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 :. | Felix Jasinski Holding His Hat | The Lie | Hate | Dinner,Light Effect | High Alps,Glacier and Snowy Peaks |
Related Artists:
Michael Wolgemut
German Northern Renaissance Painter and Printmaker, ca.1434-1519,German painter and printmaker, was born and died in Nuremberg.Little is known of Wolgemut's private life. He trained with his father Valentin Wolgemut (who died in 1469 or 1470) and in 1472 he married the widow of his former apprentice-master, the painter Hans Pleydenwurff, whose son Wilhelm worked as an assistant, and from 1491 a partner, to his stepfather. Some consider Wilhelm Pleydenwurff a finer artist than Wolgemut, however he died in January 1494, when he was probably still in his thirties. Wilhelm's oeuvre remains unclear, though works in various media have been attributed to him. The importance of Wolgemut as an artist rests, not only on his own individual works, but also on the fact that he was the head of a large workshop, in which many different branches of the fine arts were carried on by a great number of pupil-assistants, including Albrecht Durer, who completed an apprenticeship with him between 1486-9.
Corrado Giaquinto
1703-1766 Italian Corrado Giaquinto Galleries He was born in Molfetta. As a boy he apprenticed with a modest local painter Saverio Porta, (c1667-1725), escaping the religious career his parents had intended for him. By October 1724, he left Molfetta, and along with his contemporaries Francesco de Mura (1696-1784) and Giuseppe Bonito (1707-1789), he trained from 1719-23 in the prolific Neapolitan studio of Francesco Solimena, either with Solimena or his pupil, Nicola Maria Rossi. Throughout his life, Giaquinto was a peripatetic painter, with long sojourns in Naples, Rome (between 1723-53), Turin (1733 and 1735-9), and Madrid (1753-1761). In 1723, he moved to Rome to work in the studio of Sebastiano Conca. He painted in San Lorenzo in Damaso, San Giovanni Calibita, and the ceiling at Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. In March 1727, with Giuseppe Rossi as an assistant, Giaquinto opened an independent studio near the Ponte Sisto, in the parish of Saint Giovanni of the Malva in Rome. In 1734, he married Caterina Silvestri Agate. The first documented work by his hand is Christ crucified with the Madonna, Saint John Evangelist, and Magdalene commissioned in 1730 by king John V of Portugal for the cathedral of the Mafra. In 1731, he received a prestigious commission, to execute frescoes in the church of San Nicola dei Lorenesi: Saint Nicholas water gush from cliff, three theologic and cardinal Virtues, and in the cupola Paradise. The latest restoration confirms Giaquinto stylistic independence from Solimena, and reveals his stylistic dependence on Luca Giordano.
Charles Francois Daubigny
b Feb. 15, 1817, Paris, France d.Feb. 19, 1878, Paris French 78, French landscape painter. He went to Italy early in life and later studied in Paris with Paul Delaroche. Although usually classed with the Barbizon school, he never lived in Barbizon. His last 30 years were spent largely in his houseboat on the Seine and the Oise, and he is best known for his pictures of the banks of those rivers. He was particularly successful in his atmospheric depiction of dawn, twilight, and moonlight. His later pictures are handled with great breadth. Monet and Boudin were especially attentive to his work. Daubigny is well represented in the Louvre, the Mesdag Museum (The Hague), the National Gallery (London), and the Metropolitan Museum. Characteristic are his Return of the Flock??Moonlight, Banks of the Oise, and Moonlight. His son Karl Pierre Daubigny, 1846?C86, painted in his father manner.