Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

(b Albi, Tarn, 24 Nov 1864; d Chateau de Malromé, nr Langon, Gironde, 9 Sept 1901).
French painter and printmaker. He is best known for his portrayals of late 19th-century Parisian life, particularly working-class, cabaret, circus, nightclub and brothel scenes. He was admired then as he is today for his unsentimental evocations of personalities and social mores. While he belonged to no theoretical school, he is sometimes classified as Post-Impressionist. His greatest contemporary impact was his series of 30 posters (1891–1901), which transformed the aesthetics of poster art.

 

Paul Gauguin

(b Paris, 7 June 1848; d Atuona, Marquesas Islands, 8 May 1903).
French painter, printmaker, sculptor and ceramicist. His style developed from Impressionism through a brief cloisonnist phase (in partnership with Emile Bernard) towards a highly personal brand of Symbolism, which sought within the tradition of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes to combine and contrast an idealized vision of primitive Polynesian culture with the sceptical pessimism of an educated European. A selfconsciously outspoken personality and an aggressively asserted position as the leader of the Pont-Aven group made him a dominant figure in Parisian intellectual circles in the late 1880s. His use of non-naturalistic colour and formal distortion for expressive ends was widely influential on early 20th-century avant-garde artists.
 

Camille Pissarro

(b Charlotte Amalie, St Thomas, Danish Virgin Islands, 10 July 1830; d Paris, 13 Nov 1903).
Painter and printmaker. He was the only painter to exhibit in all eight of the Impressionist exhibitions held between 1874 and 1886, and he is often regarded as the ‘father’ of the movement. He was by no means narrow in outlook, however, and throughout his life remained as radical in artistic matters as he was in politics. Thadée Natanson wrote in 1948: ‘Nothing of novelty or of excellence appeared that Pissarro had not been among the first, if not the very first, to discern and to defend.’ The significance of Pissarro’s work is in the balance maintained between tradition and the avant-garde. Octave Mirbeau commented: ‘M. Camille Pissarro has shown himself to be a revolutionary by renewing the art of painting in a purely working sense; at the same time he has remained a purely classical artist in his love for exalted generalizations, his passion for nature and his respect for worthwhile traditions.’
 

Paul Cezanne

(b Aix-en-Provence, 19 Jan 1839; d Aix-en-Provence, 23 Oct 1906).
French painter. He was one of the most important painters of the second half of the 19th century. In many of his early works, up to about 1870, he depicted dark, imaginary subjects in a violent, expressive manner. In the 1870s he came under the influence of IMPRESSIONISM, particularly as practised by Camille Pissarro, and he participated in the First (1874) and Third (1877) Impressionist Exhibitions. Though he considered the study of nature essential to painting, he nevertheless opposed many aspects of the Impressionist aesthetic. He epitomized the reaction against it when he declared: ‘I wanted to make of Impressionism something solid and enduring, like the art in museums.’ Believing colour and form to be inseparable, he tried to emphasize structure and solidity in his work, features he thought neglected by Impressionism. For this reason he was a central figure in POST-IMPRESSIONISM. He rarely dated his works (and often did not sign them either), which makes it hard to ascertain the chronology of his oeuvre with any precision. Until the end of his life he received little public success and was repeatedly rejected by the Paris Salon. In his last years his work began to influence many younger artists, including both the Fauves and the Cubists, and he is therefore often seen as a precursor of 20th-century art.

 

Edgar Degas

(b Paris, 19 July 1834; d Paris, 27 Sept 1917).
French painter, draughtsman, printmaker, sculptor, pastellist, photographer and collector. He was a founder-member of the Impressionist group and the leader within it of the Realist tendency. He organized several of the group’s exhibitions, but after 1886 he showed his works very rarely and largely withdrew from the Parisian art world. As he was sufficiently wealthy, he was not constricted by the need to sell his work, and even his late pieces retain a vigour and a power to shock that is lacking in the contemporary productions of his Impressionist colleagues.

 

Federico Zandomeneghi

(b Venice, 2 June 1841; d Paris, 30 Dec 1917).
Italian painter. His father Pietro and grandfather Luigi tried to interest him in the plastic arts, but from a very early age he showed a stronger inclination for painting. Zandomeneghi soon rebelled against their teachings, and by 1856 he was attending the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, studying under the painters Michelangelo Grigoletti (1801–70) and Pompeo Molmenti (1819–94). As a Venetian he was born an Austrian subject, and, to escape conscription, he fled his city in 1859 and went to Pavia, where he enrolled at the university. In the following year he followed Garibaldi in the Expedition of the Thousand; afterwards, having been convicted of desertion and therefore unable to return to Venice, he went to Florence, where he remained from 1862 to 1866. This period was essential for his artistic development. In Tuscany he frequented the Florentine painters known as the Macchiaioli, with some of whom he took part in the Third Italian War of Independence (1866). Zandomeneghi formed a strong friendship with Telemaco Signorini and Diego Martelli, with whom he corresponded frequently for the rest of his life. In this period he painted the Palazzo Pretorio of Florence (1865; Venice, Ca’ Pesaro), in which the building, represented in the historical–romantic tradition, is redeemed by a remarkable sense of air and light, elements derived from the Macchiaioli.
 

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

(b Limoges, 25 Feb 1841; d Cagnes-sur-Mer, 3 Dec 1919).
French painter, printmaker and sculptor. He was one of the founders and leading exponents of IMPRESSIONISM from the late 1860s, producing some of the movement’s most famous images of carefree leisure. He broke with his Impressionist colleagues to exhibit at the Salon from 1878, and from c. 1884 he adopted a more linear style indebted to the Old Masters. His critical reputation has suffered from the many minor works he produced during his later years.
 

Claude Monet

(b Paris, 14 Nov 1840; d Giverny, 6 Dec 1926).
French painter. He was the leader of the Impressionist movement in France; indeed the movement’s name, IMPRESSIONISM, is derived from his Impression, Sunrise (1873; Paris, Mus. Marmottan). Throughout his long career, and especially in his series from the 1890s onwards, he explored the constantly changing quality of light and colour in different atmospheric conditions and at various times of the day.
 

Mary Cassatt

(b Allegheny City [now in Pittsburgh], 25 May 1844; d Le Mesnil-Théribus, France, 14 June 1926).
American painter and printmaker, active in France. Having settled in Paris, she became a member of the Impressionist circle. The quality of her draughtsmanship is evident in all the media in which she worked, notably pastel. She is particularly associated with the theme of mother and child.
 

Armand Guillaumin

(b Paris, 16 Feb 1841; d Paris, 26 June 1927). French painter and lithographer. He grew up in Moulins, but at 16 he returned to Paris to find work. Despite the opposition of his working-class family, he prepared for an artistic career while he supported himself in municipal jobs. He started drawing classes and then enrolled in the Académie Suisse, where he met Cézanne and Camille Pissarro. Guillaumin began his career as an avant-garde artist by exhibiting with them at the Salon des Refusés in 1863. He was also active in the Manet circle at the Café Guerbois, from which Impressionism developed.
 

Paul Signac

(b Paris, 11 Nov 1863; d Paris, 15 Aug 1935).
French painter, printmaker and writer. He came from a well-to-do family of shopkeepers. A visit to the exhibition of Claude Monet’s works organized by Georges Charpentier at the offices of La Vie moderne in 1880 decided him on an artistic career and encouraged him to try painting out of doors. His early works, landscapes or still-lifes of 1882–3 (Still-life, 1883; Berlin, Neue N.G.), show an Impressionist influence, particularly that of Monet and Alfred Sisley. In 1883 Signac took courses given by the Prix de Rome winner Jean-Baptiste Bin (1825–c. 1890), but they had little effect on his style. Such suburban Paris landscapes as The Gennevilliers Road (1883; Paris, Mus. d’Orsay) place his works in a world of modern images comparable to those of Jean François Rafaëlli in which factory chimneys, hoardings and etiolated trees abound (e.g. Gas Tanks at Clichy, 1886; Melbourne, N.G. Victoria). Already a friend of Henri Rivière, Signac soon met Armand Guillaumin, who provided important encouragement. In 1884 he was a founder-member of the Salon des Indépendants, where he met Georges Seurat who that year was exhibiting Bathers at Asnières (1884; London, N.G.). In this painting Seurat had already begun to apply principles of DIVISIONISM (although not yet the dot-like brushstroke), while Signac was still practising an orthodox form of Impressionism.
 

Childe Hassam

(b Dorchester, MA, 17 Oct 1859; d East Hampton, NY, 27 Aug 1935).
American painter and printmaker. The son of Frederick F. Hassam, a prominent Boston merchant, and his wife, Rosa P. Hathorne, he was initially trained as an apprentice to a wood-engraver. From the late 1870s to the mid-1880s he executed drawings for the illustration of books, particularly children’s stories. He had a long affiliation with the Boston firm of Daniel Lothrop & Co., for whom he illustrated E. S. Brooks’s In No-man’s Land: A Wonder Story (1885), Margaret Sidney’s A New Departure for Girls (1886) and numerous other books.
 

Max Liebermann

(b Berlin, 20 July 1847; d Berlin, 8 Feb 1935).
German painter, draughtsman, printmaker and collector. He dominated the German art world from the 1890s to the 1930s. Although at first a highly controversial figure, after the turn of the century he was showered with honours. His Naturalist and Impressionist works have been consistently admired, despite being banned during the Nazi period. Liebermann’s approach was that of a liberal cosmopolitan, and his work is distinguished by its honesty and commitment to social reform. Influenced by Dutch and French painting, he led the modernist movement in Germany away from the literary art of the 19th century.