French (1880-1950) Louis Icart was born in Toulouse, France. He began drawing at an early age. He was particularly interested in fashion, and became famous for his sketches almost immediately. He worked for major design studios at a time when fashion was undergoing a radical change-from the fussiness of the late nineteenth century to the simple, clingy lines of the early twentieth century. He was first son of Jean and Elisabeth Icart and was officially named Louis Justin Laurent Icart. The use of his initials L.I. would be sufficient in this household. Therefore, from the moment of his birth he was dubbed 'Helli'. The Icart family lived modestly in a small brick home on rue Traversi??re-de-la-balance, in the culturally rich Southern French city of Toulouse, which was the home of many prominent writers and artists, the most famous being Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Icart fought in World War I. He relied on his art to stem his anguish, sketching on every available surface. It was not until his move to Paris in 1907 that Icart would concentrate on painting, drawing and the production of countless beautiful etchings, which have served (more than the other mediums) to indelibly preserve his name in twentieth century art history. When he returned from the front he made prints from those drawings. The prints, most of which were aquatints and drypoints, showed great skill. Because they were much in demand, Icart frequently made two editions (one European, the other American) to satisfy his public. These prints are considered rare today, and when they are in mint condition they fetch high prices at auction. Art Deco, a term coined at the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Decoratifs, had taken its grip on the Paris of the 1920s. By the late 1920s Icart, working for both publications and major fashion and design studios, had become very successful, both artistically and financially. His etchings reached their height of brilliance in this era of Art Deco, and Icart had become the symbol of the epoch. Yet, although Icart has created for us a picture of Paris and New York life in the 1920s and 1930s, he worked in his own style, derived principally from the study of eighteenth-century French masters such as Jean Antoine Watteau, François Boucher and Jean Honor?? Fragonard. In Icart's drawings, one sees the Impressionists Degas and Monet and, in his rare watercolors, the Symbolists Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau. In fact, Icart lived outside the fashionable artistic movements of the time and was not completely sympathetic to contemporary art. Nonetheless, his Parisian scenes are a documentation of the life he saw around him and they are nearly as popular today as when they were first produced. In 1914 Icart had met a magical, effervescent eighteen-year-old blonde named Fanny Volmers, at the time an employee of the fashion house Paquin. She would eventually become his wife and a source of artistic inspiration for the rest of his life.   Related Paintings of Louis Lcart :. | Play the birds were | Pink bed | The afternoon quiet time | Parrot | Dancer |
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Maris, Jacob
Dutch, 1837-1899 was a Dutch painter, who with his brothers Willem and Matthijs belonged to what has come to be known as the Hague School of painters. Maris studied at the Antwerp Academy, and subsequently in Hubertus van Hove's studio during a stay in Paris from 1865 till 1871. He returned to Holland when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and died there in August 1899. Though he painted, especially in early life, domestic scenes and interiors invested with deeply sympathetic feeling, it is as a landscape painter that Maris excelled. He was the painter of bridges and windmills, of old quays, massive towers, and level banks; even more was he the painter of water, and misty skies, and chasing clouds. In all his works, whether in water or oil color, and in his etchings, the subject is always subordinate to the effect. His art is suggestive rather than decorative, and his force does not seem to depend on any preconceived method, such as a synthetical treatment of form or gradations of tone. And yet, though his means appear so simple, the artist's mind seems to communicate with the spectator's by directness of pictorial instinct, and we have only to observe the admirable balance of composition and truthful perspective to understand the sure knowledge of his business that underlies such purely impressionist handling. Maris has shown all that is gravest or brightest in the landscape of Holland, all that is heaviest or clearest in its atmosphere for instance, in the " Grey Tower, Old Amsterdam," in the " Landscape near Dordrecht," in the " Sea-weed Carts, Scheven-ingen," in " A Village Scene," and in the numerous other pictures which have been exhibited in the Royal Academy, London, in Edinburgh (1885), Paris, Brussels