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Leon Lhermitte was born in 1844 and was still executing works in the French rural tradition at his death in 1925, making him the last in an illustrious group of artists dedicated to this genre. He showed artistic talent at a young age and in 1863 left his home at Mont-Saint-Pere, Aisne for the Petite Ecole in Paris where he studied with Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran. Lecoq was known for his program of training the visual memory of his students, and his theories had a profound effect on Lhermitte.

It was in his studio that Lhermitte formed a life-long friendship with Cazin and also became acquainted with Legros, Fantin-Latour and Rodin. Lhermitte sent his initial entry to the Salon in 1864 when he was nineteen, and continued to exhibit charcoal drawings and paintings regularly, and pastels after 1885, winning his first medal in 1874 with La Moisson (Musee de Carcassonne).

Lhermitte was a well-known painter of peasant life, and Van Gogh – who also wanted to pursue this genre – was one of his greatest admirers. He wrote of him as a painter who “knows the sturdy, stern figure of the working man through and through, and [who] draws his subjects from the very heart of the people.”  Reproductions of Lhermitte’s paintings helped Van Gogh during the creation of The Potato Eaters, a work also prepared in numerous studies.

Vincent praised Lhermitte in a letter to Theo, comparing his treatment of light to that of Rembrandt. Van Gough believed that his conscientious efforts to observe his models at close hand, in “real” contexts, entitled him to interpret what he saw in the manner he deemed appropriate.  Indeed, he argued that such modifications as he made contributed to the “truth” of his renderings:

“For me, Millet and Lhermitte are the real artists for the real reason that they do not paint things as they are, traced in a dry, analytical way, but as they –Millet, Lhermitte—feel them….My great longing is to learn to make those….remodelings, so that they may becomes, yes, lies if you like—but truer than the literal truth. He (Lhermitte) is the absolute master of the figure, he does what he likes with it-proceeding neither from the color nor the local tone but rather from the light-as Rembrandt did-there is an astonishing mastery in everything he does, above all excelling in modeling, he perfectly satisfies all that honesty demands.”

The Haymakers was awarded the grand prix at the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris. It was bought by the Van Gogh Museum in 1991.  Other prizes and honors came to Lhermitte throughout his long career, including the Grand Prix at the Exhibition Universelle, 1889, the Diplome d’honneur, Dresden, 1890, and the Legion of Honor. He was a founding member of the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts.

Lhermitte must be considered an artist who bravely met challenges and used the innovations of his period to further his own vision of the heroic and noble beauty of rural life.  When combined with his latent romantic sensitivities for the desolate northern coast or with his picturesque studies of the waterways of France, Lhermitte’s work becomes a unified blending of the traditional and the academic, the highly innovative and the personal.  He remains an artist dedicated to his craft and to promoting a serene and calm view of rustic life, especially when that way of life was actually no more than a childhood dream or a remembrance of bygone times recalled in tranquility.

Museum collections include:

  • The Metropolitan Museum, New York
  • The Louvre, Paris
  • Musee D’Orsay, Paris
  • The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
  • The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, MA
  • The Cleaveland Museum of Fine Art, Ohio
  • The Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Montreal
  • The St. Louis Art Museum
  • Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Beaverbrook
  • The California Palace of Legion of Honor
  • Denver Art Museum, Colorado
  • Smith College Museum of Art, Massachusetts
  • Washington University Gallery of Art, MI
  • The Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts
  • The Paine Art Center and Arboretum, WI
  • Tretiakoff Musee D’Art Occidental, Moscow
  • Bruxelles Museum of Fine Art, Brussels
  • Glascow City Art Museum, Glascow
  • The Corcoran Art Gallery, Washington DC
  • National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin
  • Victoria and Albert Museum, London
  • Museum of Fine Art, Reims
  • Jean La Fontaine Museum, Chateau Thierry
  • Museum of Fine Art, Mulhouse
  • Museum of Fine Art, Nantes
  • Stockholm Museum
  • Goteborg Museum
  • National Gallery of Scotland, Edinborough
  • Leeds Museum
  • Singer Museum, Laren
  • Barcelona Museum of Art, Barcelona
  • National Museum of Fine Art, Buenos Aires
  • Phoenix Museum
  • Trinity College, Toronto
  • Ponce Art Museum, Puerto Rico
  • Portland Art Museum
  • Museum of Art, Cincinnati
  • Rhode Island School of Design
  • Philadelphia Museum of Fine Art

At the time of his death at age 36, Lautrec’s oeuvre consisted of 5000 drawings, 350 lithographs and 500 paintings. Lautrec suffered from a late form of dwarfism called psycnodysostosis, a condition in which one’s arms and legs don’t grow properly, the face gets coarse, and the lips thicken.

As an artist, Lautrec changed the way his viewers looked at Paris. With the honesty of a plein-air painter and the realistic style that characterized the Barbizon painters’ view of nature, Lautrec laid bare the underbelly of Parisian nightlife. Like the Impressionists Degas and Raffaelli, Lautrec was one of the first to start the revolutionary affect whereby the elements of social consciousness became as important as psychological representation, and in combination created a storyline. It is the creation of an emotional reaction by the combination of these two factors that moves art into the modern age.

Lautrec was to lithography what Rembrandt was to etching. Like Rembrandt’s revolutionary self-portraits, which for the first time showed the patchwork of human expressions, Lautrec also animated the face for joy, sorrow, surprise. Lautrec’s series of paintings of Carmen Gaudin (c. 1880s) show her in a range of emotions, such as the distrustful suspicious expressions which characterized his early portraits of her. Although she was Lautrec’s model, and a model only, he was masterful at posing her in different persona’s such as the laundress or a prostitute (in the painting Boulevard Exterior). He was able to embody the character in keeping with Bruant’s latest song about this very element. Lautrec was so masterful that by only the slightest, most subtle manipulation of Carmen’s pose he was able to capture the feelings of fatigue and anxiety and lead the viewer immediately to understand Carmen’s purpose.

In 1884 he established a studio in Montmartre and plunged into the nightlife, sketchbook in hand; he taught himself but was considerably influenced by Degas. He exhibited in Brussels with Les Vingts from 1887 and at the Salon des Indépendants from 1889. In the 1890’s he took up lithography producing some superb posters, notably for Artistide Bruant’s cabaret, and working for various publications. In 1895 he made first of several visits to London, where he knew Wilde and Beardsley. He was highly sensitive to jibes about his stunted growth, and drank heavily; in 1899 his health collapsed and he retired to a nursing home. From this period dates his series of circus pictures. After recovering, he lived mainly in Bordeaux, working industriously, but he died two years later. Not greatly appreciated in his lifetime, his work began to gain international renown after the retrospective exhibition at the Goupil Galleries in 1914.

Museum Collections include…

  •  Art Institute of Chicago;
  •  Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia;
  •  J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles;
  •  Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York;
  •  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston;
  •  Museum of Modern Art, New York;
  •  National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.;
  •  National Gallery, London;
  •  Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam;
  •  Musée d’Orsay, Paris;
  •  Musée des Augustins, Toulouse, France;
  •  Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California;
  •  San Diego Museum of Art;
  •  Tate Gallery, London;
  •  Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

20th Century, French School

A pupil of GAMBEY and CHAPELAIN-MIDY, he graduated from the Beaux-Arts school of Bordeaux. He was awarded a gold medal at the “Salon des Indépendants” and showed his works in several other exhibitions throughout the country. Gifted with amazing talent, he very quickly acquired notoriety. In love with the beaches near Bordeaux (Arcachon, Biarritz and later the Côte d’Azur) as well as with the happy days of the old buses and carriages from the “turn of the century” Paris, his style was very soon close to the one of GALLIEN-LALOUE or CORTES.

After exhibiting in number of art  galleries in Bordeaux and in France, he finally settled in Nice, but unwilling to cut himself of the world, he travelled with his brushes through Morocco, Italy, Tuscany and stayed for a short time in San Gemminiano.

He is deeply touched by everything from his own time, as the beaches in Italy, Nice, and Côte d’Azur, but also by the very beginning of our century: the “Belle Epoque”.

This outstanding individual, in love with painting, shows as much interest for the Barbizon School and Impressionism as for the Italian Masters of the Renaissance whose works he admires. Influenced by Eugène Boudin, he paints in a synthetic way, with great talent and facility, a colourful and peaceful vision of the world.

His paintings are for the most part done in France: seascapes, still lives, landscapes, which reflect his natural talent; harmonious compositions, a very detailed but still spontaneous and broad brushwork, and a way of expressing himself full of his love for beauty.

Édouard Manet (January 23, 1832 – April 30, 1883) was one of the first nineteenth century artists to approach modern-life subjects. He was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism. His early masterworks The Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia engendered great controversy, and served as rallying points for the young painters who would create Impressionism—today these are considered watershed paintings that mark the genesis of modern art.

For over twenty years, Manet sought academic and public acceptance at the annual Paris Salon for his original, brilliant, and enigmatic canvases. Because of the furor that his works created, he became the first major artist in whose career both the journalists and the general public played vital roles. Although the Impressionists—sometimes called la bande de Manet—respected Manet, he never exhibited with them or painted a truly Impressionist work. Nevertheless, his paintings of the early 1870s do seem influenced by Impressionism, or perhaps by Berthe Morisot, who had become his pupil, his model, and  later, his sister-in-law. Manet was 26 when he first submitted to the Salon, offering his Absinthe Drinker (1858-9), a cloaked, top-hatted bohemian figure. The Salon of 1859 rejected the work.

In 1861, however, his large Spanish Singer was accepted, given an honorable mention, and widely acclaimed. An admirer stated that the painting represented a stand between Realism and Romanticism. Manet worked throughout 1862 and began the year of 1863 by showing 14 canvases at a dealer’s art gallery and sending three major works to the Salon. All three were rejected.

However in 1863, artists were allowed to show their rejected work separately at the Salon des Refuses. There, Manet created a scandal with his large composition, Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), showing undressed women lounging in the woods with clothed men. From that time on, Manet’s paintings were the focus of popular attention. Olympia, also painted in 1863, caused a similar uproar, and the controversy surrounding these two paintings truly dismayed Manet. It was not at all his intention to create such scandal. Manet was not a radical artist, such as Courbet; nor was he a bohemian, as the critics had thought. Recently married to Suzanne Leenhoff, the well-mannered and well-bred Manet was an immaculately groomed member of high society. As Henri Fantin-Latour’s Portrait of Manet suggests, this man was the quintessential Parisian flaneur.

However, Manet’s unique technical innovations intrigued the likes of Pierre Renoir and Claude Monet and set free the traditional and conservative reigns of academic painting. From 1867-1871, political turbulence rocked Paris, and the Franco-Prussian war left the City of Lights besieged and defeated. In 1870, Manet sent his family south to protect them from the fighting in Paris and signed on as a gunner in the National Guard. There is much primary documentation from this period, including letters to family and friends that express Manet’s horror and dismay at the war.

As a testament to his feelings, Manet turned his eye to these events in his artwork: Execution of Maximilian (1868), Civil War (1871) and The Barricade (1871). The Execution of Maximilian reaches out to Goya’s Third of May, but despite its masterly influence, the painting was banned from being exhibited in Paris due to the “Frenchness” of the executioners costume. And yet along with his expressions of political disillusionment, Manet also continued producing works such as The Balcony (1868), Portrait of Emile Zola (1868), and The Railroad (1872).

By 1874, Manet’s reputation as experimental artist and leader of the Impressionists was firmly established. A café near Manet’s studio, the Café Guerbois, became the gathering spot for Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Degas and Pissaro. Although Manet presided over the regular meeting and debates held at the café, he was not enthusiastic about his role as leader of the avant-garde. When the (cont’d) Impressionists held their first exhibition at Nadar’s studio in 1874, Manet refused to participate. Instead he chose to remain focused on the Salon.

Although he never exhibited in any of the eight Impressionist exhibitions, by no means did Manet abandon the Impressionists. He worked closely with Monet in Argenteuil during 1874, and he often gave financial support to his friends in need. During this time, Manet came closest to painting in the Impressionist style. Painted en plein air, both Argenteuil and Monet’s Boat Studio approach the notions of reflected light and atmosphere of Impressionism, but Manet never became assimilated into the true Impressionist style.

In his last great masterpiece, Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), Manet returns again to studio painting, a somber palette and eliminated mid-tones. The café concert is a theme which Manet had been treating in the late 1870s in works, such as Corner in a Café Concert and The Café. But here at Bar at the Folies- Bergère, the viewer is no longer spectators, but is now a participant in the painting. While the barmaid occupies the center of the piece, the painting is filled with a menagerie of characters from seated couples to trapeze artists. Glittering chandeliers and electric lights fill the upper portion of the work. Here, as in Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe, optical contradictions abound.Throughout his oeuvre Manet painted modern day life, yet many of his paintings are so much more than simple mimetic depictions. If Manet’s work seems to be full of contradictions, or to employ a lack of perspective from time to time, then perhaps that was the true reality of Paris in Manet’s time.

Always, if unintentionally, controversial, , Manet sought to record the days of his life using his own unique vision. From beggars to prostitutes to the bourgeoisie, he sought to be true to himself and his time, and he aspired to create “not great art, but sincere art.”

 

Museum collections include…

  • Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
  • Art Institute of Chicago
  • Guggenheim Museum, New York
  • J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
  • Musée D’Orsay, Paris
  • Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
  • Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
  • National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
  • National Gallery, London
  • Los Angeles County Museum of Art
  • Norton-Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA
  • Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
  • Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
  • Harvard University Art Museums
  • Cincinnati Art Museum
  • Cleveland Museum of Art
  • Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany
  • Kuntsmuseum Basel, Switzerland
  • Musée de Beaux-Arts de Dijon
  • National Gallery of Victoria, Australia
  • Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Berlin
  • Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD
  • Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, MD
  • National Gallery, Berlin
  • Art Museum, Bern, Switzerland
  • Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest
  • Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA
  • National Gallery of Scotland
  • Wallrof Richartz Museum ,Germany
  • Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Portugal
  • National Gallery of London
  • Museum of Fine Art, Lyon, France
  • Mannheim City Hall of the Arts, Germany
  • National Gallery of Victoria, Australia
  • Minneapolis Institute of Arts, MN
  • Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
  • National Gallery, Oslo, Norway
  • Art Museum of Sao Paolo, Salvador, Brazil
  • National Museum of Sweden

Joan Miro was born April 20, 1893 in Barcelona to Michel Miro Adzerias a goldsmith, and Dolores Ferra, the daughter of a cabinetmaker. At an early age, Miro attended drawing lessons in the evenings after school. At 14 years old, after a brief period of time at a school of commerce in Barcelona he entered the La Lonja Academy of Fine Arts where he came under the influence of two teachers: Modesto Urgelle and Jose Pasco. He continued his studies with Pasco while working as a clerk in a business house until a serious illness caused him a leave of absence. Then in 1912 he entered the art school of Francisco Gali in Barcelona. During his years at the school he became interested and influenced by contemporary painting, Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism.

He attended drawing sessions of the Sant Lluch Circle, where the architect Gaudi had been a student. In 1916 he visited an exhibition of French art organized by Vollard in Barcelona. During this time Miro met many influential figures of the art world, such as F. Picabia, the founder of the Dada review “391,” Marie Laurencin, and Max Jacob. He had his first exhibition in 1918 at the Gallery Dalmau, and in the same year became a member of the Agrupacio Courbet, a group of young painters around Artigas. He painted “detailist” landscapes at this time. Then in 1919 Miro took his first visit to Paris, where he met and became friends with Picasso. He spent the subsequent winters in Paris, returning to Montroig with his family for the summer. At the end of 1920 he took a studio at 45 rue Blomet in Paris.

His first Paris exhibition in 1921, organized by Dalmau at the Galerie La Licorne was a complete failure. Until his next exhibition in 1923 Miro established a close relationship with the neighboring artists surrounding his studio in Paris; and with Henry Miller and Hemingway. Then in 1924 he joined Andre Breton Louis Aragon, and Paul Eluard in the Surrealist group, and in 1925 took part in the Surrealist exhibition at Galerie Pierre. During the years that followed he lived next to and worked closely with Max, Ernst, Magritte, Eluard, and Arp, he was married in 1930 to Pilar Juncosa on October 12th, and continued exhibiting with the Surrealists from New York to London.

After the outbreak of war in Spain in 1936 he left, not to return for four years. He had 22 works included in the International Surrealist exhibition in the same year, at the New Burlington Galleries in London. In 1940 while beginning his Constellations series finished the next year, Miro returned to Paris in the face of the advancing German army. He returned to Spain that same year. In 1942 Miro returned to live in Barcelona, he begins to work with ceramics in collaboration with Artigas. He makes his first visit to the United States in 1947, and returns to Paris the next year where he produced numerous engravings and lithographs.

Museums collections include…

  • Hermitage Museum,
  • Museum of Modern Art, New York,
  • Guggenheim Museum, New York,
  • Minneapolis Institute of Arts,
  • Minnesota National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.,
  • Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.,
  • Tate Gallery, London, UK,
  • San Diego Museum of Art,
  • Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Iran,
  • Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco,
  • Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Museum, Quebec,
  • National Gallery of Australia, Canberra,
  • Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan,
  • Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland,
  • Museo Patio Herreriano de Valladolid, Spain,
  • New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana,
  • Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,
  • Philadelphia Museum of Art,
  • Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio,
  • Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel                                                                                   

Czech painter, designer and decorator, one of the leading exponents of Art Nouveau. 

He designed many posters, particularly for Sarah Bernhardt, carrying the decorative “whiplash” line to its furthest limits with twisting tendrils of flowers and bizarre undulations of hair.  He studied at the Prague and Munich Academies before moving to Paris (1887), where he worked with Laurens and at the Academie Julian, and soon became the pivot of the Art Nouveau movement.  Between 1904 and 1913 he paid several visits to the U.S.  After c.1910, Prague became his base and he turned to patriotic paintings in the academic manner.

One of the chief exponents of Art Nouveau, Mucha attained world renowned popularity.  He exercised his talents in many fields:  stained glass (for Champigneule in Paris), tapestries, jewels (for Sara Bernhardt, which were then executed by the jeweler Fogquet), and many posters (Job, Nestle, Lefevre-Utile, Benedictine and many others).  In 1904, he made the first of his six trips to the United States where as a decorator (for the Deutches Theatre in New York in 1908), poster artist (The Maid of Orleans) and a portrait painter.  In 1912, he returned to his native country to devote himself to what he hoped to be his life’s work: “The Slav Epic,” a series of large paintings of his country’s history.  After 1918, he designed stamps, police uniforms and banknotes for the Czechoslovakian Republic.  Many exhibitions in France, Japan, America, England, and of course his native Czechoslovakia have attested to the immense value of his work.

Museum Collections:

  • Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY;
  • Melton Park Gallery, Oklahoma City, OK;
  • Musee d’Orsay, Paris, France;
  • Victoria & Albert Museum, London;
  • Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland;
  • Museum of Modern Art in New York, NY;
  • Carnavalet Museum, Paris;
  • National Gallery of Prague, Prague.

Jules Breton spent most of his career in the village of Courrieres, in northern France, immersed in the life and customs of the rural environment.  Raised by an uncle (Boniface Breton), Breton developed a close familiarity with rural life and saw how communities were organized since both his father and uncle served as mayor of the village.

When he was ten, Breton enrolled in a local school in St. Omer where he received his first drawing lessons.  Felix de Vigne, a professor of art at Ghent, met Breton in 1842, and asked him to study with him in Belgium.  Breton remained in Belgium throughout the mid-1840s, where he learned the traditions of academic painting, historical genre, and the heritage of northern art.  In 1847, however, ill health forced him to return to Courrieres where he found his father dying. 

After his own recovery, Breton was sent to Paris to finish his artistic education in the atelier of Michel-Martin Drolling.  Here he further absorbed the academic conventions of the day while remaining open to the development of new aspects of contemporary realism.

By 1853, following a period in Paris where he worked on his own, Breton was exhibiting canvases at the Salon.  His Retour des Moissonneurs was based on his own observations of rural life in Courrieres even though the canvas was completed from models he posed in his Parisian atelier.  At the close of the 1853Salon, Breton returned to Courrieres and continued doing his sketches of rural life as part of a general interest in recording regional aspects of French life.  During this period, Breton developed the plan for his first major Salon triumph- The Gleaners– a painting that received a third-class medal at the 1855 Salon.  This work was well received and carefully studied, eventually influencing such painters as Jean-Francois Millet, who had already developed his own interest in the same theme.

Continuing to work in Courrieres, within an atelier that was enlarged by his uncle Boniface, Breton completed La Benediction des Bles (Musee de Compiegne) for the 1857 Salon.  He received a second-class medal for the image and the praise of Comte Nieuwerkerke, the dominant art patron of the period.  The painting was also purchased by the state.  With his career going well, Breton again returned to Courrieres to develop other themes for the next Salon.  His interest in rural life was maintained in The Recall of the Gleaners, Dedication of a Calvery, and The Seamstress, images that were well-hung at the 1859 Salon and which further assured Breton’s success in public and governmental arenas.

During the 1860s, Breton’s style became increasingly attuned to past masters, including Leopold Tobert, the major romantic painter of rural life, and many painters of the Italian renaissance.  His paintings exhibited a classical quality while, at the same time, displaying a strong proclivity toward themes drawn from contemporary rural life.  Throughout the remainder of his career, Breton was one of the most popular and influential image-makers concerned with the myth of peasant life.  Many of his later compositions including The Shepherd’s Star (Toledo Museum of Art), and the famed Song of the Lark demonstrate that the painter was able to infuse a symbolic melancholy into these images to suggest a strong romantic inclination.  Also considered as a serious writer and poet, Breton achieved an artistic supremacy in his lifetime that has seldom been equaled.

A student of contemporary painting, Breton was strongly influenced by the Barbizon tradition; his sketches and preliminary studies for his large scale Salon canvases reveal his ability to absorb and recast aspects of the Barbizon tradition for a slightly different audience.  He did, however, continue the Barbizon heritage into the traditional academic camp.

Museum collections include:

  • Chateau Museum, Dieppe, France;
  • Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, New York;
  • Hendrik Willem Mesdag National Museum, Hague,
  • Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY;
  • Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE;
  • Paine Art Center, Oshkosh, WI;
  • Musee d’Orsay, Paris, France;
  • John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia, PA;
  • Washington University Gallery of Art, St. Louis, MO;
  • Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH;
  • Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA,
  • Louvre, Paris;
  • Brooklyn Museum of Art;
  • Baltimore Museum of Art;
  • Walters Museum, Baltimore;
  • Antwerp Museum of Art;
  • Arras Museum; Bagneres Museum of Art;
  • Bologne Museum of Art;
  • Calais Museum of Art; Lille Museum of Art;
  • Anvers Museum of Art;

Other Provincial museums in France…

Mary Stevenson Cassatt was born on May 22, 1844 in Pennsylvania into a well-to-do family. During her childhood, the family traveled widely in Europe, lived in France, Germany (1851-1855) and Darmstadt. Returning to Pennsylvania in 1855, the Cassatt family settled in Philadelphia. At the age of 15 Mary decided to become an artist and enrolled in 1861 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

Soon she got frustrated with her American education and decided to study in Paris. Since the Ecole des Beaux-Arts did not admit women, she studied for a short period in the studio of Charles Chaplin, then took private lessons from Jean-Léon Gérôme. She first exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1868. The most important influence on Cassatt in the years before 1875 was exercised by Edouard Manet. Although he did not accept students, Cassatt saw his works and they were much discussed both by painters and art critics.

The Franco-Prussian war (1870) made Cassatt return to the US for the next year and a half. Mary was to spend most of her life in exile from her native country, reflecting a feeling among some women of her generation that Europe offered an escape from what they saw as the oppressive, patriarchal attitudes of America. She was later to say; “After all, give me France. Women do not have to fight for recognition here if they do serious work. I suppose it is Mrs. Potter Palmer’s French blood which gives her organizing powers and determination that women should be someone and not something. The US atmosphere was so discouraging that she almost gave up painting. Late in 1871 she was on her way back to Europe, setting in Parma, where she copied works by Correggio for the archbishop of Pittsburgh. In Parma she spent 8 happy months.

In late September of 1872 she went to Spain studying first the paintings of Velázquez, Murillo, Titian, and Rubens at the Prado, then continuing on to Seville, where she began to paint her first major body of works based on Spanish subjects: Spanish Dancer Wearing a Lace Mantilla, Toreador and others.

After a brief return to Paris in April of 1873, she visited Holland and Belgium, and then traveled back south to Rome. In 1874 Cassatt finally decided to settle in Paris. Aided by her elder sister, Lydia, who joined Mary in Europe, she took an apartment and studio.

Lydia was not only the elder sister, but also the closest friend and model of Mary. There are eleven known works with Lydia, among them are The Cup of Tea, Lydia Working at a Tapestry Loom, Lydia Crocheting in the Garden at Marly, Woman and Child Driving. Lydia died at the end of 1882 of Bright’s disease, and it was a severe blow to Mary.

Cassatt became known as a portrait painter and was sought after by American visitors to France: Portrait of an Elderly Lady. As the sitters are often known, many of Cassatt’s works can be considered portraits: Mary Ellison Embroidering, Reading Le Figaro.. Her work differed from the stiff academic tradition of portrait painting as a mere likeness insofar as most of her subjects were either engaged in some kind of activity or caught in a casual pose.

In 1877 Cassatt met Degas, who advised her to join the Impressionists. “I accepted with joy. Now I could work with absolute independence without considering the opinion of a jury. I had already recognized who were my true masters. I admired Manet, Courbet, and Degas. I took leave of conventional art. I began to live.” A close friendship with Degas began, which lasted until Degas’ death in 1917. Degas and Renoir greatly influenced her style of painting. For a long time Cassatt was even thought of as a pupil of Degas. Though their relations were those of two friends, and the influence was mutual. Once, on seeing some of Mary’s work, Degas said that he would not have admitted that a woman could draw so well. Cassat became the only American whose work would appear with the Impressionists in the exhibitions of 1879, 1880,1881 and 1886.
In 1877 her parents came to Paris to live with her permanently. Success of the IV Impressionist Exhibition, and Cassatt’s in particular, made her father believe at last that the daughter had chosen the right way in life. Between 1879 and 1882 The Independents, as the Impressionists used to call themselves, held their group exhibitions annually, thus providing Cassatt with the opportunity to show her work. In the US she was exhibiting regularly with the Society of American Artists in New York.

In 1890-1891, she produced an important series of color aquatint etchings that show the cycle of women’s lives. This series, which reflects the influence of Japonisme (she herself owned a collection of Japanese prints) established her reputation as a major printmaker. She stopped making color aquatints in 1896-1897; however, she continued to produce drypoint etching until 1911. Like her close friend Degas, Cassatt also excelled at pastels. Throughout her career as a print maker she printed many of her prints by herself on her own press. Her painting aside, Cassatt was consummate printmaker and understood the medium well. She used the color wood block prints of the Japanese masters as her inspiration, thus introducing to Western art the patterning and coloration of Eastern art.

The winter of 1893-1894 found Mary Cassatt in Antibes, recovering from the effort of producing her color prints and the mural for Chicago. It was there she began to paint one of her largest canvases, The Boating Party, which was highly influenced by Manet’s painting In the Boat, which she had persuaded the Havemyers to buy for their collection. At the end of the following year, Mary had her second one-woman show at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris, and she bought the Chateau de Beaufresne at Mesnil-Theribus on the Oise, 27 miles from Paris, which was to be her summer home for the rest of her life.

The two decades around the turn of the century proved to be a highly successful and productive period for Cassatt. She focused almost exclusively on the depiction of mothers and children, these works today are her best-known and most popular, e.g. The Child’s Caress., The Bath. Almost all of Cassatt’s mother and child scenes do not depict actual mothers with their own children, since the artist preferred to select her models and match the appropriate physical types in order to achieve the desired results. From 1890 she also produced prints, e.g. The Letter, In the Omnibus, etc. Cassatt’s father died in 1891, and the mother in 1895.

In 1898 Mary returned to the US for the 1st time in over 25 years, visiting relatives, friends and collectors. In 1901 she visited Italy and Spain, in 1908 made the last trip to the USA. In 1910-12 she traveled extensively in Europe and in the Middle East. In 1904 she was accepted into the Legion of Honour and in 1910 became a member of the National Academy of Design in New York. In 1915 she was instrumental in organizing a New York exhibition to fund the campaign to win the vote for women.

Cassatt’s last years were overshadowed with the loss of close people, relatives and friends. She suffered from many diseases, like diabetes and had cataracts on both eyes. Her deteriorating vision caused her to stop painting. She lived in solitude at the Château de Beaufresne, accompanied only by her longtime housekeeper, Mathilde Valet, or in the south of France.

Mary Cassatt died at the Château de Beaufresne on June 14, 1926, and was buried in the family vault at nearby Mesnil-Théribus.

The majority of Cassatt’s works today are in American collections, while just a small number of paintings remain in France, where she worked. Her name is less familiar than those of her fellow Impressionist painters Degas, Monet or Renoir. However, Mary Cassatt is highly original and interesting painter and her talent does not yield to those with well-known names. Cassat is also important for her influence on American collectors, especially the Havemeyers whom she first advised to buy a Degas in 1874 (their large collection of Impressionist works, including a number by Degas, was bequeathed to the MMA). Cassatt recommended Galerie Durand-Ruel to open in New York thus assisting American collectors beyond her own social circle to acquire Impressionist works. She also formed in 1894 the French society of color printmakers with Raffaelli and Camille Pisarro as her co-founders.

Museum collections include…

  • Philadelphia Museum of Art,
  • Art Institute of Chicago,
  • National Gallery of Art in Washington DC,
  •  Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art at Kansas City, MO,
  •  Musée d’Orsay in Paris,
  • The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
  • The Walters Art Gallery at Baltimore, MD,
  • Butler Institute of American Art, Ohio,
  • National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa,
  • National Gallery of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC,
  • Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, Italy,
  • Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, Missouri,
  • Arthur Ross Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania,
  • Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama,
  • Cincinatti Art Museum, Ohio,
  • Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
  • Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC

Cézanne is undoubtedly one of the most important painters of the late 19th century. His work is exuberant and intense; his style impetuous, his rhythm lively and his paint thick. Though he never showed any interest in the graphic media, he completed prints at the urging of others. It took all the insistence of his friends Pissarro, Guillaumin and Dr. Gachet for him to produce his five etchings. Later it took all the pressure that his dealer Ambrose Vollard could exert to get him to do three lithographs, two in color, one in black and white. He was too much absorbed in painting to give any thought to prints. Pissarro had invited Cézanne and Guillaumin to stay with him at Pontoise and had introduced them to Dr. Gachet. The latter, a keen amateur etcher, prevailed on all the artists who came to see him to try their hand at etching; he even prepared the copper plates for them, supervised the biting and pulled the proofs on his own press. Unlike most Impressionists, he cared just as much for drawing and composition as for painting, and for the solidity and permanence of forms, as he did for tone and color. He felt the two aspects of painting were inseparable and should not be dissociated. He said, “When color attains its full brilliance and richness, then form reaches its fullness too.”

Cézanne conceived of art-and particularly his own-as being always in a state of evolution. His work is splendid, full of rhythmic compositions, clearly defined superimposed planes and a general sense of harmony. His declared ambition: “I want to make something solid and permanent out of Impressionism, like art in museums” illustrates the depth of an artist who does not merely seek to convey the passing moment, but also the past and the future.

 

Museum collections include…

  • Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
  • Metropolitan Museum of Art,
  • J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
  • The Louvre, Paris
  • Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
  • Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
  • Museum of Modern Art, New York
  • National Gallery of Art, Washington
  • National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
  • National Gallery, London
  • The Frick Collection, New York
  • Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
  • Cincinnati Museum of Art
  • Clark Art Institute, Massachusetts
  • Cleveland Museum of Art
  • Fondation Bemberg Museum, France
  • Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany
  • Kuntshaus Zurich
  • Harvard Univeristy Art Museums
  • Los Angeles County Museum of Art
  • Musée d’Orsay, Paris
  • National Museums, Liverpool, UK
  • Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena
  • Tate Gallery, London
  • The Albertina, Vienna

Landscape and animal painter; engraver, and draughtsman.

Chaigneau attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts from 1849-1857 as a pupil of François Edouard Picot, Jacques Raymond Brascassat, and Jules Coignet, the latter of whom was especially responsible for Chaigneau’s turn away from the academic, classical tradition of landscape painting.  Chaigneau won third place in the 1854 Rome Prize Competition in historical landscape painting; the same year he was awarded an artistic stipend from his hometown of Bordeaux.  In 1857, when he lost in the annual competitions and his stipend expired, he began to turn away from the Academic training he had received. 

 

He moved to Barbizon in 1858, while also keeping a residence in Paris, and began orienting his art toward nature, after coming into contact with Jean François Millet and other artists then living and working in Barbizon.  His landscape subjects, however, also included scenes from Bordelais, the Landes, Limousin, and Normandy in addition to scenes from the forest of Fontainebleau.  Beginning in the late 1860’s, under the artistic influence of the Barbizon artist Charles Jacque, Chaigneau developed his well-known fondness for painting flocks of sheep, which he had observed in the Chailly Valley region near Barbizon.  His success in this genre earned him the affectionate nickname of “the Raphael of sheep.” 

 

His works—in oils, watercolors, and engravings—were recognized as early as the 1890’s as an original contribution to the development of Impressionism, especially for his handling of the effects of light.  Chaigneau exhibited at the Paris Salon as early as 1848, winning awards in 1855, 1889, and 1900, as well as exhibiting at the International Exposition held at Santiago, Chile in 1875, the World’s Colombian Exposition, Chicago, 1893, at Barcelona, Spain, in 1880 and 1888, and at the Societé des Amis des Arts, Bordeaux, from 1851-1903.

Museum collections include:

  • Paris: Musée d’Orsay, the Louvre ; 
  • Amiens: Musée de Picardie ; 
  • Barbizon: Musée municipal de l’Ecole de Barbizon ; 
  • Bordeaux: Musée de Beaux-Arts ; 
  • Rennes: Musée de Beaux-Arts. 
  •   Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
  • Art Institute of Chicago
  • The Victoria and Albert Museum, London