French Cubist Painter, 1881-1955,was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker,Leger was born in the Argentan, Orne, Basse-Normandie, where his father raised cattle. Fernand Leger initially trained as an architect from 1897-1899 before moving in 1900 to Paris, where he supported himself as an architectural draftsman. After military service in Versailles in 1902-1903, he enrolled at the School of Decorative Arts; he also applied to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts but was rejected. He nevertheless attended the Beaux-Arts as a non-enrolled student, spending what he described as "three empty and useless years" studying with Gerome and others, while also studying at the Academie Julian. He began to work seriously as a painter only at the age of 25. At this point his work showed the influence of Impressionism, as seen in Le Jardin de ma mere (My Mother's Garden) of 1905, one of the few paintings from this period that he did not later destroy. A new emphasis on drawing and geometry appeared in Leger's work after he saw the Cezanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne in 1907. In 1909 he moved to Montparnasse and met such leaders of the avant-garde as Archipenko, Lipchitz, Chagall, and Robert Delaunay. His major painting of this period is Nudes in the Forest (1909-10), in which Leger displayed a personal form of Cubism??his critics called it "Tubism" for its emphasis on cylindrical formsethat made no use of the collage technique pioneered by Braque and Picasso. In 1910 he joined with several other artists, including Delaunay, Jacques Villon, Henri Le Fauconnier, Albert Gleizes, Francis Picabia, and Marie Laurencin to form an offshoot of the Cubist movement, the Puteaux Group??also called the Section d'Or (The Golden Section). Leger was influenced during this time by Italian Futurism, and his paintings, from then until 1914, became increasingly abstract. Their vocabulary of tubular, conical, and cubed forms are laconically rendered in rough patches of primary colours plus green, black and white, as seen in the series of paintings with the title Contrasting Forms. Leger's experiences in World War I had a significant effect on his work. Mobilized in August 1914 for service in the French Army, he spent two years at the front in Argonne. He produced many sketches of artillery pieces, airplanes, and fellow soldiers while in the trenches, and painted Soldier with a Pipe (1916) while on furlough. In September 1916 he almost died after a mustard gas attack by the German troops at Verdun.  Related Paintings of Fernand Leger :. | female toro | the mechanic | Le Coq Orange | Two women with flowers in hand | stad |
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Cornelis de Heem
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1631-1695 Son of Jan Davidsz. de Heem. He spent a great deal of his life in Antwerp, where he was taught by his father. Cornelis also worked in Utrecht in 1667, in nearby IJsselstein in 1676 and in The Hague from 1676 for more than ten years. His best works approach the quality of his father, particularly in works executed during the decade starting in 1655. Cornelis still-lifes can be distinguished by daring colour harmonies, sometimes with a strong blue. His compositions are often simpler: fruit-pieces, floral bouquets, festoons and garlands and sumptuous still-lifes, only occasionally in large formats. His technique changed from a more painterly to a more graphic style.
Piero di Cosimo
1462-1521 Italian Piero di Cosimo Galleries Italian painter and draughtsman. Tax declarations made by Piero di Cosimo's father suggest that the artist was born in either 1461 or 1462. According to the first, he was eight years old in 1469, while a catasto (land registry declaration) of 1480 gives his age as 18. A document of 1457 establishes that his father, Lorenzo di Piero d'Antonio, was a maker of small tools (succhiellinaio) rather than a goldsmith, as Vasari claimed. By 1480 Piero appears no longer to have been living at the family house in the Via della Scala, Florence, but was an unsalaried apprentice or workshop assistant to Cosimo Rosselli, from whom he received room and board and eventually took the name of Piero di Cosimo.
Trophime Bigot
Trophime Bigot (1579-1649/50), also known as Theophile Bigot, Teofili Trufemondi, Candlelight Master, Maître e la Chandelle, was a French painter of the Baroque era, active in Rome and his native Provence. Bigot was born in Arles in 1579, where he began his artistic career. Between 1620 and 1634, Bigot was in Italy, including Rome. He is known to have been in Arles in 1634, where he painted the altarpiece Saint Laurent condamne au supplice (Saint Laurence Condemned to Torture) and Assomption de la Vierge (Assumption of the Virgin) for local churches. Between 1638 and 1642, he lived in Aix-en-Provence, where he painted another Assumption of the Virgin. He returned to Arles in 1642, and divided his activities between this city and Avignon, where he died around 1650.