Felix Vallotton
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 :. | Hate | Still life with Meat and eggs | Femmes nues aux chats | Last Rays | The Rape of Europe | Related Artists: christian schubartGerman poet,writer on music and composer. A distinguished keyboard player, he served at the Werttemberg court, 1769-73, then worked in Augsburg and Ulm. After imprisonment, 1777-87 (for insulting a duke's mistress), he became court and theatre poet at Stuttgart. As a composer he was best known for his lieder. His writings, including an important work on musical aesthetics (1806) and essays in his own periodical, stress expression in music. His poetry was often set; Schubert's four settings include Die Forelle and An meine Klavier.
Daniel SeghersFlemish Baroque Era Painter, 1590-1661
was a Jesuit brother and Flemish Baroque painter who specialized in flower still lifes, and is particularly well-known for his contributions to the genre of "flower garland" painting. His paintings were collected enthusiastically by courtly patrons and he had numerous imitators. Born in Antwerp, Seghers moved to the Dutch Republic around 1601, following the death of his father Pierre and the conversion of his mother to Calvinism.[1] The young artist returned to Antwerp by 1611, where he was enrolled in the guild of St. Luke as a student of Jan Brueghel the Elder.After re-converting back to Catholicism, in 1614 he became a noviciate in the Jesuit order in MechelenUntil 1625 Seghers continued to work as a painter in Antwerp, as well as a stay in Brussels in 1621Sources differ regarding his status in the Jesuit order: some claim that he was ordained a priest in 1625,while other argue that he remained a lay brother. Joos van Craesbeeck (c. 1605/06- c. 1660) was a Flemish painter who specialized in tavern interiors, tronies, and other works similar to his teacher Adriaen Brouwer. Born in Neerlinter (Flemish Brabant), he became a master in Antwerp's guild of St. Luke in 1633?C1634, and like his contemporaries David Teniers the Elder and David Rijckaert III he developed rustic genre scenes. He subsequently moved to Brussels, where he joined that city's painters' guild in 1651.
Paintings such as Death is Violent and Fast are typical of his small, theatrical images of peasants brawling crowded with violent expressive figures. Unlike Teniers, whose style became more elegant, Craesbeeck continued to paint bawdy figures later in his career.
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