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 :. | grand canal venice | Study of Harmonious times | Concarneau | snow boulevard de clichy pa ris | oleanders |
Related Artists:
Roll Alfed Philippe
Paris 1846-Paris 1919
Rafal Hadziewicz
(13 October 1803 - 7 September 1883) was a Polish historical painter. Born in Zamch, Hadziewicz attended art school from 1816 to 1822. In 1822 he studied at Warsaw University under Antoni Brodowski. After getting a scholarship he traveled to Dresden in 1829 and later to Paris, where he studied at a prominent French School of Painting. In 1831 he continued his studies in Rome. He stayed in Rome in 1833 for self-study of the masters. At this time he created many well-received sketches. In 1834 he went to Krakew and painted icons for several Orthodox churches there. In 1839 he left for Moscow, where he served in the Department of Fine Art and Mathematics until 1844. In 1844 he moved back to Warsaw, where he served as a professor in the Warsaw School of Art. In 1871, near the end of his life, he was transferred to a university in Kielce, where he died. Hadziewicz painted many religious paintings and portraits but was best known for historic compositions, which were often compared to art of the Italian Renaissance and European Baroque.
Haughton Forrest
1826-1925