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 :. | La Rochelle Hafenansicht | saint martin kanalen | Concarneau | Harbour at Marseilles | women at the well opus |
Related Artists:
Jan Wyck
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1652-1700,Son of Thomas Wijck. A marriage certificate issued on 22 November 1676 describes the artist as 'Jan Wick of St Paul's Covent Garden, gent., widower, about 31 ...', suggesting that he was born c. 1645, but his correct birthdate is known from the inscription on a mezzotint portrait of him by John Faber II (1684-1756) after a painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller. Jan is first documented on 17 June 1674, when he appeared before the court of the Painter-Stainers' Company in London and vowed to pay both his own and his father's quarterly fees. The certificate of 1676 relates to his second marriage, to Ann Skinner (d 1687), who between 1678 and 1683 bore him four children, all of whom died young. After Ann's death in 1687, he married Elizabeth Holomberg (d 1693) in 1688 and moved to Mortlake. Between 1689 and 1693 they had two sons and a daughter.
Nils Hansteen
(1855-1912) was a Norwegian painter. Nils Hansteen was born in Mo i Rana, in the county of Nordland, Norway. He attended the painting school of Knud Bergslien from 1873 and Peder Thurmann Cappelen (1874-1975). He later studied under Hans Gude in Karlsruhe from 1876 to 1877. He then lived in Munich (1877-1880), Italy (1880-1881) and Copenhagen (1887-1892). He was known principally as a landscape and marine painter. He painted in a naturalistic style, with motifs from marine and forest environments. Two of his paintings are owned by the National Gallery of Norway.
Pierre de Valenciennes
Toulouse 1750-Paris 1819 .French painter. He trained at the academy in Toulouse under the history painter Jean-Baptiste Despax (1709-73). In 1769 he went to Italy for the first time, with Mathias Du Bourg, a councillor at the Toulouse parliament. Du Bourg introduced him to Etienne-Fran?ois, Duc de Choiseul, a keen patron of the arts, who in turn recommended him to Gabriel-Fran?ois Doyen, one of the leading history painters in Paris, whose studio he entered in 1773. Doyen gave his pupil a sense of the elevated ideals of history painting but was also sympathetic to the lesser genre of landscape. Valenciennes presumably frequented Choiseul's country seat at Chanteloup, near Amboise, meeting there the landscape painters Hubert Robert and Jean Hoeel, both proteg's of Choiseul. His early interest in the native landscape can be seen in his sketchbooks (Paris, Louvre), especially one dated 1775 that contains drawings made at Amboise, Compiegne and Fontainebleau