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Henri Julien Felix Rousseau (May 21, 1844 – September 2, 1910) was a French Post-Impressionist painter in the Naive or Primitive manner. He is also known as Le Douanier (the customs officer) after his place of employment. Ridiculed during his life, he came to be recognized as a self-taught genius whose works are of high artistic quality.
He was born in Laval in the Loire Valley into the family of a plumber. He attended Laval High School as a day student and then as a boarder, after his father became a debtor and his parents had to leave the town upon the seizure of their house. He was mediocre in some subjects at the high school but won prizes for drawing and music. He worked for a lawyer and studied law, but “attempted a small perjury and sought refuge in the army,” serving for four years, starting in 1863. With his father’s death, Rousseau moved to Paris in 1868 to support his widowed mother as a government employee. With his new job in hand, in 1869 he started a relationship with a cabinetmaker’s daughter, Clémence Boitard, who became his first wife and he wrote a waltz bearing her name. They went on to have nine children but tuberculosis was rife at the time and seven died at an early age. In 1871, he was promoted to the toll collector’s office in Paris as a tax collector.
He started painting seriously in his early forties, and by age 49 he retired from his job to work on his art.His wife died in 1888 and he later remarried. Rousseau claimed he had “no teacher other than nature”, although he admitted he had received “some advice” from two established Academic painters, Félix Auguste-Clément and Jean-Léon Gérôme. Essentially he was self-taught and is considered to be a naive or primitive painter. is best known paintings depict jungle scenes, even though he never left France or saw a jungle. Stories spread by admirers that his army service included the French expeditionary force to Mexico are unfounded. His inspiration came from illustrated books and the botanical gardens in Paris, as well as tableaux of “taxidermified” wild animals. He had also met soldiers, during his term of service, who had survived the French expedition to Mexico and listened to their stories of the subtropical country they had encountered. Along with his exotic scenes there was a concurrent output of smaller topographical images of the city and its suburbs. He claimed to have invented a new genre of portrait landscape, which he achieved by starting a painting with a view such as a favourite part of the city, and then depicting a person in the foreground.
Rousseau’s flat, seemingly childish style gave him many critics; people often were shocked by his work or ridiculed it. His ingenuousness was extreme, and he was unaware that establishment artists considered him untutored. He always aspired, in vain, to conventional acceptance. Many observers commented that he painted like a child and did not know what he was doing, but the work shows sophistication with his particular technique. From 1886 he exhibited regularly in the Salon des Indépendants, and, although his work was not placed prominently, it drew an increasing following over the years. Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!) was exhibited in 1891, and Rousseau received his first serious review, when the young artist Félix Vallotton wrote: “His tiger surprising its prey ought not to be missed; it’s the alpha and omega of painting.” Yet it was more than a decade before Rousseau returned to depicting his vision of jungles.
During 1897 he produced one of his most famous paintings, La Bohémienne endormie (The Sleeping Gypsy). During 1905 a large jungle scene The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants near works by younger leading avant-garde artists such as Henri Matisse in what is now seen as the first showing of The Fauves. Rousseau’s painting may even have influenced the naming of the Fauves. In 1907 he was commissioned by artist Robert Delaunay’s mother, Berthe, Comtesse de Delaunay, to paint The Snake Charmer. When Pablo Picasso happened upon a painting by Rousseau being sold on the street as a canvas to be painted over, the younger artist instantly recognised Rousseau’s genius and went to meet him.
In 1908 Picasso held a half serious, half burlesque banquet in his studio in Le Bateau-Lavoir in Rousseau’s honour. After Rousseau’s retirement in 1893, he supplemented his small pension with part-time jobs and work such as playing a violin in the streets. He also worked briefly at Le petit journal, where he produced a number of its covers. Henri Rousseau died 2 September 1910 in the Hospital Necker in Paris.
The song of the video is Candombito, from Kevin Johansen.
(July 12, 1884 – January 24, 1920). Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was born into a Jewish family in Livorno, Tuscany, Italy, on July 12, 1884. Modigliani was the fourth child of Flaminio Modigliani and his French-born wife, Eugénie Garsin. His father was in the money-changing business, but when the business went bankrupt the family was forced to live in poverty.
Young Modigliani was also beset by health problems after an attack of typhoid at the age of 14 followed by tuberculosis two years later. The tuberculosis would affect him for the rest of his life. Depression also ran in his family and Modigliani suffered from it as well. At least some of his siblings seemed to have also inherited his stubborn, independent streak. In 1898 his 26-year-old brother, Emmanuel, was sentenced to six months imprisonment as an anarchist. In 1902, Modigliani enrolled in the Scuola libera di Nudo (Free School of Nude Studies) in Florence and a year later moved to Venice where he registered to study at the Istituto per le Belle Arti di Venezia. It is in Venice that he first tried hashish and, rather than studying, began to spend time frequenting the sleazy parts of the city.
In 1906, Modigliani moved to Paris, the then focal point of the avant-garde, where he would become the epitome of the tragic artist, creating a posthumous legend almost as famous as that of Vincent Van Gogh. Settling in Le Bateau-Lavoir, a commune for penniless artists in Montmartre, he was soon busy painting, at first influenced by the work of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec until Paul Cezanne changed his views. Eventually, Modigliani developed his own unique style, one that still cannot be adequately categorized with other artists. He is noted for his fast work, usually finishing a portrait in one or two sittings and never reworked. Yet, those who posed for him said that being painted by Modigliani was like having your soul laid bare. In 1909, Modigliani returned home to Livorno, sickly and worn out from his wild lifestyle. He did not stay in Italy long and soon he was back in Paris, this time renting a studio in Montparnasse.
He had originally seen himself as a sculptor more than a painter, and he began sculpting seriously after Paul Guillaume, an ambitious young art dealer, took an interest in his work and introduced him to sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Although a series of Modigliani’s sculptures were exhibited in the Salon d’Automne of 1912, for whatever reason he abruptly abandoned sculpting and focused solely on his painting. In Modigliani’s art, there is evidence of him being influenced by primitive art from Africa and Cambodia which he probably saw in the Musée de l’Homme. This interest in African masks also shows in the treatment of the sitters’ faces in his portraits. The sitter’s faces appear ancient, almost resembling ancient Egyptian painting as they are flat and masklike, with distinctive almond eyes, pursed mouths, twisted noses, and elongated necks. Among his works is the portrait of his hard-drinking friend Chaim Soutine plus portraits of many of his other Montparnasse contemporaries such as Moise Kisling, Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Juan Gris, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, and Jean Cocteau.
At the outset of World War I, he tried to enlist in the army but was refused because of his poor health. Perhaps knowing that for health reasons his life would be short, he carried a death wish, drinking continuously and consuming large quantities of drugs. Known as “Modì” by the art world, but as “Dedo” to his friends, Modigliani was an extremely handsome man to whom females were greatly attracted. Women came and went until Beatrice Hastings entered his life. She stayed with him for almost two years, was the subject for several of his portraits, including Madame Pompadour, and the object of much of his drunken wrath. Drunk, he was a bitter, angry person, always looking for a fight as was depicted in the famous drawing by Marie Vassilieff. Sober, he was graciously timid and charming, would quote Dante Alighieri and recite poems from Lautreamont’s book, Les Chants de Maldoror, a copy of which he always carried with him. When the British painter Nina Hamnett arrived in Montparnasse in 1914, on her first evening there the smiling man at the next table in the café introduced himself as “Modigliani, painter and Jew”. They became great friends. In 1916, Modigliani befriended the Polish poet and art dealer Leopold Zborovski and his wife Anna. Modigliani painted them several times, charging only 10 francs for a portrait.
The following summer, the Russian sculptor Chana Orloff introduced him to a beautiful 18-year-old art student named Jeanne Hébuterne who had posed for Foujita. Jeanne came from a conservative bourgeois background and was renounced by her family, devout Roman Catholics, for her liaison with the painter, who in their eyes was nothing but a debauched derelict, and Jewish besides. Despite her family, soon they were living together and although Jeanne was the love of his life, their public scenes became even more famous than Modigliani’s personal drunken exhibitions. On December 3, 1917, Modigliani’s first one-man exhibition was opened at the Berthe Weill Gallery. The chief of the Paris police was scandalized by Modigliani’s nudes and forced him to close the exhibition within a few hours after its opening. That same year, Modigliani received a letter from a former lover Simone Thirioux, a French-Canadian woman who informed him that she had given birth to his son. He never acknowledged the child as his but after moving to Nice with Hébuterne she became pregnant and on November 29, 1918 gave birth to a daughter whom they would also name Jeanne. While in Nice, a trip organized by Leopold Zborovski for Modigliani, Tsuguharu Foujita and other artists to try to sell their works to rich tourists, Modigliani managed to sell a few pictures but only for a few francs each. Despite this, during this time he produced most of the paintings that would ultimately become his most popular and valued works. During his lifetime he sold a number of his works, but never for any great amount of money. What funds he did receive, soon vanished for drugs including alcohol.
In May of 1919 he returned to Paris, where, with Jeanne and their daughter, he rented an apartment in the rue de la Grande Chaumière. While there, both Jeanne and Modigliani painted portraits of each other and of themselves. Although he continued to paint, by then his lifestyle had taken its toll and Modigliani’s health was deteriorating rapidly, his alcoholic blackouts becoming more frequent. After not being heard from for several days by his friends, his downstairs neighbor checked in on them and found Modigliani delirious and in bed, holding onto Jeanne, who was nearly nine months pregnant. A doctor was summoned but there was little that could be done because Modigliani was suffering from tubercular meningitis. Modigliani died on January 24, 1920 without regaining consciousness. There was an enormous funeral, attended by many from the artistic communities in Montmartre and Montparnasse. Jeanne Hébuterne, who had been taken to her parents’ home, threw herself out of a fifth-floor window two days after Modigliani’s death, killing herself and her unborn child.
Today a video of the best paintings of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, one of the greatest impressionist painters of history.
(1841-1919) Renoir was born in Limoges on February 25, 1841. As a child he worked in a porcelain factory in Paris, painting designs on china; at 17 he copied paintings on fans, lampshades, and blinds. 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. Renoir first exhibited his paintings in Paris in 1864, but he did not gain recognition until 1874, at the first exhibition of painters of the new impressionist school (see Impressionism). One of the most famous of all impressionist works is Renoir’s Le Bal au Moulin de la Galette (1876, Louvre, Paris), an open-air scene of a café, in which his mastery in figure painting and in representing light is evident. Outstanding examples of his talents as a portraitist are Madame Charpentier and Her Children (1878, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City) and Jeanne Samary (1879, Louvre).
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 (Philadelphia Museum of Art). These reveal his extraordinary ability to depict the lustrous, pearly color and texture of skin and to impart lyrical feeling and plasticity to a subject; they are unsurpassed in the history of modern painting in their representation of feminine grace. Many of his later paintings also treat the same theme in an increasingly bold rhythmic style. During the last 20 years of his life Renoir was crippled by arthritis; unable to move his hands freely, he continued to paint, however, by using a brush strapped to his arm.
Renoir died at Cagnes-sur-Mer, a village in the south of France, on December 3, 1919. Other notable paintings by Renoir include La Loge (1874, Courtauld Institute Galleries, London); Woman with Fan (1875) and The Swing (1875), both in the Louvre, Paris; The Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.); and Vase of Chrysanthemums (1895, Musée de Beaux-Arts, Rouen)-one of the many still lifes of flowers and fruit he painted throughout his life. This French impressionist painter was noted for his radiant, intimate paintings, particularly of the female nude. Recognized by critics as one of the greatest and most independent painters of his period, Renoir was noted for the harmony of his lines, the brilliance of his color, and the intimate charm of his wide variety of subjects. Unlike other impressionists he was as much interested in painting the single human figure or family group portraits as he was in landscapes; unlike them, too, he did not subordinate composition and plasticity of form to attempts at rendering the effect of light.
This video is provided by Allpaintings. The background music is the song Le moulin by Yann Tersien (BSO Amelie)
Video with the best paintings of Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890). Vincent was born near Brabant, the son of a minister. In 1869, he got a position at the art dealers, Goupil and Co. in The Hague, through his uncle, and worked with them until he was dismissed from the London office in 1873. He worked as a schoolmaster in England (1876), before training for the ministry at Amsterdam University (1877). After he failed to get a post in the Church, he went to live as an independent missionary among the Borinage miners.
He was largely self-taught as an artist, although he received help from his cousin, Mauve. His first works were heavily painted, mud-colored and clumsy attempts to represent the life of the poor (e.g. Potato-Eaters, 1885, Amsterdam), influenced by one of his artistic heroes, Millet. He moved to Paris in 1886, living with his devoted brother, Theo, who as a dealer introduced him to artists like Gauguin, Pissarro, Seurat and Toulouse-Lautrec. In Paris, he discovered color as well as the divisionist ideas which helped to create the distinctive dashed brushstrokes of his later work (e.g. Pere Tanguy, 1887, Paris).
He moved to Arles, in the south of France, in 1888, hoping to establish an artists’ colony there, and was immediately struck by the hot reds and yellows of the Mediterranean, which he increasingly used symbolically to represent his own moods (e.g. Sunflowers, 1888, London, National Gallery). He was joined briefly by Gauguin in October 1888, and managed in some works to combine his own ideas with the latter’s Synthetism (e.g. The Sower, 1888, Amsterdam), but the visit was not a success. A final argument led to the infamous episode in which Van Gogh mutilated his ear. In 1889, he became a voluntary patient at the St. Remy asylum, where he continued to paint, often making copies of artists he admired. His palette softened to mauves and pinks, but his brushwork was increasingly agitated, the dashes constructed into swirling, twisted shapes, often seen as symbolic of his mental state (e.g. Ravine, 1889, Otterlo).
He moved to Auvers, to be closer to Theo in 1890 - his last 70 days spent in a hectic program of painting. He died, having sold only one work, following a botched suicide attempt. His life is detailed in a series of letters to his brother (published 1959).
This video is provided by Allpaintings. The background music is the song Alegria by Antònia Font (Coser i Cantar)
During the last two weeks the Allpaintings web page has been unaccessible or without images during hours, maybe days. The site has been moved to a new server and all the problems has been solved. Our old webspace was so modest. Two weeks is a lot of time to solve the problem but also the site has thousands of files that has been moved and it takes so long hours, and configuring the site again can take some problems.
A new server is a great notice for the users of the website because now it’s really faster.
This is the first video from allpaintings. The net new uses are very important to promote art. This is a new way to promote art and old masters of painting.
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Paul Gauguin was Post-Impressionist artist who painted lots of landscapes and images from the Tahitian daily life.
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