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 :. | Garden at Asnieres | grand canal | Marseilles | The Jetty at Cassis, Opus | Still life |
Related Artists:
Gottfried Von Wedig
Cologne 1583-1641
Marie Egner
painted On the Danube near Vienna in 1912
john scarlett davis
John Scarlett Davis (1 September 1804 - 29 September 1845), or Davies, was an English painter of the first half of the nineteenth century. Davis was born in Leominster, the son of James Davis, a watchmaker; Scarlett was his mother's maiden name. At the age of eleven, Davis won an award from the local society for the encouragement of the arts. He was educated at the Royal Academy of Art School in London, and began exhibiting his works at the annual Royal Academy shows in 1825. He was influenced by the work of his contemporary, Richard Parkes Bonington. Davis painted portraits, landscapes, and church interiors, and developed a distinctive specialty in painting the interiors of art galleries. His picture The Interior of the British Institution Gallery (1829) records a collection of Old Masters. His watercolor of the collection of Benjamin Godfrey Windus (1835) shows the Turner pictures on the walls. (John Ruskin studied those Turners while writing his Modern Painters.) Davis painted the interiors of the Louvre as well. Between 1842 and 1845 he was commissioned to draw copies of the paintings in the collections of the British royal palaces. Davis painted scenes on the Continent during his travels there. He was in Florence in 1834, and Amsterdam in 1841. He painted the interior of the Uffizi Gallery. Davis's later years were marred by alcoholism and spells of imprisonment. His posthumous reputation suffered as a result. Davis's name is almost identical to that of John Scarlett-Davies, a modern video artist and director.