in a near-drowning accident, and gradually become totally deaf. His formal art training included Mckmicken School of Design (Cincinnati) and Antwerp (Belgium) Academy. He traveled and worked in Europe also. Harpers Magazine commissioned his illustrations of Taos Indian life. Some portraits were purchased by the Smithsonian Institution. President Theodore Roosevelt took an interest in him and had a cabin built for him at Little Big Horn to paint Indian life there.
William Simpson
British Painter (1823-1899) was a British artist and war correspondent. Born into poverty in Glasgow on 28 October 1823, Simpson went on to become one of the leading 'special artists' of his day, and sketched many scenes of war for the Illustrated London News. His early years were very difficult living in a house with an abusive and alcoholic father, and in 1834 he was sent to live with his grandmother in Perth. Simpson's only formal schooling took place during this period and within a few years, he was working as an apprentice in the Glasgow lithographic firm of Macfarlane. The artist stated later that "this was the turning point which changed all my boyish intentions." It was during the years in Glasgow that he attended the Andersonian University and the Mechanics Institute in the evenings. His next position was with the lithographic company of Allan and Ferguson where he spent four years learning the trade. In 1851 Simpson moved to London where he was hired by Day & Sons. While at Day's he was able to work on several important lithographic sets. He became famous initially for his work in the Crimean War where he was sent by the firm of Colnaghi to create a series of watercolors suitable for lithographing. In the late 1850's he was sent to India to sketch scenes relating to the recent Sepoy Revolt. He joined the ILN in 1866 and covered the Abyssinian Campaign of 1868. In 1870 he went to France to sketch the war with Prussia, and in the following year observed the barricades of the Paris Commune. During a trip around the world, he stopped off in California and traveled to the Lava Beds area to report on the Modoc War in 1873. Five years later, he journeyed to Afghanistan to provide illustrations of the Second Afghan War that had broken out; he returned to London in the summer of 1879. In 1890, he observed the opening of the Forth Bridge and caught a chill which was to have detrimental effects on his health. He died at home in Willesden, north London, on August 17, 1899, and was buried in Highgate Cemetery. Besides his war pictures, he covered state events, coronations, funerals, and other ceremonies. He was particularly interested in India and sketched scenes of the Kashmir Maharajas.