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Born in the Breton city of Nantes on 21 September 1829, Auguste Toulmouche must have observed great variety in the cultural life of his hometown. Nantes was one of the largest ports in France, and the diversity of people and languages that filled the city was notable. Little is known about the circumstances of Toulmouche’s early years, although his uncle was apparently a sculptor and may have given the boy his first lessons in art.
 
What is known is that Toulmouche was studying design with another local sculptor, Amedeo Rene Menard, beginning in 1841. Three years later, he was learning painting from a portraitist named Biron who also taught in Nantes. With his fundamental art education completed, Toulmouche left for Paris in 1846 at the age of 17. There he entered the independent studio of Charles Gleyre, the Swiss painter later known for his association with the Impressionists who also began their Paris training under his guidance. Gleyre’s atelier offered Toulmouche exactly what he needed—quiet guidance in the traditional French curriculum of learning to draw in front of classical plaster casts before learning to paint from live models. By 1848, he was ready for his Salon debut.
 
The year 1848, however, was less than auspicious for beginning a career in any field other than the military. Revolution swept through Europe, and through France for the third time in fifty years. For a scant four years, France was again a republic, only to revert to an empire when Napoleon III declared himself emperor in 1852. For Toulmouche, this turn of events proved fortunate. At the 1852 Salon, he not only earned a third class medal, but his painting, La Fille, was acquired by the emperor himself. The following year, in 1853, Empress Eugénie was so pleased with Toulmouche’s rendering of a domestic genre scene, The First Step, that she too made a purchase. 
 
With success at the Salon and imperial approval of his art, Toulmouche’s reputation was assured. He continued to specialize in depictions of charming domestic scenes of mothers and children or of young women in the throes of various romantic dilemmas. Two works from 1858, both of them exhibited at the Salon of 1859, are typical. In The Lesson, a beautiful young mother reads aloud to her equally appealing daughter from La Fontaine’s fable, The Grasshopper and the Ant; both figures are dressed in exquisitely elegant gowns, and there is a suitably moral lesson being provided. Similarly, in The Prayer, a young boy leans against his mother’s knees as she guides him through bedtime prayers. Behind them, the child’s bed draped in lush white fabric provides a counterpoint to the opulent sky blue moiré of his mother’s skirt. This type of image, sometimes referred to as Costume Painting, found a ready market with both middle class and upper class audiences, and continued to bring Toulmouche professional success and acclaim. In 1861, he won a second class medal at the annual Salon.
 
As a practitioner of Costume Painting, Toulmouche was one of a group of artists who adapted the emotional expressiveness found in earlier history painting to the depiction of romantic narratives based on everyday life. There is clearly a relationship to acting techniques in this imagery as well; Toulmouche’s figures express a range of sentiments through stylized gestures that would have been part of a standard theatrical repertoire. Other artists who are associated with this specialized type of paining include Jules Emile Saintin, Joaquin Pallares y Allustante, and Charles Joseph Frederick Soulacroix.
 
Toulmouche’s role in the history of art was unexpectedly altered in 1862 when he married one of Claude Monet’s cousins just at the moment when Monet’s father was looking for someone to “supervise” his son’s art studies in Paris. Naturally, Toulmouche’s reputation as a successful Salon painter made him the logical choice. When Monet arrived in Paris in November 1862, Toulmouche directed him immediately to Gleyre’s studio, commenting that: “He will teach you to do a picture.” [i] Monet began with a willing spirit, but soon chafed under Gleyre’s insistence that he paint in the idealized Academic style rather than attempt to capture the image as he actually saw it. Nonetheless, it was at Gleyre’s that Monet met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille, all of whom became his close companions. As for Toulmouche, no doubt he was glad to have placed his recalcitrant cousin where he could study art, while simultaneously keeping peace in the family.
 
During the 1860s, Toulmouche refined his style, and began exploring more complex compositional structures. Works such as The Hesitant Fiancée, 1866, demonstrates a new confidence in the intricate composition of four women who attempt to persuade the reluctant (and gorgeously dressed) bride to overcome her fears. At the beginning of the next decade, in 1870, Toulmouche received the Legion of Honor award, surely a monumental accomplishment for someone from a modest Breton background.

Over the next twenty years, Toulmouche’s painting also showed glimmers of influence from cousin Claude. Although remaining a resolutely academic painter, there was nonetheless a lightening of his palette in the 1870s as well as the incorporation of Japanese elements in images like Afternoon Idyll from 1874. It is equally tempting to wonder whether Monet’s theatrically costumed portrait of Camille Doncieux as La Japonaise, 1875-76, wasn’t influenced in part by what critic Emile Zola described as “Toulmouche’s delicious dolls” [délicieuses poupées de Toulmouche”].
 
Toulmouche’s work was also admired in the United States. Just as in Paris, the modest size of his paintings, coupled with their visual appeal, made them fashionable among American collectors. He even received favorable mention in an otherwise disparaging overview of French art published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1877. [ii] At the Exposition Universelle in 1878, Toulmouche’s painting was again honored with a third class medal.
 
He died in Paris on 16 October 1890 at age 61.
 
                                                            Janet Whitmore, Ph.D.
 
 
Selected museum collections:

Louvre
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts
 
 
[i] John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, Fourth revised edition, (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973), 70.

[ii] “Contemporary Art in France”, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, No. CCCXXII., March 1877, vol. LIV. (481-503), 488.

The eldest son of Antoine-Jean Bail, a painter from Lyon, Franck-Antoine, like his father and his younger brother Joseph, painted genre scenes, still lifes, landscapes from the region around Fontainebleau. He also completed portraits for which he gained a solid reputation. He studied with his father Antoine-Jean Bail (1830-1918) and in the atelier of Jean-Léon Gérôme, and began exhibiting at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1878. He received an honorable mention at the Salon in 1889, a third class medal in 1900, and a second medal in 1904. Perhaps not as well known as his brother Joseph, his reputation is nonetheless well established among the genre painters of the latter part of the nineteenth-century. 
 
Similar to Théodule Ribot, his daughter Louise and son Germain, another family of 19th century realist painters, the Bails worked in Paris where they had studios on the IsleSaint Louis. The first, at 17-quai d’Anjou in the hotel Lauzun, had a spacious kitchen that served as a wonderful background for the Bails’ paintings of cooks, scullions, and copper ware cleaners. When not in Paris, the three artists moved to Bois-Le-Roi near Fontainebleau, where they spent their summers and found other subjects for their canvases, namely studies of the forest of Fontainebleau or genre scenes representing rural themes.
Jules Worms was born into a family of Parisian shopkeepers in the early years of the July Monarchy, a period in French history that is characterized by the cultivation of a thriving comic tradition in the visual arts. During the 1830s and 1840s, this was particularly evident in the satirical newspapers such as Le Charivari, which published the razor-edged political cartoons of Honoré Daumier and Charles Philipon. The young Worms began his art career within this milieu, working as an illustrator after having learned lithography in the studio of an “overworked designer for periodicals,” perhaps Philipon. [i]
 
Worms’ mastery of drawing and lithography, however, propelled him quickly into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts where he began studying in 1849, at the age of seventeen. Jean-Baptiste-Adolf Lafosse, a painter of historical scenes, encouraged the young artist to develop his skill in creating anecdotal history scenes with a comic edge. In fact, Worms’ debut painting at the Salon in 1859 was entitled Dragoon Making Love to a Maid on a Bench in the Place Royale, a gently humorous comment on contemporary romance.
 
In the early 1860s, Worms made the first of many trips to Spain where he was immediately enchanted with Spanish culture and customs. Like many of his colleagues, Worms undoubtedly spent hours studying Spanish paintings at the Galerie Espagnole, established at the Louvre in 1838. This unique collection of Spanish art was assembled under the auspices of King Louis-Philippe who had appointed the Belgian-English aristocrat, Isidore-Justin-Séverin Taylor, as his official agent. Taylor was an occasional painter, but more significantly, he was a skilled negotiator with an extensive European network of contacts among artists and writers. From 1835 to 1838, he traveled through Spain acquiring a stellar group of paintings for the “citizen king” of France. When the Galerie Espagnole opened its doors on 7 January 1838, the French public was treated to works by El Greco, Goya, Murillo, Ribera, Valdés Leal, Velázquez, and Zurbarán as well as many less famous painters. [ii]
 
Within the arts community, the influence of this unprecedented collection was both immediate and profound. Spanish art acquired a fresh cultural legitimacy independent of the classical tradition of the Academy, instilling a new appreciation of dramatic lighting, expressive brushwork, and subject matter based on ordinary life. By the time that political changes forced the Galerie Espagnole to close on 1 January 1849, Spanish art had become an significant source of inspiration for many young artists in France. 
 
Although the next generation of French artists, including Jules Worms, had only a brief time to appreciate the Spanish paintings directly, traveling to Spain soon became a popular activity. Manet’s famously unsuccessful trip [he hated the food] nonetheless produced numerous paintings influenced by Spanish artists. Rosa Bonheur, a hardier traveler, journeyed to Spain on horseback to enjoy the semi-arid landscape so different from the rich fields of France. And Jules Worms was so enchanted with Spanish culture and customs that it became a primary theme for the rest of his career. His subject matter was typically based on the everyday life of the people, often coupled with a genial social comment on human foibles. In The Spy, for example, Worms depicted a colorfully clad majo spying on his beloved, who seems to be receiving the attentions of another man on the opposite side of a sunlit plaza. Clearly, the jealous suitor is furious as he clenches his fist and glares at the chatting couple while hiding in the shadow of an imposing lion-topped pillar. The viewer is left to imagine the next episode in such a tumultuous scenario. 
 
Following his initial trip to Spain, Worms returned repeatedly, even living for six weeks in Grenada in 1871 with the Catalan painter, Jose Marià Fortuny whom he had met in Paris. The resulting sketchbooks were filled with drawings of costumes, customs and local buildings, providing Worms with a lifetime of material for future paintings. 
 
On his return to Paris in late 1871, Worms resumed his work as an illustrator. The precarious economy in the years immediately after the Franco-Prussian war meant that many artists struggled to find work; Worms was among the more fortunate in his knowledge of lithography—a marketable skill in hard times. During this period, he designed illustrations for Jean de la Fontaine’s famous Fables (1873), Louis de Chévigné’s Les Contes rémois (1877), and Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1884).
 
Paintings from the 1870s and 1880s were largely based on Spanish subject matter. Images like Sheep-Shearing in Granada (1872), An Aunt-in-Law (1873) or The Dance of the Vito at Granada (1876) were popular with the French public, and increasingly with American art collectors as well. The size of the paintings is generally modest—and therefore suitable for a bourgeois home—and the subject matter frequently reveals the universality of everyday human experiences. Even in the twenty-first century, paintings such as First Cigarette or Distracted Barber may conjure up familiar shared experiences.
 
Worms continued to exhibit his paintings at the annual Salon until the 1890s. In the early twentieth century he began writing his memoirs of travels in Spain, eventually publishing them as Souvenirs d’Espagne, impressions de voyages et croquis in 1906. (Paris, H. Floury). He continued to paint at least up until World War I, and his paintings continued to sell consistently in both France and the United States. Jules Worms died in Paris at the age of 92 on 25 November 1924.
 
                                                                         by Janet Whitmore, Ph.D.
 
 
 
Museum Collections

Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nancy
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes
Museum of Fine Arts, Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts
 
Salon exhibitions

Société des Artistes Françaises, Paris
1859: Dragoon Making Love to a Maid on a Bench in the Place Royale
1861: Arrest for Debt
1867: Medal
1868: Medal
1869: Medal
1876: Departure for the Revue; Awarded Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur
 
Exposition Universelle

1878: Third Class Medal
1889: New Medal

 
[i] Edward Strahan [Earl Shinn]. The Art Treasures of America, vol. II, (Philadelphia, 1880). 54. 
 
[ii] See Jeannine Baticle’s essay “The Galerie Espagnole of Louis-Philippe” in Manet/Velazquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting, (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003). 175-189.

 

The 19th century proved to be one of the greatest periods in English Sporting art, and one of the most sought after artist during the early days was John Frederick Herring, Sr. (1895-1865). Herring captured many of the most famous racehorses of the time on canvas, but there were many other artists whose work was also in demand; among them was Harry Hall.
 

Born in the fashionable eastern town of Cambridge in 1816, it appears that Hall may have received some of his artistic training from another great Sporting artist – Abraham Cooper (1787-1868). 
 

Hall’s made his first appearance at Tattersalls – working on a number of their publications, including British Racehorses, The Sporting Review, The Field and The Illustrated London News.   His earliest exhibited work was a portrait of Edward Wetherby, Esq. that was shown at the Royal Academy (RA) in 1838 while he was living in St. John’s Wood. It appears that he made the move to Newmarket towards the end of the 1840’s to concentrate on painting horse portraits and other animal subjects – these included shooting, poaching and rabbiting scenes. He continued to submit works to the RA until 1864, among the paintings shown were: Thoroughbred mares and foal (1846), Hunters, the property of F.L. Popham, Esq. (1851) and Favorite Hunters, the property of S.H. Arkwright, Esq., Hampton Court(1863).
 

Hall was also a frequent exhibitor at the British Institution, showing his first work there – Interior of a stable with Cart Horses – in 1847 and continuing to exhibit until 1866. However, it appears that he favored exhibiting at the Royal Society of British Artists (RBA). His exhibited first exhibited work at the RBA was in 1839 – A Brood Mare – and he continued sending works until 1875, exhibiting 27 works in all. Among the paintings shown were: Portrait of Rhedycinz, ridden by F. Butler – Winner of the Oaks at Epsom (1851); The Poacher Disturbed (1857); Rufus, a hunter, the property of John Fairman, Esq. (1861) and Disputed Possession (1875).
 

Working in Newmarket for more than 40 years Harry Hall received numerous commissions and after Herring, Sr.’s death in 1865, it appears that he became the most sought after animal portraitist. Among his important commissions were: Portrait of Irish Birdcatcher (currently in the collection of The Baltimore Museum of Art); Iroquios (the first American bred horse to win the English Derby); Sir Tatton Sykes (winner of the St. Leger in 1846), Blink Bonny (winner of both the Derby and Oaks in 1857); Blair Athol (winner of the Derby and St. Leger in 1864) and Count Lagrange’s horse Gladiateur (winner of the Derby and St. Leger of 1865).
 

Like a number of his contemporaries, including J.F. Herring, F.C. Turner, E. Corbet, and Abraham Cooper, many of Hall’s racehorse portraits – 114 in all – were used for engravings in The Sporting Magazine.
 
His last professional visit, outside the United Kingdom, was to M. Lefevre’s racing establishment near Chantilly where he was commissioned to paint portraits of numerous horses including Mortemer and Flageolet.  Hall died on April 22, 1882 from an attack of paralysis … at that time he was finishing a commission for Prince Soltykoff of his horse Lucetta, winner of the Cambridgeshire in 1880.
 

Today many of his works are in important collections of Sporting art throughout the world and are a wonderful picture of the great racing tradition in England during the 19th century.

            Considered one of the greatest and most influential painters and printmakers of all art history, Rembrandt van Rijn stands out as one of the most solitary and unapproachable personalities, who struck his own style and stamped his influence for all posterity. In his etched works, his unique position is realized to even greater advantage than in his painted works; Hardly any etchers, then or since, achieved the same mastery of medium and expression that Rembrandt possessed. In the range of his genius, Rembrandt still stands alone in art history. Whether a landscape, a genre scene, a religious moment, or a still life—he illumined all with his technical and stylistic powers, never failing to pierce to the heart of things.

Born in 1606 as the ninth child of a wealthy miller in the town of Leiden, young Rembrandt attended Latin school until 1620 and studied at the University of Leiden. Even at a young age, his interest and ability in the arts was apparent, and he came to study with local artist Jacob van Swanenburgh, working for three years to develop his formative abilities. In the early 1620s, Rembrandt spent a precious six months studying with Pieter Lastman, a great artist in Amsterdam. In 1624, the young Rembrandt opened his own studio in Leiden, and he began accepting students in 1627, including Gerard Dou.

As proof of Rembrandt’s individual genius, it is interesting to note that in an age when every young artist made an obligatory trip to Italy, the young Rembrandt did not. As a pupil of the classicist Lastman, he despised the conventional tour. He was convinced that the true realization of his and his country’s art lay in the limited view of the Dutch interior and amid the quiet beauty of uneventful landscape.

After leaving school in the early 1620s, Rembrandt spent several years experimenting with the technique of etching. His earliest undated prints were produced about 1626 and the earliest dated prints were done in 1628. Rembrandt expressed great genius in numerous series of studies, portraits, and Biblical subjects. His etchings numbered more than three hundred and were well received due to the fine detail of the pieces. The execution of the plates was a masterful accomplishment in that time in history.

By 1632, Rembrandt’s reputation was well established. He permanently settled in Amsterdam, and there he received many commissions, allowing him a life of prosperity. In 1634, he married a wealthy woman named Saskia, and for the next ten years, they led a comfortable, happy life of luxury and extravagance, building a family and enjoying the success of Rembrandt’s art. They bought a luxuriously large house in the artistic Jewish Quarter, an indulgence that later contributed to his financial ruin.

Tragedy too soon eclipsed this happy period. In the 1630s, the couple’s first three children died shortly after birth—only their fourth child Titus survived to adulthood. Then, shortly after Titus’s birth, dear wife Saskia died, possibly of tuberculosis. Rembrandt’s drawings of Saskia on her sick and death bed are among his most moving works.

After Saskia’s death, Rembrandt kept other female companions, including Geertje Dircx, who worked as Titus’s nanny, and Hendrickje Stoffels, who began as Remrandt’s maid. Even with small newfound joys, Rembrandt could not escape emotional hardship. Soon after birthing a healthy baby girl, Rembrandt’s faithful companion Hendrickje passed away. Then, just after marrying in 1668, Rembrandt’s song Titus and his young wife both died. The artist was once again all but alone.

Throughout his life, Rembrandt lived beyond his means, buying art (including bidding up his own work), prints (often used in his paintings) and rarities, which probably caused a court arrangement to avoid his bankruptcy in 1656 when he sold most of his paintings and a large collection of antiquities. The sale list survives and gives good insight into his collections, which included Old Master paintings and drawings, busts of the Roman Emperors, suits of Japanese armor among and assorted Asian objects, and collections of natural history and minerals.

In spite of his personal tragedies, Rembrandt never ceased working, the one constant in his life. As an artist, he made no compromises. Indeed, first and foremost, his life was dedicated to his passion for creating art.

Throughout his whole work, Rembrandt accepted all variations of man, woman, and land that lay to his hand. He never sought the external ideal of beauty, which he felt lacked the distinct voice of true humanity. He appreciated that physical realism is less a hindrance than an aid to the rendering of spiritual significance—both religious and secular—in art.

In his lifetime, Rembrandt created countless self-portraits, like a string of autobiographies that reveal the progression of his physical and emotional states. Still today, he is renowned a master of the self-portrait in both etching and paint.

Rembrandt’s etched work can be divided into three periods, each with a predominant characteristic. In the first period (1628-1639), the pure etched line is the most common medium. The young artist was accustomed to holding back exuberant passion, using careful and even restrained draftsmanship.

By 1640, in the second period, Rembrandt’s work with the dry-point, which began in the late 1630s, became a significant factor in his style, and its use in heightening the effect of light and shade is little by little more adequately realized. Attention to the tone of the whole composition, apart from the mere design, is characteristic of Rembrandt’s developing power, though this end is still gained largely by means of close lines of shading.

In the third period (from 1651 through his death), there is a remarkable increase in the vigor and breadth of the handling. The lines of shading are more open, the forms less conventional, and the touch truer, more spontaneous, and less evidently conscious. Drypoint was used as much as etching, and chiaroscuro, now of-the-moment, was often achieved by a more summary method, though still rendered in some plates by closely hatched shading.

In his etching, Rembrandt is open to adapting all elements of life and art that made a passing impression on his mind, which best displays his constant freshness of vision. Like all the greatest creators, he seldom exhibited a need for forced originality. He used familiar themes and felt no compunction at copying other artists. Yet, his reused themes and ideas show a readiness of appreciation, not poverty of imagination.

His pre-eminent place in art depends as much on his untiring powers of self-education as on any extraordinary brilliance of innate genius. While other artists acquiesced in contemporary fame, public, Rembrandt still took infinite pains to re-explore visual paths, sometimes leading him away from general popularity, but constantly reaching for the highest level of human achievement.


Museum collections include:

  • The Louvre, Paris
  • Metropolitan Museum, New York
  • Art Institute of Chicago
  • Frick Collection, New York
  • Prado, Madrid, Spain
  • Alte Pinakothek, Munich
  • The Hermitage, St. Petersburg
  • Rijks Museum, Amsterdam
  • The Rembrandt House, Amsterdam
  • National Gallery of Washington DC
  • Pitti Museum, Florence
  • National Gallery of London
  • The Royal Collection, London
  • The British Museum, London
  • Los Angeles County Museum
  • J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
  • The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
  • The Jewish Museum, New York
  • Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland
  • Biblioteca Nacional de España
  • National Gallery of Scotland
  • National Gallery Museum of Florence
  • National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
  • National Gallery of Victoria, Australia
  • National Museum Kassel, Germany 
  • National Museum of Art of Romania
  • Royal Museum of Art, Belgium
  • Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires
  • Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon
  • Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil
  • Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal
  • Museum of Berlin
  • Museum of Dublin
  • Indianapolis Museum of Art,
  • Detroit Institute of the Arts, Michigan
  • National Museum of Stockholm, Sweden
  • Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
  • Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
  • Museum of Fine Arts, San Francisco
  • Philadelphia Museum of Art
  • Dallas Museum of Art
  • Yale University Art Gallery,
    New Haven, CT
  • Armand Hammer Museum of Art at University of California Los Angeles
  • Harvard University Art Museums
  • Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri

as well as countless other museums, galleries, and private collections around the world

Born in Limoges, France, Pierre Auguste Renoir moved to Paris with his family when he was just four years old. At the tender age of thirteen, young Renoir worked at a porcelain factory where he learned his earliest lessons of color and drawing and became a skilled decorator of fine china. The budding artist often visited the Louvre, which was still half-palace and half-museum. There the young budding artist began his formative studies of the French masters.  

In 1862, Renoir joined the classical painting school of Charles Gleyre, where he met Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille, and Claude Monet, who were all exploring plein air painting and studying the effects of color and light.

He first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1864, but his recognition did not come for nearly a decade. Through the 1960s, he sometimes could hardly afford to even buy paints. Finally in 1874, he displayed six works at the first Salon des Réfuses, the pioneer exhibition of the Impressionists. With a new avant-garde audience, Renoir found acceptance and recognition of his extraordinary abilities.

Although he was one of the most controversial Impressionists, Renoir eventually established himself with the general public and eventually participated in the official Salons. By 1880, he also began concentrating on painting the female figure. But Renoir never gave up his roots as a traditional arts craftsman and as an admirer of the old masters. In the early 1880s Renoir had the feeling of exhaustion and that he had done everything he could do with Impressionist style.

Starting in 1881, Renoir traveled to Algeria, Spain, and Italy, absorbing the styles and techniques of Delacroix, Velazquez, Raphael, and Titian. Through the 1880s, he worked with the Italian style of restrained brushwork and empathetic modeling of subjects, focusing on details and more elaborate lines. In 1883, he spent a prolific summer painting at Guernsey, an island in the English Channel.

As Renoir matured, his style changed again, growing softer and more sketchily outlined. He used very strong colors—often reds and oranges—and thick brush strokes. His preferred subjects were voluptuous young female nudes.

Stricken with severe arthritis, by 1903 he was hardly able to hold the brush. Yet, still determined to paint, he resorted to strapping the brush to his wrist. This improvised technique affected his style in the last decade of his life, but it allowed him to continue painting through the last years of his life. At the end of his life in 1919, Renoir had the rare opportunity to see his own paintings hanging at the Louvre alongside the masterpieces that influenced him as a young boy.

Museum Collections include…

  • Art Institute of Chicago
  • Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge
  • J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
  • Louvre Museum, Paris
  • Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
  • Minneapolis Institute of Arts
  • Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
  • National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
  • National Gallery of Canada, National Gallery, London
  • Norton Museum of Art, Florida
  • State Hermitage Museum, Russia
  • Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums, Scotland
  • Accademia Carrara, Italy
  • Appleton Museum of Art, Florida
  • Chrysler Museum, Virginia
  • Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio
  • Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio
  • Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
  • Folkwang Museum, Germany
  • Joslyn Art Museum, Nebraska
  • Le Chateau-Musee de Dieppe, France
  • Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Quebec
  • Musée d’Orsay, Paris
  • Musee des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux
  • Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
  • Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon
  • Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo, Brazil
  • National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo
  • National Museum, Sweden
  • New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana
  • Norton Simon Museum, California
  • Portland Museum of Art, Maine
  • Reading Public Museum, Pennsylvania
  • Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel
  • Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Connecticut
  • Wright Museum of Art at Beloit College, Wisconsin

Surprisingly while Matisse may be the most recognized name in modern art after Picasso, his graphic work, even today, is not widely known. As one of the most sought-after and highly collected artists of the 20th century it seems curious that this should be the case. One reason may be that color is excluded almost entirely from his graphic work, which would certainly give a collector of his paintings pause. However, closer inspection reveals that Matisse employed graphic techniques to specifically explore the nature of the human figure in a very personal and intimate way, which had important implications for his entire oeuvre. Matisse produced a remarkable series of three etched portraits in 1914 featuring Fanny Galanis, the wife of a close friend and fellow artist. In Fanny de Face, he employs a narrow, vertical format in the Japanese style. The immediacy and naturalism achieved with such brevity of detail is a testament to his grasp of the potential of etching from the very beginning. Sketched directly onto the etching plate, Matisse was known to favor working as quickly as possible to capture the essence of his subject. This plate would have been completed in three to five minutes according to contemporary accounts by close associates of the artist.

Unlike Picasso who would single-handedly transform printmaking techniques at intervals throughout his career, Matisse was content to adhere to traditional methods. It was the subject rather than the medium, which was the catalyst for his life-long interest in printmaking. Noted Matisse scholar Margrit Hahnloser points out, “His models were not made in accordance with the classical idea of beauty although he frequently referred to them. He distorted figures to enhance the expressive power of a picture, making them serve the synthesis of the composition.” Upside Down Nude on Checkered Background (1929) illustrates this observation admirably: Crouching and twisting yet perfectly balanced, Matisse utilizes one long sinuous line to unite her foot, calf, buttocks, back and elbow. The simple yet elegant backdrop of open cross-hatching emphasizes the sensuous and liquid character of the model to maximum effect.

It seems clear, that for Matisse, printmaking was a natural extension and a further refinement of his passionate and abiding dialogue with the model. “What interests me most is neither still life, nor landscapes, but the human figure,” explained the artist in 1908 in one of his first public statements on art. “The model, for others, is a piece of information. In my case it is something, which arrests me. It is the source of my energy.” In 1927 the first volume of lithographs by Matisse was published. Entitled Ten Dancers, it featured different poses by Henriette, the model who came to embody dance for the artist. In Standing Dancer, Leaning, “she is presented in delicately graduated tones of light and shade. The tutu breaks the flow of the body’s lines, extending decoratively into the room but, suggesting the dynamics of dance in the flying material."

Individual, intuitive and irrepressible Matisse’s graphic work has only recently been the object of serious scholarly research. With new monographs and exhibitions devoted to this facet of his creativity, his prints will surely receive the much wider audience they deserve. Like his contemporary Picasso, Matisse continues to delight and surprise us with each new aspect of his art we make the time to consider.

 

 

Museum collections include…

  • Art Institute of Chicago
  • Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
  • Guggenheim Museum, New York
  • Museum of Modern Art, New York
  • Hermitage Museum, Russia
  • Matisse Museum, Nice
  • Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
  • Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota
  • Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
  • Museum of Modern Art, New York
  • National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
  • Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC
  • Courtauld Institute of Art, London, UK
  • Tate Gallery, London, UK
  • Kunsthaus, Zurich
  • Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland   
  • Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena
  • Los Angeles County Museum of Art
  • San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
  • San Diego Museum of Art, California
  • Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California
  •   Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
  •  Dallas Museum of Art, Texas
  • Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
  • Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
  • Minneapolis Institute of Arts
  • Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio
  • Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio
  • Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
  • Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach
  • Philadelphia Museum of Art
  • Royal Museum of Art, Belgium
  • National Museums of Wales
  • National Gallery of Australia
  • National Galleries of Scotland,
  • National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
  • National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
  • National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
  • National Gallery, London, UK
  • State Museums of Florence
  • State Museums of Copenhagen
  • Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid
  • Museums of Geneva, Switzerland   
  • Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil
  • Baltimore Museum of Art
  • Kunst Indeks Danmark
  • Musée de Grenoble, France
  • Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris   
  • Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux
  • Musée Matisse, Le Cateau, France   
  • Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri
  • University of Oxford Museum of Art
  • Harvard University Art Museums
  • Brown University Art Gallery
  • Indiana University Art Museum
  • University of Chicago Museum of Art

…and countless other museums, galleries, and private collections around the world.

Pablo Picasso was undoubtedly the most famous artist of the twentieth century. During his artistic career, which lasted more than 75 years, he created thousands of works using all kinds of materials: paintings, sculptures, prints, and ceramics. He almost single-handedly created modern art. He changed art more profoundly than any other artist of this century. First famous for his pioneering role in Cubism, Picasso continued to develop his art with a pace and vitality comparable to the accelerated technological and cultural changes of the twentieth century. Each change embodied a radical new idea, and it might be said that Picasso lived several artistic lifetimes.

Picasso was born on October 25, 1881, in Malaga, Spain, the son of an artist Jose Ruiz and Maria Picasso. Rather than adopt the common name Ruiz, the young Picasso took the more uncommon name of his mother. Already an artistic prodigy at the age of 14, Picasso completed the one-month qualifying examination for the Academy of Fine Arts in Barcelona in one day. From there, he went to the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid. Then returning to Barcelona in 1900, he frequented the city’s famous cabaret, Els Quatra Gats—a favorite of local intellectuals and artists.

From 1901 to 1904, Picasso entered his so-called Blue Period, named for the blue tonality of Picasso’s paintings. During this time, he frequently changed his residence between Barcelona and Paris. He spent his days in Paris studying the masterworks at the Louvre and his nights enjoying the company of fellow artists at cabarets like the Lapin Agile.

In 1905 and 1906, Picasso’s color and mood radically changed. He became fascinated with the acrobats, clowns, and wandering families of the circus world. He started to paint in subtle pinks and grays, often highlighted in brighter tones. This period became known as his Rose Period.

In 1907, Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, considered the watershed work of the twentieth-century art and an emblem of the Cubist movement. Cubism was equally the creation of Picasso and Georges Braque, and from 1911 to 1913 the two men were in frequent contact.

For Picasso, the 1920s were years of rich artistic exploration and great productivity. Picasso continued to design theater sets and painted in Cubist, Classical, and Surreal modes. From 1929 to 1931, he pioneered wrought iron sculpture with his old friend Julio Gonzalez. In the early 1930’s, Picasso did a large quantity of graphic illustrations.

In late April 1937, the world learned the shocking news of the saturation bombing of the civilian target of Guernica, Spain by the Nazi Luftwaffe. Picasso responded with Guernica, his great anti-war painting.

During World War II, Picasso lived in Paris, where he turned his energy to the art of ceramics. From 1947 to 1950, he pursued new methods of lithography. The 1950’s saw the beginning of a number of large retrospective exhibits of his works. During this time, he began to paint a series of works conceived as free variations on old master paintings.

In the 1960’s, he produced a monumental 50-foot sculpture for the Chicago Civic Center. In 1970, Picasso donated more than 800 of his works to the Berenguer de Aguilar Palace Museum in Barcelona.

Pablo Picasso died on April 8, 1973 in southern France at the age of 91.

Museum collections include…

  • Art Institute of Chicago
  • Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
  • Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris
  • Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco
  • Guggenheim Museum, New York City
  • The Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg
  • Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France
  • Courtauld Institute of Art, London, UK
  • The Museum of Modern Art, NY
  • Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany
  • Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany
  • National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
  • National Gallery, London
  • National Gallery, Prague
  • National Gallery, Washington DC
  • National Gallery, Edinburgh
  • National Gallery, Australia, Canberra
  • National Gallery, Canada
  • Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.
  • Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK
  • Tate Gallery, London, Great Britain
  • Musée National Picasso de Paris
  • Musée Picasso d’Antibes
  • Musée Picasso de Vallauris
  • Museu Picasso de Barcelona
  • Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
  • Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
  • San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
  • Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena
  • Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach
  • Los Angeles County Museum of Art
  • Dallas Museum of Art, Texas
  • Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC
  • Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana
  • Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio
  • Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin
  • Philadelphia Museum of Art
  • Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona
  • Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach
  • Kunsthaus Zurich
  • Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland
  • Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri
  • San Diego Museum of Art, California
  • Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California
  • Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond
  • Portland Art Museum, Oregon
  • Portland Museum of Art, Maine
  • Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam
  • Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Iran
  • The Hunt Museum, Limerick, Ireland
  • Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
  • Reina Sofía National Museum, Madrid
  • Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Belgium
  • Musée National Picasso, Paris
  • Museo Picasso Málaga, Spain
  • Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil
  • Musée National Picasso La Guerre et la Paix, Vallauris, France
  • Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux
  • Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal
  • Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
  • Harvard University Museum, Boston
  • Yale University Gallery, New Haven
  • Hammer Museum of UCLA

…and countless other museums, galleries, and private collections around the world.

Although Whistler was American by birth, he spent most of his artistic career in England and France.  His controversial paintings, and his insistence upon “art for art’s sake,” earned for him a reputation as a revolutionary within the art world.  His prints, while definitely modern, were more within the mainstream of the 19th century tradition, and as a result, influenced artists of various aesthetic persuasions.  Whistler had already made some prints before he left the United States for Paris in 1855.  An etching revival was taking place in France at about this time, which fostered his interest in the medium.  Contacts with his brother-in-law Seymour Haden during the 1850s and the 1860sresulted in a large body of prints, which displayed Whistler’s concern with the potential for luminosity, detail and texture in this linear technique.  Although prints would play an important role throughout Whistler’s career, it was the 1850s and the 1860s, that he made his most significant contributions.  His style absorbed influences from the Realists, the Impressionists, the 17th  In turn, his work stimulated other 19th and 20th century printmakers, including Fantin-Latour, James Jacques Tissot, Eugene Bejot and Seymour Haden.  Many of Whistler’s best etchings can be found in series such as,  The Thames Set, Twelve Etchings from Nature and the two Venice Sets.  Whistler also produced lithographs, which are marked by an economy of line and a certain delicacy of handling. century Dutch artists and Japanese prints.

Although, Tissot is frequently classified as a Victorian artist, he actually only spent ten years in England. His early instruction in art was with La Motte and Flandrin in Paris. The fashionable women of that city became the subjects of many of his prints and paintings. The influence of Realism could be seen in his style if not his subjects, as forms and environments were depicted with meticulous detail and precisely graded tones.

Tissot went to England after 1870-1871, a year during which he was involved with the Franco-Prussian War. While in London, he worked with Seymour Haden, and added drypoint to his repertoire of intaglio media. Even in his English works, there is an indefinable flavor, which places all of Tissot’s oeuvre within the French School. Tissot’s etchings often show a “quality of melancholy and tension between the figures which gave them a much psychological input.” He was clearly influenced by the Belle Époque style and the overall feeling in his drypoints is certainly romantic and sheer decorative beauty.

Following his alleged involvement in the turbulent events of the Paris Commune (1871) he took refuge in London, where he lived from 1871 to 1882. He was just as successful there as he had been in Paris and lived in some style in St John’s Wood.

His pictures are distinguished most obviously by his love of painting women’s costumes: indeed, his work has probably been more often reproduced in works on the history of costume than on the history of painting. He also, however, had a gift for wittily observing nuances of social behavior. In 1882, following the death of his mistress Kathleen Newton (the archetypal Tissot model), he returned to France. In 1888 he underwent a religious conversion when he went into a church to `catch the atmosphere for a picture’, and thereafter he devoted himself to religious subjects. He visited the Holy Land in 1886-87 and in 1889, and his illustrations to the events of the Bible were enormously popular, both in book form and when the original drawings were exhibited.

Museum collections include…

  • Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, Minneapolis;
  • Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massacusettes;
  • National Gallery, Washington D.C.,
  • Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York,
  • Appleton Museum of Art, Florida;
  • Henri De Young Museum, San Francisco, California,
  • Cleveand Museum of Art, Ohio,
  • Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Quebec;
  • Museum of Fine Arts of Dijon, France,
  • National Portrait Gallery, England;
  • Tate Gallery, London, England,
  • Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio.