French painter. He came to Paris in 1882 and
studied art at the Ateliers of Bonnat and Cormon, where he was a
contemporary and friend of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Emile Bernard and
Vincent van Gogh. His early work shows the influence of Impressionism and
of Edgar Degas. In 1887 Anquetin and Bernard devised an innovative method
of painting using strong black contour lines and flat areas of colour;
Anquetin aroused much comment when he showed his new paintings, including
the striking Avenue de Clichy: Five O’Clock in the Evening (1887;
Hartford, CT, Wadsworth Atheneum) at the exhibition of Les XX in Brussels
and at the Salon des Indйpendants in Paris in 1888. The new style, dubbed
Cloisonnisme by the critic Edouard Dujardin (1861–1949), resulted from a
study of stained glass, Japanese prints and other so-called ‘primitive’
sources; it was close to the Synthetist experiments of Paul Gauguin and
was adopted briefly by van Gogh during his Arles period. Anquetin’s works
were shown alongside Gauguin’s and Bernard’s at the Cafй Volpini
exhibition in 1889, where they attracted considerable attention among
younger artists.
The Three
Graces National Gallery, London
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