1863-1935 French Paul Signac Galleries Paul Victor Jules Signac was born in Paris on November 11, 1863. He followed a course of training in architecture before deciding at the age of 18 to pursue a career as a painter. He sailed around the coasts of Europe, painting the landscapes he encountered. He also painted scenes of cities in France in his later years. In 1884 he met Claude Monet and Georges Seurat. He was struck by the systematic working methods of Seurat and by his theory of colours and became Seurat's faithful supporter. Under his influence he abandoned the short brushstrokes of impressionism to experiment with scientifically juxtaposed small dots of pure colour, intended to combine and blend not on the canvas but in the viewer's eye, the defining feature of pointillism. Many of Signac's paintings are of the French coast. He left the capital each summer, to stay in the south of France in the village of Collioure or at St. Tropez, where he bought a house and invited his friends. In March 1889, he visited Vincent van Gogh at Arles. The next year he made a short trip to Italy, seeing Genoa, Florence, and Naples. The Port of Saint-Tropez, oil on canvas, 1901Signac loved sailing and began to travel in 1892, sailing a small boat to almost all the ports of France, to Holland, and around the Mediterranean as far as Constantinople, basing his boat at St. Tropez, which he "discovered". From his various ports of call, Signac brought back vibrant, colourful watercolors, sketched rapidly from nature. From these sketches, he painted large studio canvases that are carefully worked out in small, mosaic-like squares of color, quite different from the tiny, variegated dots previously used by Seurat. Signac himself experimented with various media. As well as oil paintings and watercolours he made etchings, lithographs, and many pen-and-ink sketches composed of small, laborious dots. The neo-impressionists influenced the next generation: Signac inspired Henri Matisse and Andr?? Derain in particular, thus playing a decisive role in the evolution of Fauvism. As president of the Societe des Artistes Ind??pendants from 1908 until his death, Signac encouraged younger artists (he was the first to buy a painting by Matisse) by exhibiting the controversial works of the Fauves and the Cubists.  Related Paintings of Paul Signac :. | Bridge | The still life having bottle | Erik Satie | La Rochelle Hafenansicht | Le Moulin Holiandais a Edam |
Related Artists:
Abraham van Beijeren
(ca. 1620 - March 1690) was a Dutch Baroque era painter. He was little regarded in his day but is now considered one of the greatest of still-life painters. Van Beijeren (alternatively spelled "Beyeren") lived in a succession of Dutch towns. Born in The Hague, the artist also lived in Delft, Amsterdam, Alkmaar and Gouda. In 1678 he settled in Rotterdam, where he died in 1690.
GOYEN, Jan van
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1596-1656 Jan van Goyen was born in Leiden on Jan. 13, 1596. Apprenticed from the age of 10, he had several masters. About 1617 he went to Haarlem to study with Esaias van de Velde, an important innovator in the Haarlem movement of realistic landscape painting. Van Goyen's works between 1621 and 1625 are sometimes hard to distinguish from those of his teacher. They are colorful, detailed views of villages and roads, usually busy with people, as in Winter (1621). It was Van Goyen's usual practice to sign or monogram and date his paintings. He traveled extensively through the Netherlands and beyond, recording his impressions in sketchbooks, occasionally with dates and often depicting recognizable scenes. Thus the chronology of his development is clear. His paintings of the late 1620s show a steady advance from the strong colors and scattered organization of his early works toward tonality and greater simplicity and unity of composition. By 1630 he was painting monochromes in golden brown or pale green; he played a leading part in the tonal phase of Dutch landscape painting. In 1631 Van Goyen settled in The Hague, where he became a citizen in 1634. The simplicity, airiness, and unification of his compositions continued to increase in his abundant production of dune landscapes, river views, seascapes, town views, and winter landscapes. The River View (1636) displays a river so open and extensive as to suggest the sea, with reflections that prolong the vast and luminous sky. In its monumentalization of humble structures and its composition built on a firm scaffolding of horizontal and vertical forces, it forecast at this early date developments that dominated landscape painting in the 1650s and later. In the Village and Dunes (1647) the traditional double-diagonal composition still exists, but it is dominated by horizontal and vertical accents. Stronger contrasts of light and dark replace the earlier tonality. In the last year of his life Van Goyen produced an eloquent new style, in which powerful forms stand out against the radiant sky and water in an exquisitely balanced composition (Evening Calm; 1656). The commission in 1651 to paint a panoramic view of The Hague for the Burgomaster's Room shows the high regard in which Van Goyen was held. He was enormously productive; well over 1,000 of his paintings still exist, and almost as many drawings. Yet he died insolvent, perhaps because of losses in his various business ventures, and soon after his death on April 27, 1656,
Alexandre Cabanel
French Academic Painter, 1823-1889 French painter and teacher. His skill in drawing was apparently evident by the age of 11. His father could not afford his training, but in 1839 his departement gave him a grant to go to Paris. This enabled him to register at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts the following October as a pupil of Franeois-Edouard Picot. At his first Salon in 1843 he presented Agony in the Garden (Valenciennes, Mus. B.-A.) and won second place in the Prix de Rome competition (after Leon B?nouville, also a pupil of Picot) in 1845 with Christ at the Praetorium (Paris, Ecole N. Sup. B.-A.). Both Cabanel and Benouville were able to go to Rome, as there was a vacancy from the previous year. Cabanel's Death of Moses (untraced), an academic composition, painted to comply with the regulations of the Ecole de Rome, was exhibited at the Salon of 1852.