Late 19th-century French paintings

 

Paul Cezanne (1839 – 1906)

Cezanne was born in Aix-en-Provence, where he maintained ties all of his life.  Although Cezanne is often credited with advancing painting so that artists like Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso could forward it farther still, it was Camille Pissarro who showed Cezanne the beauty of landscape painting.  The two met in Paris at the Academy Suisse in the 1861.  For two years, 1872 – 1874, the two artists painted together near Pissarro’s home at Pontoise.  While Cezanne’s painting was certainly informed by Pissarro’s Impressionist sensibilities, his own work focused on the geometric construction of a composition.  Cezanne’s interest in giving painted objects mass pervades his landscape work and can be seen even in the structure of his brushwork.  

Paul Cézanne’s Maison dans la verdure, painted circa 1881, was first exhibited in Paris at Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in 1926 as a part of Trente ans d’art independent. Paul Cézanne is considered to be one of the greatest of the Post-Impressionists, whose works and ideas were influential in the aesthetic development of many 20th-century artists and art movements, especially Cubism. Cézanne's paintings grew out of Impressionism and eventually challenged all the conventional values of painting in the 19th century through its insistence on personal expression and on the integrity of the painting itself.

Camille Pissarro (1830 -1903)

Born in St. Thomas, the Virgin Islands, Pissarro was sent by his French father to a boarding school near Paris at the age of 12.  He returned to the Caribbean when his formal education was complete.  However Pissarro spent so much of his time avoiding taking up his father’s business that his parents chose to support him in his professed calling as a painter.  Back in Paris Pissarro developed his interest painting from nature by working in the outskirts of town along the Seine.  Eventually he moved farther into the countryside and settled in Pontoise.  Although it did not help him sell canvases, getting out of Paris and out-of-doors allowed Pissarro to explore his understanding that in painting an object and the light that illuminates it had to be treated as inseparable.

Rue des Roches au Valhermeil à Auvers-sur-Oise, painted 1880, by Camille Pissarro, was first exhibited in Paris, 35 Boulevard des Capucines as a part of Sixiéme Exposition de peinture in 1881. He is viewed as one of the founders of impressionism. Pissarro studied painting in Paris at the Barbizon school where he was attracted to the poetic realism of Camille Corot. Pissarro later discarded Corot's dark colors in favor of a more atmospheric treatment of landscape. With Edouard Manet and other avant-garde painters, Pissarro exhibited at the Salon des Refuses (1863), and his connections grew closer with such Impressionists as Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 – 1919)

Renoir was born in Limoges but moved with his family to Paris when he was three years old.  He began his working life as a porcelain painter.  When the company was bankrupted after he had been there for only 4 years Renoir turned to canvas.  Meeting Claude Monet, the two painted directly from nature.  The Impressionist brush work evokes a sense of immediacy, almost veracity, that what is painted is a faithful report of what the artist saw.  Renoir transferred this technique to social settings, painting intimate portraits of individuals and groups.  Still-lifes and cut flower paintings were yet another opportunity to explore intimacy with the Impressionist technique.  Flower size is magnified for benefit of viewer instead of being scaled down to fit the picture frame.  On the day he died, Renoir was still at work, painting a bouquet of anemones cut from his garden.  The last words he spoke were about his flower painting, “I think I am beginning to understand something about it.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Vase de Fleurs, was created with careful attention to light and shadow. Vase de Fleurs exhibits the artist’s ability to replicate the pure luxuriance of a floral arrangement. Renoir is credited with once saying of his flower pictures, “What seems to me most significant about our movement (Impressionism) is that… I am at liberty to paint flowers and call them flowers, without their needing to tell a story.” Renoir was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. His early works were typically Impressionist snapshots of real life, full of sparkling color and light. By the mid-1880s, however, he had broken with the movement to apply a more disciplined, formal technique to portraits and figure paintings.

Paul Signac (1863 - 1935)

Signac was born in Paris to wealthy shopkeepers.  He planned to study architecture but decided to become a painter after seeing Claude Monet’s work.  Early in is his career he was introduced to Pointillism by George Seraut and became faithful devotee.  Fascinated by color theory, Signac employed the small dots of red, green and blue color rather than the short brush strokes of blended colors used by the Impressionists.  An enthusiastic sailor, Signac traveled throughout the Mediterranean and along the entirety of France’s coastline, drawing and painting along the way.  Signac’s life can be read in his canvases as he divided his time between a home on the French Riviera where he painted coastal scenes and Paris, the inspiration for his townscapes. 

Paul Signac’s Rue de la Station, Asnières, painted in 1884, was first exhibited in Paris at Salon des Indépendants titled as L’ombre dans la rue de la Station, Asnières. One of the principal Neo-Impressionist painters, Paul Signac, worked with in creating pointillism. Unlike Seurat, he had virtually no formal training and taught himself to paint by studying the works of Georges Seurat, Claude Monet, and others. After he and Seurat met, they developed their technique of painting with dots or points, which led to the name Pointillism.

Henri Martin (1860 - 1943)

Born in Toulouse, Martin was trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts there. After winning the Grand Prix at his school in Toulouse, Martin found approval from the traditional arts community in Paris.  His work was awarded the Gold Medal at the Paris Salon of 1889 and he won the Grand Prize at the World’s Fair in 1900.  Martin combined traditional subject matter with techniques learned from the Neo-Impressionists.  Landscapes and coastal views were rendered in short brush strokes reminiscent of Pointillism. 

Le Port de Collioure by Henri Martin, painted circa 1920, is a fine example of Martin’s mature style. He began his art studies at the Toulouse School of the Fine Arts in 1877, under the tutelage of Jules Garipuy. In 1879, Martin relocated to Paris and was able to study in Jean-Paul Laurens' studio with the help of a scholarship. Influenced by the Neo-Impressionists, Martin used a Pointillism technique to give his work an ethereal quality.