Swiss-born French Art Nouveau Designer, 1845-1917 Born Eugene Samuel Grasset in Lausanne, Switzerland, his birth year is sometimes stated as 1841. He was raised in an artistic environment as the son of a cabinet designer maker and sculptor. He studied drawing under Francois-Louis David Bocion (1828-1890) and in 1861 went to Zurich to study architecture. After completing his education, he visited Egypt, an experience that would later be reflected in a number of his poster designs. He became an admirer of Japanese art which too influenced some of his creative designs. Between 1869 and 1870, Grasset worked as a painter and sculptor in Lausanne but moved to Paris in 1871 where he designed furniture fabrics and tapestries as well as ceramics and jewelry. His fine art decorative pieces were crafted from ivory, gold and other precious materials in unique combinations and his creations are considered a cornerstone of Art Nouveau motifs and patterns. Grasset poster for Mark Twain Joan of ArcIn 1877 Eugene Grasset turned to graphic design, producing income-generating products such as postcards and eventually postage stamps for both France and Switzerland. However, it was poster art that quickly became his forte. Some of his works became part of the Maitres de l Affiche including his lithograph, Jeanne d Arc Sarah Bernhardt. In 1890, he designed the Semeuse logo used by the dictionary publishers, Editions Larousse. With the growing popularity of French posters in the United States, Grasset was soon contacted by several American companies. In the 1880s, he did his first American commission and more success led to his cover design for the 1892 Christmas issue of Harper Magazine. In 1894 Grasset created The Wooly Horse and The Sun of Austerlitz for The Century Magazine to help advertise their serialized story on the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. The Wooly Horse image proved so popular that Louis Comfort Tiffany recreated it in stained glass. Grasset work for U.S. institutions helped pave the way for Art Nouveau to dominate American art. At the end of the 19th century, Grasset was hired to teach design at Ecole Guerin and Ecole Estienne in Paris. Among his students were Maurice Pillard Verneuil, Augusto Giacometti, Paul Berthon and Otto Ernst Schmidt. At the Universal Exhibition of 1900 in Paris, the G. Peignot et Fils typefoundry, introduced the Grasset typeface, an Italic design Eugene Grasset created in 1898 for use on some of his posters.  Related Paintings of Eugene Grasset :. | christ before pilate | Old Man in the Kitchen | Madchenkopf | The Propect | The Muses Urania and Calliope |
Related Artists:
Marie Bracquemond
French Impressionist Painter, 1840-1916 .was a French Impressionist artist described by Gustave Geffroy in 1894 as one of the "le trois grandes dames" of Impressionism alongside Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt.However, her often omission from books on women artists indicate the success of her husband, F??lix Bracquemond, in his campaign to thwart her development as an artist.
Aubrey Beardsley
English Art Nouveau/Golden Age Illustrator, 1872-1898 English draughtsman and writer. He was brought up in Brighton, in genteel poverty, by his mother. She gave her children an intensive education in music and books, and by the time he was sent to boarding-school at the age of seven Beardsley was exceptionally literate and something of a musical prodigy. He was also already infected with the tuberculosis that eventually killed him. There is evidence that his talent for drawing was highly developed by the age of ten, and he was subsequently encouraged by his housemaster at Brighton Grammar School, Arthur William King. Beardsley left school at the end of 1888, and in January 1889 became a clerk at the Guardian Life and Fire Insurance Company in the City of London. Attacks of haemorrhaging of the lungs forced him to abandon his job at the end of 1889. On the strength of a short story sold to Tit Bits he tried to pursue a literary career, but when his health improved in the spring of 1890, he returned both to his job and to drawing. Final affirmation of the direction of his art came in July 1891, when he showed his work to Edward Burne-Jones, who told Beardsley: 'I seldom or never advise anyone to take up art as a profession, but in your case I can do nothing else.
Tilly Kettle
(1735-1786) was a portrait painter and the first English painter to work in India. He was born in London, the son of a coach painter, in a family that had been members of the Brewers' Company of freemen for five generations. He studied drawing with William Shipley in the Strand and first entered professional portraiture in the 1750s. Kettle's first series of portraits appeared in the 1760s. His first surviving painting is a self-portrait from 1760, with his first exhibit at the Society of Artists in 1761. In 1762, he worked at restoring Robert Streater's ceiling fresco in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, and painted Francis Yarborough, a doctor of Brasenose College, Oxford in 1763. He painted many members of the family of William Legge, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth. In 1764-5, he was active in London and continued exhibiting at the Society of Artists. In 1768, Kettle sailed to India with the British East India Company, landing at Madras (now Chennai), where he remained for two years. There, he painted Lord Pigot and Muhammad Ali Kahn twice (once alone and once with five of his sons). He also painted non-portraits, including Dancing Girls (Blacks) in 1772 and a suttee scene in 1776 entitled, The ceremony of a gentoo woman taking leave of her relations and distributing her jewels prior to ascending the funeral pyre of her deceased husband. In 1770 Kettle painted a half-length portrait of 'Sir' Levett Hanson, a peripatetic writer on European knighthood and chivalry originally from Yorkshire. (The portrait is now in the collection of the Bury St Edmunds Manor House Museum.) Kettle moved on to Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1771 and painted Shuja ud-Daula and Dancing-Girl Holding the Stem of a Hookah. In 1775,he painted George Bogle, Warren Hastings' emissary to Tibet, in Tibetan dress, presenting a ceremonial white scarf to Lobsang Yeshe the 5th Panchen Lama.He also took an Indian mistress and had two daughters by her.