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 :. | Women at the Well | Departure of Three-Masted Boats at Croix-de-Vie | Sailor-s Cross | Paul Signac | Port |
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Duccio
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CARLEVARIS, Luca
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Agnolo Gaddi
Italian Early Renaissance Painter, ca.1345-1396 Son of Taddeo Gaddi. Through both his brother Giovanni and his father, Agnolo was heir to the Giottesque tradition and to a successful family enterprise, which he directed with enormous success up to the turn of the 15th century. He is first mentioned as a painter in 1369, when he assisted his brother Giovanni and Giovanni da Milano in decorations for Urban V (reg 1362-70) in the Vatican. Although he probably did not assume full responsibility for the workshop until his brother Giovanni death, he must have begun accepting his own commissions as early as the 1370s. The nature of his early work and whether it included an altarpiece dated 1375 (Parma, G.N., 435), however, remains a matter of debate. Logical or likely though it may be, the notion that this early activity developed out of his brother Giovanni still little-known art is hypothetical. Whereas the works grouped around Giovanni name are all small panels, Agnolo was an artist who, like his father, excelled in wall painting. Indeed, three monumental fresco cycles (see below), in the Castellani Chapel (painted c. 1384) and the choir (painted c. 1388-93) of Santa Croce, Florence, and the chapel of the Sacra Cintola (doc. 1393-5) in Prato Cathedral, constitute the artist most notable surviving works and offer a basis for reconstructing the content and chronology of his oeuvre.