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 :. | Entrance to the Port of Honfleur | Bay | Departure of Three-Masted Boats at Croix-de-Vie | Landscape | Impression |
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Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta
July 26, 1870 - October 31, 1945 Spanish Basque painter. He studied in Paris in 1891, coming under the influence of Impressionism and of the group of Catalan painters around Santiago Rusieol. His visit to Andalusia in 1892 provided the key to his later work, leading him to replace the grey tonalities of his Paris paintings with more brightly coloured images of Spanish folkloric subjects and of male or female figures in regional dress, for example Merceditas (1911/13; Washington, DC, N.G.A.). Zuloaga turned to Castilian subjects in works such as Segoviano and Toreros de Pueblo (both 1906; both Madrid, Mus. A. Contemp.) after the defeat suffered by Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898; like the group of writers known as the Generation of 98, with whom he was associated and who were among his most articulate supporters, he sought to encourage the regeneration of his country culture but with a critical spirit..
Peter Hansen
Peter Marius Hansen (13 May 1868, Faaborg - 6 October 1928, Faaborg) was a Danish painter who became one of the Fynboerne or "Funen Painters" group living and working on the island of Funen. Hansen attended the Copenhagen Technical School before studying under Kristian Zahrtmann at the Kunstnernes Frie Studieskoler (1884 - 1890). His travels included the Netherlands (1892 and 1909), and several periods in Italy from 1899 where he was in Civita d'Antino with Zahrtmann (1904) and in Pompei with Theodor Philipsen (1919 - 21). He also travelled to Belgium and Paris in 1909. His eldest son, David Shane Hansen (1888-1909) would become one of the leading organizers of the 1909 general strike in Barcelona, Spain. He was killed by military forces July 27th 1909. Peter Hansen would comment that his son had become a great martyr in the rising Spanish Anarchist movement that was sweeping Spain. It was during this time that Peter's art began to reflect the pain he suffered at the loss of his son.
Gregorio Lopes
Gregorio Lopes (c. 1490 - 1550) was one of the most important Renaissance painters from Portugal. Gregorio Lopes was educated in the workshop of Jorge Afonso, the court painter of King Manuel I. Later he himself became court painter for both Manuel I and for his successor, John III. In 1514 he married the daughter of Jorge Afonso, and in 1520 was knighted by Prince Jorge de Lencastre and entered the Order of Santiago. The work of Gregorio Lopes mainly consists of painted religious altarpieces for various churches and monasteries in central Portugal. Between 1520 and 1525 he worked (together with Jorge Leal) in painting altarpieces for the Saint Francis Convent of Lisbon. Also in the 1520s he painted panels for the Church of Paraeso (Paradise), also in Lisbon. In his first fase, Gregorio Lopes also worked in Sesimbra, Setebal and in the Monastery of Ferreirim, in this latter case together with Cristevao de Figueiredo and Garcia Fernandes. The painter moved in the 1530s to the city of Tomar, where he painted various panels for the Round Church of the Convent of Christ (1536 - 1539) and the main altarpiece of the Church of Saint John the Baptist (1538 - 1539). His last known works include altarpieces for the Convent of Santos-o-Novo in Lisbon (1540) and the Valverde Convent, near Évora (1545).