French Symbolist Painter, 1840-1916 Bertrand-Jean Redon, better known as Odilon Redon (April 20, 1840 ?C July 6, 1916) was a Symbolist painter and printmaker, born in Bordeaux, Aquitaine, France. Odilon was a nickname derived from his mother, Odile. Redon started drawing as a young child, and at the age of 10 he was awarded a drawing prize at school. At age 15, he began formal study in drawing but on the insistence of his father he switched to architecture. His failure to pass the entrance exams at Paris?? Ecole des Beaux-Arts ended any plans for a career as an architect, although he would later study there under Jean-L??on Gerôme. Back home in his native Bordeaux, he took up sculpture, and Rodolphe Bresdin instructed him in etching and lithography. However, his artistic career was interrupted in 1870 when he joined the army to serve in the Franco-Prussian War. At the end of the war, he moved to Paris, working almost exclusively in charcoal and lithography. It would not be until 1878 that his work gained any recognition with Guardian Spirit of the Waters, and he published his first album of lithographs, titled Dans le R??ve, in 1879. Still, Redon remained relatively unknown until the appearance in 1884 of a cult novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans titled, À rebours (Against Nature). The story featured a decadent aristocrat who collected Redon's drawings. In the 1890s, he began to use pastel and oils, which dominated his works for the rest of his life. In 1899, he exhibited with the Nabis at Durand-Ruel's. In 1903 he was awarded the Legion of Honor. His popularity increased when a catalogue of etchings and lithographs was published by Andr?? Mellerio in 1913 and that same year, he was given the largest single representation at the New York Armory Show. In 1923 Mellerio published: Odilon Redon: Peintre Dessinateur et Graveur. An archive of Mellerio's papers is held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2005 the Museum of Modern Art launched an exhibition entitled "Beyond The Visible", a comprehensive overview of Redon's work showcasing more than 100 paintings, drawings, prints and books from The Ian Woodner Family Collection. The exhibition ran from October 30, 2005 to January 23, 2006.   Related Paintings of Odilon Redon :. | The Road to Peyrelebade | The Predestined Child | The Shell | Mystical Knight | The Valkyrie |
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Noble, Thomas Satterwhite
American, 1835-1907 was born in Lexington, Kentucky. He grew up on a plantation where hemp and cotton were grown. Noble saw the effects of slavery firsthand and portrayed many scenes of the Old South in his works. He attended Transylvania University in Lexington and studied art with Oliver Frazier and George P. A. Healey and moved to New York, New York in 1853 at age eighteen. He first studied painting with Samuel Woodson Price in Louisville, Kentucky in 1852, then with Thomas Couture in Paris, 1856-1859 and returned to the United States in 1859. He served in the Confederate army from 1862-1865 during the American Civil War, despite his avowed hatred for slavery. After the war, he had a studio in New York City 1866-1869. In 1869, Noble was invited to become the first head of the McMicken School of Design in Cincinnati, Ohio, a post he would hold until 1904. During his tenure at the McMicken School of Design, Noble moved briefly to Munich, Germany where he studied from 1881-1883. He retired in 1904 and died in New York City, April 27, 1907. He is buried in Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati. Noble's works are largely historical presentations. Modern critics have viewed them as overly romanticized, while others believe that he painted realistic scenes from actual events. One of his most famous paintings is The Modern Medea (1867) which portrays a tragic event from 1856 in which Margaret Garner, a fugitive slave mother, has murdered one of her children, rather than see it returned to slavery.
Charles Ricketts
1866-1931 English painter, designer, writer and collector. He trained as an illustrator at the City and Guilds Technical Art School, Lambeth, London, where he met and formed a lifelong relationship with CHARLES HAZELWOOD SHANNON. He identified with the ideals of the Aesthetic Movement, finding inspiration in Renaissance art as well as in the French artists Gustave Moreau and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. In 1888 he took over James Abbott McNeill Whistler's house, The Vale, in Chelsea and drew together an artists' colony. Inspired by the work of A. H. Mackmurdo and William Morris, he set up a small press over which he exercised complete control of design and production, producing art journals and books that included Oscar Wilde's A House of Pomegranates (1891) and The Sphinx (1894). Ricketts later designed founts, initials, borders and illustrations for the Vale Press (1896-1904), blending medieval, Renaissance and contemporary imagery.
COSSA, Francesco del
Italian Early Renaissance Painter, ca.1435-1477 Italian painter. Together with Cosimo Tura and Ercole de' Roberti, Cossa was one of the most important painters working in Ferrara and Bologna in the second half of the 15th century. With them he shared an expressive use of line and solidity of form, but he also had a gift for decorative and anecdotal scenes, most evident in the frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara.