1865-1925was a Swiss painter and printmaker associated with Les Nabis. He was an important figure in the development of the modern woodcut. He was born into a conservative middle class family in Lausanne, and there he attended College Cantonal, graduating with a degree in classical studies in 1882. In that year he moved to Paris to study art under Jules Joseph Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger at the Academie Julian. He spent many hours in the Louvre, where he greatly admired the works of Holbein, Derer and Ingres; these artists would remain exemplars for Vallotton throughout his life.[1] His earliest paintings, such as the Ingresque Portrait of Monsieur Ursenbach (1885), are firmly rooted in the academic tradition, and his self portrait of 1885 (seen at right) received an honorable mention at the Salon des artistes français in 1886. During the following decade Vallotton painted, wrote art criticism and made a number of prints. In 1891 he executed his first woodcut, a portrait of Paul Verlaine. The many woodcuts he produced during the 1890s were widely disseminated in periodicals and books in Europe as well as in the United States, and were recognized as radically innovative in printmaking. They established Vallotton as a leader in the revival of true woodcut as an artistic medium; in the western world, the relief print, in the form of commercial wood engraving, had long been mainly utilized unimaginatively as a medium for the reproduction of drawn or painted images and, latterly, photographs. Vallotton's starkly reductive woodcut style features large masses of undifferentiated black and areas of unmodulated white. While emphasizing outline and flat patterns, Vallotton generally made no use of the gradations and modeling traditionally produced by hatching. The influences of post-Impressionism, symbolism and the Japanese woodcut are apparent; a large exhibition of ukiyo-e prints had been presented at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1890, and Vallotton, like many artists of his era an enthusiast of Japonism, collected these prints. He depicted street crowds and demonstrations including several scenes of police attacking anarchists bathing women, portrait heads, and other subjects which he treated with a sardonic humor. His graphic art reached its highest development in Intimit's (Intimacies), a series of ten interiors published in 1898 by the Revue Blanche, which deal with tension between men and women. Vallotton's prints have been suggested as a significant influence on the graphic art of Edvard Munch, Aubrey Beardsley, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner .By 1892 he was affiliated with Les Nabis, a group of young artists that included Pierre Bonnard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Maurice Denis, and Edouard Vuillard, with whom Vallotton was to form a lifelong friendship. During the 1890s, when Vallotton was closely allied with the avant-garde, his paintings reflected the style of his woodcuts, with flat areas of color, hard edges, and simplification of detail.  Related Paintings of Felix Vallotton :. | Self-Portrait at the Age of Twenty | Marthe Mellot | Path in the Heathland | Alfred Athis | woman in the street |
Related Artists:
Theodore Clement Steele
1847-1926 Theodore Clement Steele Galleries Theodore Clement Steele (September 11, 1847-July 24, 1926) was an American Impressionist painter known for his Indiana landscapes. Steele was born in Owen County, Indiana, and later moved to Indianapolis after study in Cincinnati, Chicago and Munich. He is considered to be the most important of the Hoosier Group of painters and his work is widely collected by museums and individuals. Steele earned his living primarily as a portrait painter and his portraits include one of notable Hoosier Poet James Whitcomb Riley and the official portraits of several Indiana governors. Steele exhibited at and was on the art selection for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904 and was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1913. He enjoyed plein air, or outdoor, painting, which is reflected in many of the landscapes he painted. Steele went through a notable change in style after his return from Munich in 1885. Steele's work, which in the Munich time period sported drab colors and high contrasts, shifted towards a brighter, more vivid color palette after his return to Indiana. Upon T.C. Steele's return, his family lived in the Talbot House, or Tinker Mansion, which is at what is now 16th and Pennsylvania Streets in Indianapolis. In 1898, Steele and J. Ottis Adams bought a home in Brookville, Indiana, which they called "The Hermitage." Steele sold his interest in the home to Adams after the death of his first wife. He received an honorary master's degree from Wabash College in 1900 and an honorary doctorate from Indiana University in 1916.
Jacques Blanchard
(1600 - 1638), also known as Jacques Blanchart, was a French baroque painter who was born in Paris. He was raised and taught by his uncle, the painter Nicolas Bollery (ca. 1560-1630). Jacques's brother and son, Jean-Baptiste Blanchard (after 1602-1665) and Gabriel Blanchard (1630-1704), respectively were also painters. Jacques spent the years from 1624 to 1628 studying in Bologna and Venice. After briefly working in Turin at the court of the Charles Emmanuel I, Duke of Savoy (ca. 1628) he returned to France and set himself up in Paris in 1629. Jacques Blanchard is best known for his small religious and mythological paintings. He died in Paris in 1638. This painter should not be confused with the French sculptor of the same name who lived from 1634 to 1689. Nothing seems to be known of his work before he left for Rome at the age of twenty-four. After two years he moved to Venice, where he remained for two more years. It was there that his style was formed. He then went to Turin, where he worked for the Dukes of Savoy, before returning to France 1628. It is from the brief but productive period after his return that all his dated works survive. They show him to stand quite apart from his contemporaries, not only in his painting style but also in his choice of sensual subject-matter, for example the Bacchanal at Nancy. The chief influences were the sixteenth century painters, especially Titian and Tintoretto with their rich, warm colours, and Veronese, whose blond and silvery colour and limpid light he used most effectively in his small religious and mythological subjects. The several versions of Charity, depicted as a young woman with two or three children, are excellent examples of his tenderness of colour handling, and of a softness of sentiment nearer to the 18th than to the 17th century.
emile-Rene Menard
(1861 - 1930) was a French painter born in Paris. From early childhood he was immersed in an artistic environment: Corot, Millet and the Barbizon painters frequented his family home, familiarizing him thus with both landscape and antique subjects. Menard studied at the Academy Jullian from 1880 after having been a student of Baudry, Bouguereau, and Henri Lehmann. He participated in the Salon of the Secession in Munich, and the Salon de la Libre Esthetique in Brussels during 1897. Several personal exhibitions were also devoted to him at the Georges Small Gallery. In 1921 he exhibited in the Twelfth Salon along with Henri Martin and Edmond Aman-Jean. Galleries in Buffalo, New York and Boston, Massachusetts exposed Menard and his art to the United States. However, the numerous commissions that Menard received from the French government crowned his career; for example, the cycle for the Hautes Etudes e la Sorbonne, the Faculte de Droit, and the fresco Atoms for the Chemistry institute, and finally the Caise des Depôts in Marseilles. Menard's art allies a rigorous, clear classicism with a diffuse and dreamlike brushwork. In 1894, Victor Shoe wrote of Menard in l' Art et la Vie (Art and Life): "visions of a pacified, bathed nature, of dawn and of twilight, where the soul seems to immerse itself in the innocence of daybreak, and breathe the divine anointment that comes with the dawn."