1863-1935 French Paul Signac Galleries Paul Victor Jules Signac was born in Paris on November 11, 1863. He followed a course of training in architecture before deciding at the age of 18 to pursue a career as a painter. He sailed around the coasts of Europe, painting the landscapes he encountered. He also painted scenes of cities in France in his later years. In 1884 he met Claude Monet and Georges Seurat. He was struck by the systematic working methods of Seurat and by his theory of colours and became Seurat's faithful supporter. Under his influence he abandoned the short brushstrokes of impressionism to experiment with scientifically juxtaposed small dots of pure colour, intended to combine and blend not on the canvas but in the viewer's eye, the defining feature of pointillism. Many of Signac's paintings are of the French coast. He left the capital each summer, to stay in the south of France in the village of Collioure or at St. Tropez, where he bought a house and invited his friends. In March 1889, he visited Vincent van Gogh at Arles. The next year he made a short trip to Italy, seeing Genoa, Florence, and Naples. The Port of Saint-Tropez, oil on canvas, 1901Signac loved sailing and began to travel in 1892, sailing a small boat to almost all the ports of France, to Holland, and around the Mediterranean as far as Constantinople, basing his boat at St. Tropez, which he "discovered". From his various ports of call, Signac brought back vibrant, colourful watercolors, sketched rapidly from nature. From these sketches, he painted large studio canvases that are carefully worked out in small, mosaic-like squares of color, quite different from the tiny, variegated dots previously used by Seurat. Signac himself experimented with various media. As well as oil paintings and watercolours he made etchings, lithographs, and many pen-and-ink sketches composed of small, laborious dots. The neo-impressionists influenced the next generation: Signac inspired Henri Matisse and Andr?? Derain in particular, thus playing a decisive role in the evolution of Fauvism. As president of the Societe des Artistes Ind??pendants from 1908 until his death, Signac encouraged younger artists (he was the first to buy a painting by Matisse) by exhibiting the controversial works of the Fauves and the Cubists.  Related Paintings of Paul Signac :. | The Railway at Bois-Colombes | Breeze, Concarneau | Dunkirk | Erik Satie | Woman by Lamplight |
Related Artists:
Ludwig Vogel
(1788-1879) was a Swiss painter. This article was initially translated from the German Wikipedia.
Marsden Hartley
1877-1943 Marsden Hartley (January 4, 1877 - September 2, 1943) was an American Modernist painter and poet in the early 20th century. Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine, USA. He began his art training at the Cleveland Institute of Art after moving to Cleveland, Ohio in 1892. At the age of 22, he moved to New York City, where he attended the National Academy of Design and studied painting at the Art Students League of New York under William Merritt Chase. A great admirer of Albert Pinkham Ryder, Hartley would visit Ryder's studio in Greenwich Village as often as possible. While in New York, he came to the attention of Alfred Stieglitz and became associated with Stieglitz' 291 Gallery Group. Hartley had his first major exhibition at the 291 Gallery in 1909 and another in 1912. He was in the cultural vanguard, in the same milieu as Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane, Charles Demuth, Georgia O'Keeffe, Fernand Leger, Ezra Pound, among many others. Hartley, who was gay, painted Portrait of a German Officer (1914), which was an ode to Karl von Freyburg, a Prussian lieutenant of whom he became enamored before von Freyburg's death in World War I.
ABILDGAARD Nicolai
Nikolaj Abraham Abildgaard (September 11, 1743 - June 4, 1809), Danish artist, was born in Copenhagen, the son of Søren Abildgaard, an antiquarian draughtsman of repute, and Anne Margrethe Bastholm.