French
1865-1925
Felix Vallotton Gallery
Swiss woodcut artist and painter. Associated with the Nabis, he worked in Paris. Vallotton rejuvenated the woodcut medium as a creative technique. His boldly cut designs, conceived as arrangements in black and white, depict Parisian society with wit and intelligence. A painting, Swiss Landscape, is in the Lyman Allyn Museum, New London, Related Paintings of Felix Vallotton :. | Reading Abandoned | Naked Woman Before Salamander Stove | The Red Room | Bathing on a Summer Evening (mk19) | Woman wiht Yellow Necklace Reading | Related Artists:
Henry Dawson a landscape painter, was born in Hull in 1811, but came with his parents to Nottingham when an infant, so that he always regarded the latter as his native town. His parents were poor, and he began life in a Nottingham lace factory. But even while engaged in lace-making he continued to find time for art, and used to paint small pictures, which he sold at first for about half-a-crown each. In 1835 he gave up the lace trade and set up as an artist, his earliest patron being a hairdresser in Nottingham, who possessed a taste for art. In 1844 he removed to Liverpool, where after a time he got into greater repute, and received higher prices for his works. In 1849 he came with his family to London, and settled at Croydon, where some of his best pictures were painted. Among these may be reckoned 'The Wooden Walls of Old England,' exhibited at the British Institution in 1853, 'The Rainbow,' 'The Rainbow at Sea,' 'London Bridge,' and ' London at Sunrise.'
With the exception of six lessons from Pyne received in 1838, Henry Dawson was entirely a self-taught artist, and his art shows much originality and careful realism. He studied nature for himself, but he seems in later life to have been moved by Turner's influence to try more brilliant effects than he had before dared. Many of his works indeed are very Turneresque in treatment, though he can scarcely be called an imitator of Turner, for he had a distinct style of his own.
Henry Dawson, though painting much, and selling his pictures for high prices in his later life, remained, strange to say, very little known except to artists and connoisseurs until the large and very interesting collection of his works that was made for the Nottingham Exhibition in 1878 brought him wider fame. This exhibition showed him to be a genuine English landscape painter, of no great imaginative or intellectual power, but who delighted in nature, and represented her faithfully to the best of his ability. He died in December 1878, at Chiswick, where he had for some time resided.
Antoine BerjonFrench Romantic Painter, 1754-1843,French painter, teacher and designer. According to his uncorroborated 19th-century biographer J. Gaubin, he was intended for holy orders and began studying flower painting as a novice (Rev. Lyon., i, 1856). Certainly he studied drawing under the sculptor Antoine-Michel Perrache (1726-79) and worked for Lyon's silk industry as a textile designer, visiting Paris annually, ostensibly to keep abreast of the latest fashions. He first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1791 and settled in Paris in about 1794, probably as a consequence of the catastrophic siege and destruction of Lyon by revolutionary forces the previous year. Initially he eked out a precarious living decorating snuff-boxes and painting miniatures, supported by friends such as Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, the poetess, and the miniature painter Jean-Baptiste Augustin, to whom Berjon dedicated The Gift (1797; Lyon, Mus. B.-A.). He contributed to seven Paris Salons between 1796 and 1819 and again in 1842, and he had built up a considerable reputation for his work by the early 19th century.
Clarice BeckettAustralian Painter, 1887-1935,Australian painter. She studied at the National Gallery School, Melbourne (1914-16), and with Max Meldrum became involved (c. 1917) with the Meldrum circle of artists, which included Colin Colahan (1897-1987), Justus Jorgensen (1893-1975), John Farmer (b 1897) and Percy Leason (1889-1959). In 1919 she moved to the seaside suburb of Beaumaris, where she lived and worked for the rest of her life.