Artist Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli
(October 14, 1824 - June 29, 1886) was a French painter of the generation preceding the Impressionists.
Monticelli was born in Marseille in humble circumstances. He attended the École Municipale de Dessin in Marseille from 1842 to 1846, and continued his artistic training in Paris, where he studied under Paul Delaroche at the École des Beaux-Arts. In Paris he made copies after the Old Masters in the Louvre, and admired the oil sketches of Eugene Delacroix. In 1855 he met Narcisse Diaz, a member of the Barbizon school, and the two often painted together in the Fontainebleau Forest. Monticelli frequently adopted Diaz's practice of introducing nudes or elegantly costumed figures into his landscapes.
He developed a highly individual Romantic style of painting, in which richly colored, dappled, textured and glazed surfaces produce a scintillating effect. He painted courtly subjects inspired by Antoine Watteau; he also painted still lives, portraits, and Orientalist subjects that owe much to the example of Delacroix.
After 1870, Monticelli returned to Marseille, where he would live in poverty despite a prolific output, selling his paintings for small sums. An unworldly man, he dedicated himself singlemindedly to his art.
The young Paul Cezanne had befriended Monticelli in the 1860s, and the influence of the older painter's work can be seen in Cezanne's work of that decade. Between 1878 and 1884 the two artists often painted landscapes together, once spending a month roaming the Aix countryside. Although Monticelli experimented briefly around 1870 with a treatment of light reflecting the discoveries of the Impressionists, he found the objectivity of this approach uncongenial.
Confronted with criticism of his style of painting Monticelli himself remarked, "I paint for thirty years from now". The work of this instinctive painter reached its greatest spontaneity in the decade before his death in 1886.
Related Paintings of Artist Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli :. | Gallant Meeting in the Park | Les Precieuses Ridicules | Figures at a Fountain | Port of Cassis | Weidelandschaft | Related Artists: Chiari, GiuseppeItalian Baroque Era Painter, 1654-1727 Henri Jules Geo1853-1924 French Henri Jules Geo Gallery william holman hunt,o.m.,r.w.s1827-1910
English painter. He worked as an office clerk in London from 1839 to 1843, attending drawing classes at a mechanics' institute in the evenings and taking weekly lessons from the portrait painter Henry Rogers. Holman Hunt overcame parental opposition to his choice of career in 1843, and this determined attitude and dedication to art could be seen throughout his working life. In July 1844, at the third attempt, he entered the Royal Academy Schools. His earliest exhibited works, such as Little Nell and her Grandfather (exh. British Institution, 1846; Sheffield, Graves A.G.), reveal few traces of originality, but the reading of John Ruskin's Modern Painters in 1847 was of crucial importance to Holman Hunt's artistic development. It led him to abandon the ambitious Christ and the Two Marys (Adelaide, A.G. S. Australia) in early 1848, when he realized its traditional iconography would leave his contemporaries unmoved. His next major work, the Flight of Madeline and Porphyro during the Drunkenness Attending the Revelry (1848; London, Guildhall A.G.), from John Keats's 'Eve of St Agnes', though displaced into a medieval setting, dramatized an issue dear to contemporary poets and central to Holman Hunt's art: love and youthful idealism versus loyalty to one's family. His first mature painting, it focuses on a moment of psychological crisis in a cramped and shallow picture space.
|