James Holland’s Biography

Born: 1851 Warrington, near Manchester, England.
Died: 1906 London, England

Holland had initial training at Hatherly’s School of Art in London. From 1872 he began his studies at the Royal Academy in London and continued his studies at the Academie Julian in Paris. He was an exponent of plein-air painting, and painted atmospheric, naturalistic landscape and genre pictures. He mainly worked at his country estate of East Ashling House near Chichester but had several stays on Capri. Holland took part regularly in exhibitions at the Royal Academy during the years of 1875-1906 and also exhibited occasionally in the Paris Salon from 1897 to 1905.

Click here for Holland’s paintings in our gallery.

Paul Gauguin’s Biography

Born: June 7, 1848, Paris, France
Died: May 8, 1903, Atuona, Hiva Oa, Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia

Gauguin was the son of an émigré journalist He grew up in Lima (Peru), then in Orleans and Paris. He settled by the sea in 1865 until 1871, when he returned to Paris. He worked as a stockbroker in Paris, painting in his spare time. He married a Danish woman, Mette Gad, in 1873, and they had five children. He met Pissarro and other Impressionists in 1874 and studied at the Academie Colarossi. He painted with Pissarro and Cezanne in the years 1879-1881, and exhibited at the Salon and at other Impressionist exhibitions a number of times. In 1882, he moved to Rouen, then Copenhagen where he got into financial difficulties. He returned to Paris in 1885 leaving his family in Denmark. He went to Pont-Aven for the first time in 1886 and met Bernard. He took part in the 8th Impressionists Exhibition in Paris, where he became acquainted with the van Gogh brothers. He traveled with the painter Laval to Panama and Martinique in 1887, then returned to stay with Bernard and others in Pont-Aven, Brittany. In his depictions of Breton customs his style moved towards “synthetist symbolism”. Later, he exhibited with Theo van Gogh and stayed with Vincent van Gogh in Arles, which ended in a disastrous personal conflict. He continued painting in Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu, influencing Serusier, Denis and Bonard.

After auctioning off his paintings in Paris in 1891, he broke off with Bernard and emigrated to Tahiti, in search of an alternative life to that of European city civilization. He became ill with syphilis. In 1893 to 1895 he tried selling his large, symbolic pictures with their areas of flat, bright colors and scenes of the South Seas, the epitome of exotic “Primitivism”, but had no success in Paris, Copenhagen and Brittany. He returned to Tahiti in 1895 where he also worked on sculptures, but his health suffered, partly from alcohol. He published his autobiographical work “Noa Noa” in 1897. In 1898, he attempted suicide while living in desperate poverty. Shortly thereafter, in 1901, Gauguin moved to the Island of Dominique in the Marquesas Islands. Because he protested against the policies of the colonial administration, he was arrested in 1903. During the same year he died, worn out, at the age of 54.

Click here for Gauguin’s paintings in our gallery.

Myles Birket Foster’s Biography

Born: 1825, North Shields, England
Died: 1899, Weybridge, England

Foster was a member of an old North-Country Quaker family. He was the youngest one of seven children. His father removed to London when he was five years of age. Foster seems to have been the only member of the family who had any inclinations towards art. He is known as a born watercolorist, illustrator, etcher, wood and metal engraver. He is said to have been able to draw before he could speak. At the first schools to which he went, those kept by Quakers at Tottenham and at Hitchio, he was taught drawing, and then later on he had special lessons from a master named Parry; but his education ended before he was sixteen. He was sent to the studio of Ebenezer Landells, a wood engraver, a man who had known Thomas Bewick the engraver acquainted with Foster’s grandfather, who became important to Foster as an influence. In London and Surrey he worked for many years doing drawings for “Punch”, “Punch’s Almanack”, the “Illustrated London News” and its ” Annual Almanack”, and many of the illustrated books of the day, notably one by S.C. Hall on Ireland. Foster did very little actual engraving since he did his work drawing on the blocks so well that his time was fully occupied with it. He himself was always ready to add to his knowledge with steady work outdoors, or by sketching events which took place in order to use them for illustrations. He left Landell’s in 1846, starting out on his own, working as a book illustrator for Vizetelly. His first great success was in illustrating ” Evangeline”, and after that he was sent up the Rhine to make drawings for “Hyperion”, and for a book on the famous river itself. His work was widely respected and pleasing, and assumed a strong and broad character. He had a great love for the rustic cottage scenes of Surrey, and painted them with a daintiness and skill which few have excelled. His greatest triumph in painting were obtained in the country side, in the winding lane, the hedgerow with its flowers, the cottage, the hamlet, or the village, and he painted all these over and over again with a careful attention to details. His graceful paintings were invariably popular and attractive. His home at Witley, near London, named The Hill, was adorned with the work of his artist friends. Edward Burne-Jones painted his staircase, Rossetti adorned the dining-room, Keene designed some of the stained glass, Morris and Hunt, Linnell, Walker, Pinwell, Houghton and Lewis, all had their share in the decoration, and the result was very remarkable and widely praised. Towards the close of his life, Foster had to leave The Hill, and settled in failing health at Weybridge. There he died at the age of seventy-three, becoming an important figure in English art.

Click here for Foster’s paintings in our gallery.

Mary Cassatt’s Biography

Born: May 22, 1844, Allegheny City, USA
Died: June 14, 1926, Château de Beaufresne, near Paris, France

Cassatt was the daughter of a banker and an affluent Pittsburgh businessman. The family moved to Paris in 1851 and also lived in Heidelberg and Darmstadt in 1853-1855. She returned to Pennsylvania in 1855 and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia during the years 1861 to 1865. She had studied for a short period in the studio of Charles Chaplin in Paris in 1866, while she self-taught and worked together with Gerome and Charles Bellay. She returned to America in 1870 because of the Franco – Prussian War. Then, she studied for a time at the Academy Raimondi in Parma in 1871; she imitated Correggio and Parmigianino, and admired Velazquez and Rembrandt. In the years of 1873 to 1877 she traveled to Madrid, Seville, Belgium and the Netherlands and copied Velazquez and Rubens. She finally settled in Paris in 1877, where she met Degas who advised her to join the Impressionists and she participated in the Exhibitions of 1879, 1880, 1881 and 1886, refusing to do so in 1882 when Degas did not.. Degas and Renoir greatly influenced her style of painting.

Her favorite themes are portraits of women and children. She had exhibited her works a few times at Durand-Ruel gallery and was commissioned to do a mural for the 1892 World Fair in Chicago. She traveled in the USA in 1898 and took travelling extensively in Europe and the Middle East in the following years. She was accepted into the Legion of Honour in 1904 and been awarded of a gold metal at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art in 1914. She also became a member of the National Academy of Design in New York in 1910. Her failing eyesight forced her to give up painting. She was a great practical support to the movement as a whole, both by providing direct financial help and by promoting the works of Impressionists in the USA, largely through her brother Alexander. By persuading him to buy works by Manet, Monet, Morisot, Renoir, Degas and Pissarro, she made him the first important collector of such works in America. She also advised and encouraged her friends the Havemeyers to build up their important collection of works by Impressionists and other contemporary French artists.

Click here for Cassatt’s paintings in our gallery.

Canaletto’s Biography

Born: October 28, 1697, Venice, Italy
Died: 1768, Venice, Italy

The above engraving of Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canale) was completed by Antonio Visentini, circa 1735. Canaletto was a son of the scene-painter Bernardo Canale. He worked as a scene-painter in his father’s workshop in Rome in 1719 and was influenced by Panini. About 1720, he turned to the painting of views and concentrated on this for the rest of his life and became perhaps the most famous view-painter of the 18th century. His progenitors as “veduta” (city view) painters were Luca Antonio Carlevaris and the Dutch born Jaspar van Wittel (a.k.a. Vanvitelli), but Canaletto’s superiority over them was recognized early by his contemporaries. His views of his native city were intended for export. He acquired a large clientele in England through the Irish impresario Owen MacSwiny and Joseph Smith, a merchant resident in Venice who became British Consul in 1744. Smith’s own collection of 54 paintings and over 140 drawings was sold to King George III, and many are still in the Royal Art Collection at Windsor. In 1745, partly as a result of the War of the Austrian Succession, which made travel difficult for his patrons, Canaletto went to England. He lived mainly there until 1755, painting many views of the Thames and its bridges, of Whitehall, and of a number of country houses including Warwick Castle and Badminton. All his works employ linear perspective, which is used not only as an illusionistic device, but as a means to aesthetic order. He often employs wide-angle or birds-eye views with several vanishing points; the perspective is handled so as to control the way the painting is seen, leading the eye on a structured voyage of exploration through its complex spaces (“camera obscura”). His Venetian views are very varied, moving from the enclosed irregular spaces of the smaller Venetian “campi” to wide panoramas of the Grand Canal and the Bacino du San Marco. In the careful distribution of accents across the surface they show a sense of interval which is classical and very satisfying, but this is combined with a feeling for extended effects of air and atmosphere which is essentially Rococo, comparable with Tiepolo’s style. Canaletto’s early works favor picturesque effects of surface and texture. Some of his greatest paintings of this period have open and Corotesque brushwork, evoking effects of light comparable to early Impressionism. He returned and lived in Venice some time after 1755, until his death in 1768.

Click here for Canaletto’s paintings in our gallery.

James Charles’ Biography

Born: 1851 Warrington, near Manchester, England
Died: 1906 London, England

Charles received his initial training at Hatherly’s School of Art in London. In 1872 he began his studies at the Royal Academy in London and the Academie Julian in Paris. An exponent of plein-air painting, he painted atmospheric, naturalistic landscape and genre pictures. Charles worked mainly at his country estate of East Ashling House near Chichester and also had several stays on Capri. From 1875 to 1906 he regularly took part in exhibitions at the Royal Academy, and during 1897-1905 he exhibited occasionally in the Paris Salon.

Click here for Charles’s paintings in our gallery.

Rupert Bunny’s Biography

Born: September 29, 1864, Melbourne, Australia
Died: May 25, 1947, Melbourne, Australia

A painter of mythological scenes, landscapes and figure studies, Rupert Bunny is best known for intimate scenes of women indoors, on balconies or relaxing in sun-dappled landscapes, as well as interpretations of mythological subjects. He studied at the National Gallery of Victoria School from 1881 to 1884, then traveled to Europe in 1884. There he studied at the St. John’s Wood Art School, London under Philip Calderon, then also in Paris under Jean Paul Laurens. He lived mainly in France apart from brief visits to London and Australia in 1911 and 1928. He was one of the few Australian artists of his generation to establish an international reputation. Contemporary critics admired Bunny’s handling of light and texture, praising his works for their `unaffected charm’ and `masterly technique’. Bunny also composed music. He returned to Melbourne in 1933, in 1946 he was honored with a retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Click here for Bunny’s paintings in our gallery.

Jan Brueghel’s Biography

Born: 1568, Brussels, Belgium
Died: 1625, Antwerp, Belgium

Jan Brueghel was born in a family of Flemish painters in Brussels. He was the second son of Pieter Brueghel The Elder (1525-1569), who was a major landscape artist. Jan had been given several nicknames, called “Velvet”, “Flower” and “Paradise” Brueghel – the nicknames were to some extent an effort to distinguish between members of the same family. His father was often called the “Peasant” Brueghel and Jan’s elder brother, Pieter was called “Hell Brueghel” because he exploited the growing market for pictures of hell-fire and demons. Brueghel attended school in Antwerp where he was a pupil of Pieter Goctkind and probably also of Gillis van Coninxloo during the years of 1578-1584. He also studied watercolour painting with his grandmother, Mayken Verhulst, in Italy in 1589. There he entered the service of Cardinal Borromeo in Rome and Milan in 1595 and 1596. He returned to Antwerp in 1598 and settled and became a member of a painters’ guild. He married Isabella de Jode in 1599. They had one daughter and a son, Jan II (1601-1678) who also became a painter. After Isabella died in 1603, he married Catharine van Marienberghe in 1605. With her they had eight children, including the painter Ambrosius (1617-1675). Jan Brueghel ‘s position in society and among his fellow artists was assured during his lifetime: he solidified the family reputation established by his famous father, and his works were very influential. His flower paintings are perhaps his most well known, though he began painting flowers only toward the end of his career. By the time Brueghel began painting, “Turkish” flowers such as tulips and hyacinths had appeared in Europe, as well as American plants such as marigolds, nasturtiums, and sunflowers. Brueghel’s reputation as a master at painting flowers is notable because of the newness of the genre, and he was proud of his mastery of minute detail. Most of his still lifes date from 1610-21. His bouquets all have a sure touch in terms of composition. His juxtaposition of flowers of all seasons in the same picture is less a botanical curiosity than a suggestion of the “Paradise” or “Eden” quality added to the very idea of such beauty and fullness of nature. His landscapes, which he painted all his life, and which show the influences he encountered on his trip to Italy, also take on certain characteristics of his father’s work, which he obviously studied. He collaborated with many of his contemporaries – most famously with Rubens, who wrote his epitaph. Two of his most famous works, collaborated with Rubens, are “Madonna in a Wreath of Flowers” (Brueghel painted the wreath), and “Paradise”, also called “Adam and Eve in the Garden”. His style was perpetuated by his sons Jan Brueghel II (1601-78) and Ambrosius Brueghel (1617-75), whose sons then carried on the tradition into the 18th century. Jan Brueghel died in Antwerp of cholera in 1625.

Click here for Brueghel’s paintings in our gallery.

Eugène-Louis Boudin’s Biography

Born: July 12, 1824, Honfleur, France
Died: August 8, 1898, Deauville, France

Boudin was a son of a sailor. He settled in Le Havre in 1835, where he was an apprentice to a printer. In 1838, he opened an art framer’s shop, in which he exhibited paintings by Couture, Millet, Troyon and others. Soon he gave up the shop, to dedicate himself wholeheartedly to painting. After traveling to Paris in 1847 he visited northern France and Flanders in 1848. He exhibited two pictures at the Societe des Amis des Arts du Havre in 1850, after which the town gave him a scholarship to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He finished the study in 1853 and returned to Honfleur taking the route along the coast in 1855. Throughout his life he remained faithful to the Corot tradition and plein-air painting, especially the play of light on water and atmospheric cloud studies. He once declared that three brushstrokes done outdoors to be of greater value than days spent working in the studio. Grains of sand from the beaches where Boudin painted still adhere to some of his pictures. His pastels exhibited at the Salon in 1859 were greatly admired by Baudelaire. In 1858, he met Monet and encouraged an equal enthusiasm for plein-air painting. Later, Monet was to say: “If I became a painter it was thanks to Boudin”.

Beginning in 1862 he began spending his holidays at Trouville, where the beach life provided many models. In 1868, he was commissioned to execute a decorative painting for the Chateau de Bourdainville. During his stay in Brussels in 1870/71, new motifs – market scenes – led to a more generous brushwork. He met Durand-Ruel there. He had considerable success at the Salon after his paintings were showed in the 1st Impressionist Exhibition in 1874. He received the gold metal at the General Exhibition in 1889. Afterwards, based at his home in Deauville, he made various trips to Venice, Cote d’Azur and elsewhere, which enriched his use of colour. His pictures of the sea made him one of the forerunners of the Impressionists. Though Boudin believed sincerity was achieved by painting directly from nature, he still made adjustments to his paintings in the studio. “An impression is gained in an instant,” he advised a student, “but it then has to be condensed following the rules of art or rather your own feeling and that is the most difficult thing – to finish a painting without spoiling anything.”

Click here for Boudin’s paintings in our gallery.

François Boucher’s Biography

Born: 1703, Paris, France
Died: May 30, 1770, Paris, France

Boucher was a son of a decoration and embroidery draftsman. He came to the graphic workshop of Laurent Cars by the age of nineteen, where he actively worked as an engraver on the publication of the graphic works of his contemporary Antoine Watteau. The four volumes of publication, which preserved the major pictures and drawings of the master, were the next layer on which Boucher’s artistic style was founded. Boucher’s father took his teenage son to the studio of the decorator Francois Lemoyne for apprenticeship, and he mastered the art of composition. Boucher was chosen in 1734 by Jean-Baptiste Oudry as designer for the tapestry works at Beauvais, and much later, in 1755, became director of the Gobelins tapestries. In 1723 Boucher won the Prix de Rome, he studied there from 1727 to 1731. After his return to France, he married Marie Anna Buseau in 1733. Their son, Juste, was an architect and decorator, his two daughters married his pupil, Deshays and Baudouin. Already having worked at Versailles in the Queen’s apartments in 1750, Boucher began to work for Madame de Pompadour, the Mistress to Louis XV. Under her patronage, he created indulgently luxurious works such as “The Toilet” and “The Bath of Venus” in 1751, as well as “The Rising” and “The Setting of the Sun” in 1752, which were considered masterpieces from the moment of their completion. He was appointed Premier Peintre du Roi (first painter to the king), and lived in Louvre after 1752. He was very productive in a variety of designs for tapestries, decorative boudoir panels, theater, book illustrations, porcelain, as well as his paintings. He is noted for his lighthearted depictions of classical divinities and pastoral, mythological scenes which embody the frivolity as well as the sensuousness of the rococo style.

Click here for Boucher’s paintings in our gallery.

Helen Allingham’s Biography

Born: 1848, Burton on Trent, UK
Died: 1926

Helen Allingham (nee Paterson) was born near Burton on Trent, the family settling in Birmingham after the death of her father in 1862. She studied at the Birmingham School of Design under Rainbach, and in 1867 went to London to study first at the Female School of Art, and then at the RA Schools. In London she stayed with her aunt, Laura Herford, who had been instrumental in opening the Royal Academy Schools to women. Allingham’s began her career as a black and white illustrator, her first success being in Once a Week, followed by various children’s books for Cassells. By the late 1860’s she had a strong reputation, she was one of the founder members of staff on The Graphic when that magazine was established in 1869. From 1874 she was a regular contributor to the Illustrated London News and the Cornhill Magazine – including Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. In that year she married the poet William Allingham, (whose book The Music Masters was one of those illustrated by the Pre-Raphaelites). Following her marriage, freed from the necessity of earning a living, she turned more to. Allingham was influenced by the works of Fred Walker. Of her watercolors, Ralph Peacock wrote that few painters “have shown a more definitely English sympathy in landscape than she has.” She produced rustic countryside scenes, with cottages and village people, in a sympathetic style avoiding overt sentimentality. She was also a portraitist, among her sitters being Carlyle. Watercolors by Allingham are in the Birmingham museum. Many of the periodicals illustrated by her are still to be found in second-hand bookshops.

Click here for Allingham’s paintings in our gallery.

Sir Hubert von Herkomer’s Biography

Born: 1849, Bavaria, Germany
Died: 1914

Hubert von Herkomer settled in England in 1857. He studied art at the Royal College of Art from 1866, under the direction of Sir Luke Fildes. Von Herkomer first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1869, “The Last Muster” was one of the pictures of the year in 1875. He was influenced in watercolour painting by J. W. North, while spending time under his tutelage. Later von Herkomer himself founded a school of art in Middlesex, which he directed from its inception in 1883 until 1904. He had strong and unique ideas on teaching art. Besides painting, von Herkomer also did enamelling, directed theatre productions, created backdrops for them, and was engaged in a number of other artistic endeavors. Between 1912 and until his death in 1914 von Herkomer built a film studio on his estate in Hertfordshire. There he produced seven films including a comedy and costume dramas. They were released and shown in and around London, and at least one was shown in the United States, but to date, the whereabouts of the films remains unknown.

Click here for von Herkomer’s paintings in our gallery.

Vincent van Gogh’s Biography

Born: March 30, 1853, Groot-Zundert, Holland
Died: July 29, 1890, Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris, France

Vincent van Gogh was the son of a Dutch Protestant pastor, and he originally planned to study theology. He worked in branches of the Paris art dealer Goupil in The Hague, Brussels and London during the years of 1869-1876. He had been an assistant teacher and preacher in and near London in 1876 and was trained as a lay preacher in 1877/78, when he began to draw. He became a lay preacher in the mining area of Borinage in 1878, suffering from poverty. His early works reflect van Gogh’s desire to express the misery and poverty of humanity as he saw it among the miners in Belgium. His brother Theo, the art dealer, began to support him financially. In 1880, he decided turning to a career as an artist and studied at the academy in Brussels. He stayed together with the Realist painter A. Mauve in The Hague and lived with a prostitute in 1881, until 1883; he lived at his parent’s house in Nuenen, he drew and painted dark realistic scenes from the life of the poor. He had stayed in Antwerp in 1885/86 for a short time at the college of art. After 1886, he came to Paris and lived with his brother Theo in the Rue Lepic. At the Atelier Cormon he met Bernard and Toulouse-Lautrec, and through Theo the Impressionists, Neo-Impressionists, and the work of such Japanese printmakers as Hiroshige and Hokusai. He began to employ their motifs, brilliant hues and style of painting, such as also found in the paintings of Camille Pissarro and Georges Seurat.

He left Paris for Arles in 1888, where he continued painting in a heavy style with strong colors. A short period of artistic cooperation with Gauguin ended in a disastrous row and mental instability; in a bout of maddened remorse he cut off part of his left ear. He stayed in hospital in 1889 at Arles was also institutionalized in Saint-Remy. In 1890 he exhibited with Les Vingt in Brussels, where one of his acquaintances, the painter Anna Boch, bought the only painting he ever sold in his lifetime. He moved to Auvers-sur-Oise in 1890. There he was treated by the sympathetic Dr. Paul Gachet, a physician friend of Pissarro and Cézanne who was interested in the arts and psychiatry, whose portrait van Gogh eventually painted. Later the same year, after painting the ominous “Crows in the Wheatfields”, he shot himself (at the age of thirty-seven). His extensive work (around 750 paintings and 1600 drawings) also became a basic influence on the development of Fauvism and Expressionism. In 1973 the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, containing over 1000 paintings, sketches, and letters, was opened in Amsterdam.

Click here for van Gogh’s paintings in our gallery.

Joseph Mallord William Turner’s Biography

Born: April 23, 1775, London, England
Died: December 19, 1851, London, England

The above portrait of Turner by George Dance, c. 1800

Since the 18th century, English painters and those who bought their work had displayed a particular interest in landscapes – England had originated a fundamentally new approach to landscape: the landscape garden. England was therefore the home of a number of gifted who gave almost exclusive attention to native or foreign landscapes (including townscapes, harbor scenes and seascapes). The distinctive landscape atmospheres and moods established by different kinds of weather or light offered an important aesthetic attraction in this kind of work; the precision with which they were recorded decided its value as art. The public and the buyers wanted the pictures to make the same impression on them, if at all possible, as the landscape itself might make. Beginning in the1820’s, three painters in particular introduced significant innovations which the Impressionists drew upon, Joseph M. W. Turner being one of them. Turner was partly inspired by the 17th century Dutch seascape tradition and by dramatic 18th century shipwreck scenes from the early stages of Romantic art. While Romanticism in general left the Impressionists fairly unmoved, Turner’s tendencies towards a meditative and philosophical approach to pictorial content offered a form of Romantic art that remained important. Some of his early training had been as a topographic draftsman and he was also influenced by the 17th-century French landscape painter Claude Lorrain, mostly in the use of atmospheric effects. His unique application of the Romantic view of Nature included an eye for the expressive atmospherics of light and color phenomena. Wherever he visited he studied the effects of sea and sky in every kind of weather. Instead of merely recording factually what he saw, Turner translated scenes into a light-filled expression of his own romantic feelings.

Turner’s father was a barber, and his mother died when he was very young. As a boy, he received little schooling. His father taught him how to read, but this was the extent of his education except for the study of art. By the age of 13 he was making drawings at home and exhibiting them in his father’s shop window for sale. Turner was 15 years old when one of his paintings was exhibited at the Royal Academy. By the time he was 18 he had his own studio. Before he was 20 print sellers were eagerly buying his drawings for reproduction. He quickly achieved a reputation and was elected an associate of the Royal Academy. In 1802, when he was only 27, Turner became a full member. He then began traveling widely in Europe and Venice became the inspiration of some of Turner’s finest work.

As he grew older Turner became an eccentric. Except for his father, with whom he lived for 30 years, he had no close friends. He allowed no one to watch him while he painted. He gave up attending the meetings of the Royal Academy, and his acquaintances did not see him for months at a time. Turner continued to travel but always alone. He still held exhibitions, but he usually refused to sell his paintings. When he was persuaded to sell one, he was dejected for days. In 1850 he exhibited for the last time, and one day shortly thereafter Turner disappeared from his house. His housekeeper, after searching for many months, found him hiding in a house in Chelsea, where he had been ill for a long time. He died the following day. Turner left a large fortune that he hoped would be used to support what he called “decaying artists”, and his collection of paintings was bequeathed to England. Although known for his oils, Turner is regarded as one of the founders of English watercolor landscape painting. Some of his most famous works are “Calais Pier”, “Dido Building Carthage”, “Rain, Steam and Speed”, “Burial at Sea” and “The Grand Canal, Venice”.

Click here for Turner’s paintings in our gallery.

James Tissot’s Biography

Born: 1836, Nantes, France
Died: 1902

Tissot studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1857 where he made friends with Degas, Whistler, and the writer Dauder. He exhibited a Late Romantic style historical painting for the first time at the Salon in 1859. Being influenced by Manet, when he went to London and exhibited at the Royal Academy in the years of 1863/64, he began to use Impressionist techniques of colour and composition. He made great success with his anecdotal and detailed pictures, which was also influenced by the Japanese style of painting. He emigrated to England in 1871, and returned to Paris in 1882. He had finished a series of 15 pictures of typical Parisian women during the years of 1883-1885 In 1888 he underwent a religious conversion when he went into a church to ‘catch the atmosphere for a picture’, and thereafter he devoted himself to biblical subjects. He visited the Holy Land in 1886-87 and in 1889, and his illustrations to the events of the Bible became very popular, both in book form and when the original drawings were exhibited. A gold medal was awarded to him at the World Fair in Paris in 1889. He died at Chateau-de-Buillon in 1902.

Click here for Tissot’s paintings in our gallery.

Alfred Sisley’s Biography

Born: October 30, 1839, Paris, France
Died: January 29, 1899, Moret-sur-Loing, France

Sisley was a son of well-to-do English parents who planned that he would have a career in business. His father, a merchant trading with the U.S. sent Sisley to London, where he began to draw, from 1857 until 1862. In 1862 he returned to Paris and studied at the Atelier Gleyre with Monet, Renoir and Bazille. In 1863 he made early attempts at plein-air painting with his friends at Chailly-en-Biere, near Barbizon. He worked with Renoir, Monet and Pissarro in 1865 at Marlotte, and with Renoir on a boat on the Seine. He exhibited for the first time in 1866 and married Marie Lescouezec the same year. The couple had two children. He called for the founding of a “Salon des Refuses” with others in 1867, after he was rejected by the Salon. He painted at Honfleur at that time.

In 1870, he showed some of his Impressionist works at the Salon. When he stayed at Voisins-Louveciennes during the Commune in 1871 Durand-Ruel exhibited one of his pictures in London, and began to buy regularly from him the following year. During this period, he painted impressionist river landscapes and village scenes (many in the snow) at Argenteuil, Bougival and Louveciennes. While he lived at Mary-le-Roi, in 1875, he was involved in a failed auction sale of pictures at the Hotel Drouot with Renoir and others. He exhibited a few times at the Impressionist Exhibitions, and at Durand-Ruel’s in London, Boston, Rotterdam, Berlin and New York during the years 1876-1889. He moved to Sevres in 1877, supported by the hotelier Murer and the Publisher Charpentier. Sisley lived in dire poverty in 1878 and 1879, since only a few purchases were arranged by Duret. He lived at Veneux-Nadon with Monet, settled in Moret-sur-Loing, at Sablons, and then moved for the last time to Moret in 1889. He remained an exponent of pure Impressionist landscape painting to the end. He was elected a member of the “Nationale” in 1890, and subsequently exhibited in their Salon. In the years of 1893/94, he painted some of his best picture series (an idea borrowed from Monet). He held a large retrospective at G. Petit’s in 1897, but met with little success with the critics and collectors. Sisley was seriously ill with cancer in 1898 and he had no money to apply for French citizenship. He died in 1899 at Moret-sur-Loing. At the posthumous auction of his work in 1899, the prices for his pictures began to rise appreciably. In 1911 a memorial was built for him at Moret, the first such for an Impressionist.

Click here for Sisley’s paintings in our gallery.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Biography

Born: February 25, 1841, Limoges, France
Died: December 3, 1919, Cagnes, France

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was the son of a poor tailor. His family moved to Paris in 1844, where he was trained as a porcelain painter between 1854 and 1858, gaining experience with the light, fresh colors that were to distinguish his Impressionist work. In 1859 he worked at a firm producing painted curtains. He studied painting formally in 1862-63 at the academy of the Swiss painter Charles Gabriel Gleyre in Paris. Renoir’s early work was influenced by two French artists, Claude Monet in his treatment of light and the romantic painter Eugène Delacroix in his treatment of color. 1860 to 1864 he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, together with Monet, Sisley and Bazille. He painted with them in the Barbizon district and became a leading member of the group of Impressionists who met at the Café Guerbois, sharing with them an interest in catching the fleeting effect of light and atmosphere on color and form. Renoir exhibited with the group at the independent shows they organized in the 1870s as an alternative to the official annual Salon in Paris. Later, at Bougival and Argenteuil on the Seine during his frequent visits to where Monet lived, he worked out the main tenets of the Impressionist method with him. The two of them would often paint side by side, perfecting their techniques.

He met Aline Charigot, his favourite model, in 1880, married her in 1890, and had three sons. Renoir fully established his reputation with a solo exhibition held at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris in 1883. In 1887 he completed a series of studies of a group of nude female figures known as “The Bathers”. In the 1890s Renoir began to suffer from rheumatism, and from 1903 (by which time he was world-famous) he lived in the warmth of the south of France. The rheumatism eventually crippled him (by 1912 he was confined to a wheelchair), but he continued to paint until the end of his life, and in his last years he also took up sculpture, directing assistants (usually Richard Guino, a pupil of Maillol) to act as his hands. In 1894 he became the executor of a bequest of Impressionist paintings to the French government. His wife died in 1915. In 1919 he was honored with the hanging of one of his pictures in the Louvre. One of his sons was the popular film director Jean Renoir (1894-1979), who wrote a lively and touching biography (Renoir, My Father) in 1962.

Click here for Renoir’s paintings in our gallery.

Frederic Remington’s Biography

Born: 1861, Canton, New York, USA
Died: 1909

Most people know of the names of the great Indian tribes, such as the Commanche, Sioux, Apache and many others, while chiefs such as Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Geronimo and Chief Joseph, have become equally famous universally. Artists in America during the 19th century depicted Indians in their paintings, concerned with describing their appearances, customs and ways of life. They also presented the best-known images of Western life. The most important painters of this time, Frederic Remington and Charles Marion Russell, were technically accurate and also sensational. They represented scenes of cowboys and Indians, gamblers, gunfighters, saloons and all the paraphernalia of the Hollywood Western.

Frederic Remington had formal training at the Yale School of Art and at the Art Students’ League before he went West for health reasons. He was primarily an illustrator, working for many magazines such as Harper’s Weekly and Outing. In the Spanish-American War he served as a war correspondent and artist. He had an unusual approach to color: he used it extremely successfully to set a mood, to strike an atmospheric note. He often chose a single dominant color, applying paint richly and roughly, around which the rest of the picture was composed. During the last twenty years of his life he executed a powerful series of twenty-four bronzes to great success, which also helped raise Remington to a position of real significance in the history of 19th-century American art. His first, “Bronco Buster” (1895, one casting in New-York Historical Society, New York City) displays the vigor and sense of movement of his paintings. His subsequent bronzes, such as “Comin’ Through the Rye” (1902, Metropolitan Museum), in which four cowhands on horseback charge at the observer in glee, are daring for their technical skill in suspending large figures on slim supports, in this case on the hooves of the horses. Among the books he wrote and illustrated are “Pony Tracks” (1895), “Crooked Trails” (1898), and “The Way of an Indian” (1906). He died in 1909, having produced nearly three thousand paintings.

Click here for Remington’s paintings in our gallery.

Berthe Morisot’s Biography

Born: January 14, 1841, Bourges, France
Died: March 2, 1895

Morisot was the daughter of a top civil servant and a great- niece of the rococo painter Fragonard. She took lessons and learned to draw in 1857. She had met Fantin-Latour, the famous French painter who painted ” A Studio in Batignolles”. In 1860-1862 Morisot was the pupil of Corot, with her sister Edma. Corot advised her to go to Auvers-Sur-Oise and learn to paint plein-air, where she met Daubigny. In 1868 she became friends with Manet, who gave her advice and painted her portrait, in the well known “Repose” and “The Balcony”. She worked in both oil and watercolor.

Morisot was the first woman to join the circle of the French impressionist painters, and she exhibited at all but one of the Impressionist exhibitions. She married Eugène Manet, Edouard Manet’s brother, in 1874. In 1881-1883, she built a house in Paris, which became a weekly meeting place for painters and writers, such as Degas, Gustave Caillebotte, Monet, Pissarro and Whistler. Puvis de Chavannes, Duret, Renoir and the poet Mallarme also visited her – Mallarme became her closest friend and greatest admirer. She bought a chateau in Mesmil in 1892, her husband died the same year. After Morisot’s death in 1895, a large memorial exhibition was held at Durand-Ruel’s with 300 of her paintings. The introduction to the exhibition catalog was written by Mallarme. Morisot made an important contribution to Impressionism with her bright and delicate impressions of domestic life. Berthe Morisot and American artist Mary Cassatt are generally considered the most important women painters of the later 19th century.

Click here for Morisot’s paintings in our gallery.

Claude Oscar Monet’s Biography

Born: November 14, 1840, Paris, France
Died: December 5, 1926, Giverny, France

Through the years 1845-1859, Monet grew up in Le Havre, a son of a merchant. In 1858, he exhibited a painting he had done under the tutelage of Boudin After he moved to Paris in 1859, the painter Troyon gave him help and advice. He studied at the Academie Suisse in 1860 and met Pissarro and Courbet. In 1862, after returning from military service in Algeria, Monet studied at Gleyre’s studio in Paris and made friendships with Bazille, Renoir and Sisley, and was influenced by Manet.

He began plein-air painting at Chailly near Barbizon and at Honfleur in 1863, where he painted a plein-air figural composition that was to excel those of Manet. He exhibited for the first time at the Salon in 1865 and struck a friendship with Zola, Cezanne and Manet. He met Camille Doncieux in the same year, who became his favorite model, with whom he had two sons, Jean and Michel, born in 1867 and 1878. The couple did not marry until 1870, against the wishes of Monet’s family. Camille and their sons frequently appear in Monet’s pictures. He had success at the Salon in 1866 during which time he painted in Sainte-Adresse and other localities, becoming increasingly impressive in his use of bright colors. After being rejected by the Salon in 1869, he worked out the formal techniques of the new Impressionist style with Renoir in Bougival on the Seine.

When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870 he moved to London with Pisarro, where he studied pictures by Turner and Constable. Through Daubigny he became acquainted with Durand-Ruel when an exhibition organized by Durand-Ruel was held in London in 1871. Then he took a trip to Holland, lived there and painted in Argenteuil until 1878. Thereafter Monet painted in Le Havre where he finished the impressive “Impression: Sunrise” in 1872. He formed a friendship with Gustave Gustave Caillebotte and helped in the founding of a group of artists in 1873. The new group held their first exhibition in Paris in 1874, referred to mockingly as the “Impressionist “, after the title of Monet’s painting.

Through the years of 1878-1881, he lived in Vetheuil with his family and with Alice Hoschede and her six children, who became his wife much later, in 1892, after her husband’s death. Monet’s first wife Camille died in 1879. In 1880, he began to concentrate on landscape painting. After he finally settled in Giverny in1883, he made trips and painted in Etretat (Holland), Belle-Ile (Brittany), Antibes, Fresselines (Creus) and London, where he finished ” Thames in Mist ” He had repeated successful exhibitions of series paintings at the Durand-Ruel as well as the Petit and Bernheim-Jeune galleries. He bought a house and settled at Giverny in 1889. In 1893 he began the creation of his famous garden with lily ponds, which became the source of his most important motifs. His eyesight began to fail since 1908 and he became deeply depressed after the death of his wife Alice in 1911. He got the idea in 1914, suggested by his friend Clemenceau, to donate a series of paintings of water lilies to the French state. He worked on these until his death in 1926. Still, he rejected an offer of membership to the Institut de France in 1920.

Click here for Monet’s paintings in our gallery.

Henri-Jean Guillaume Martin’s Biography

Born: 1860, Toulouse, France
Died: 1943, La Bastide-du-Vert, France

Martin was a son of a carpenter. His full name is Henri-Jean Guillaume Martin. He first trained in Toulouse at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Jules Garipuy, where he was also a pupil of Delacroix. In 1879 he moved to Paris and worked in the studio of Jean-Paul Laurens. In 1886 he exhibited for the first time at the Salon. He won a scholarship for a tour in Italy, where he developed his own style with its characteristic short, divisionist brush strokes. He received the gold metal at the Salon in 1889, and became a member of the Legion of Honour. He had painted some unusually large pictures for the Neo-Impressionists and won great acclaim when he exhibited them at a one-man show at the Mancini Gallery in 1895. At the World Fair in 1900, he won the Grand Prize. He was commissioned to paint some important murals for the city hall in Paris in 1895 and for the Capitol in Toulouse in 1903/1906. He made friends with Rodin during that period. He lived most of his life in Marquairol, near Bastide-du-Vert, France, where he died in 1943.

Click here for Martin’s paintings in our gallery.

Édouard Manet’s Biography

Born: January 23, 1832, Paris, France
Died: April 30, 1883, Paris, France

Manet came from a well-to-do Parisian family and became at ease in society. He studied with one of the most respected Parisian masters, Thomas Couture (1815- 79), and he consciously sought to make his reputation at the official Parisian Salons. He longed for the approval of the cultural and political establishment of the day, but his modern approach met with disapproval. Constant rejection and harsh criticism so wore him down that in 1871 he suffered a nervous breakdown. Nevertheless, his work came to inspire impressionism and had far-reaching influence on the development of modern art. Manet was influenced primarily by Dutch painter Frans Hals and Spanish artists Diego Velázquez and Francisco José de Goya.

In 1863 his painting “Le déjeuner sur l’herbe” (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) was shown at the Salon des Refusés, a new exhibition place opened by Napoleon III following protests by artists rejected at the official Salon. Hailed by young painters as their leader, Manet became the central figure in the dispute between the academic and rebellious art factions of his time.

Manet became the rallying point for a group of artists at the Café Guerbois, out of which grew the Impressionist movement. He staged a one-man show at the Exposition of 1867, but with little success. The Franco-Prussian war intervened and then in 1873 he scored a triumph with a painting titled “Bon Bock”. His style was already changing toward the fresh palette of the Impressionists. At this time his work also shows the clipped composition of the Impressionists that seems to snatch a fragment out of real life. However, his forms remained fairly tactile, and in subject and treatment he owed the most to Degas rather than to the other Impressionists. Scenes in restaurants and bistros resulted in the great masterpiece of his career, “The Bar at the Folies Bergères” (London), exhibited the year before his death. In this he retreated somewhat from his Impressionism to the earlier pursuit of the delectable in painting. That the painting, and all art, was to be enjoyed and not understood, Manet showed by signing and dating the painting on a champagne label, like a vintage. He died in agony from syphilis, aged 51. In 1884 a successful memorial exhibition and auction sale was held and in 1890 another of his paintings, “Olympia”, was bought by donations and presented to the French state.

Click here for Manet’s paintings in our gallery.

Odilon Redon’s Biography

Born: 1840, Bordeaux, France
Died: 1916, Paris, France

Odilon Redon was mainly self-taught as a painter. He lived in Bordeaux and Paris. Until he was in his fifties he worked almost exclusively in black and white, in charcoal drawings and lithographs. In 1867 he exhibited an etching at the Salon. Redon was a great admirer of Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863). Later he also met Corot, Courbet and Fantin-Latour. He exhibited for the first time in 1881 at the gallery of the journal “La vie moderne”. In 1884 he was a co-founder of the “indépendants”. For years he only did copper engravings, but in 1886 he exhibited at the 8th Impressionist exhibition and with Les Vingt in Brussels. During the 1890’s Redon turned to painting and revealed remarkable powers as a colorist that had lain dormant and began to do Symbolist work. Also, in 1890, a friendship began with Gauguin, and he came in close contact with the poet Mallarme in 1891. An exhibition was arranged in his honour by symbolist painters at Durand-Ruel’s in 1899. After a serious illness in 1894-95, he began to work with pastels and oils again in a relaxed style, using brighter and more intense colors. Redon was given a prominent place in Dents’ group-portrait “Hommage à Cézanne”. His flower pieces, in particular, were much admired by Matisse, and the surrealists also regarded Redon as one of their precursors. During 1909-1916 he lived a life of withdrawal and meditation at Bièvres, near Paris.

Click here for Redon’s paintings in our gallery.