1865-1925was a Swiss painter and printmaker associated with Les Nabis. He was an important figure in the development of the modern woodcut. He was born into a conservative middle class family in Lausanne, and there he attended College Cantonal, graduating with a degree in classical studies in 1882. In that year he moved to Paris to study art under Jules Joseph Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger at the Academie Julian. He spent many hours in the Louvre, where he greatly admired the works of Holbein, Derer and Ingres; these artists would remain exemplars for Vallotton throughout his life.[1] His earliest paintings, such as the Ingresque Portrait of Monsieur Ursenbach (1885), are firmly rooted in the academic tradition, and his self portrait of 1885 (seen at right) received an honorable mention at the Salon des artistes français in 1886. During the following decade Vallotton painted, wrote art criticism and made a number of prints. In 1891 he executed his first woodcut, a portrait of Paul Verlaine. The many woodcuts he produced during the 1890s were widely disseminated in periodicals and books in Europe as well as in the United States, and were recognized as radically innovative in printmaking. They established Vallotton as a leader in the revival of true woodcut as an artistic medium; in the western world, the relief print, in the form of commercial wood engraving, had long been mainly utilized unimaginatively as a medium for the reproduction of drawn or painted images and, latterly, photographs. Vallotton's starkly reductive woodcut style features large masses of undifferentiated black and areas of unmodulated white. While emphasizing outline and flat patterns, Vallotton generally made no use of the gradations and modeling traditionally produced by hatching. The influences of post-Impressionism, symbolism and the Japanese woodcut are apparent; a large exhibition of ukiyo-e prints had been presented at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1890, and Vallotton, like many artists of his era an enthusiast of Japonism, collected these prints. He depicted street crowds and demonstrations including several scenes of police attacking anarchists bathing women, portrait heads, and other subjects which he treated with a sardonic humor. His graphic art reached its highest development in Intimit's (Intimacies), a series of ten interiors published in 1898 by the Revue Blanche, which deal with tension between men and women. Vallotton's prints have been suggested as a significant influence on the graphic art of Edvard Munch, Aubrey Beardsley, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner .By 1892 he was affiliated with Les Nabis, a group of young artists that included Pierre Bonnard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Maurice Denis, and Edouard Vuillard, with whom Vallotton was to form a lifelong friendship. During the 1890s, when Vallotton was closely allied with the avant-garde, his paintings reflected the style of his woodcuts, with flat areas of color, hard edges, and simplification of detail.  Related Paintings of Felix Vallotton :. | The Red Cardigan | Bathing on a Summer Evening | Sunset,Villerville | Perseus Slays the Dragon | Interior with Woman in red |
Related Artists:
Gustaf Fjaestad
Swedish 1868-1948 Swedish painter, printmaker and designer. He trained at the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm in 1891-2. Subsequently he studied with Bruno Liljefors and Carl Larsson, assisting them with such decorative schemes as Larsson's fresco at the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (1896). In 1897 he moved to the Arvika district of V?rmland, where he worked together with his wife, Maja (1873-1961), as painter, craftsman and cabinetmaker, and gathered around him a circle of artists who became known as the Racken group. He first achieved public recognition at the Stockholm Artists Union exhibition in 1898 with some of his snow landscapes, which were an immediate popular success and were often reproduced. He had his first one-man exhibition in Stockholm in 1908,
Herri met de Bles
(also known as Herri de Dinant, Herry de Patinir, and Civetta) (c. 1510 - c. 1555 - 1560) was a Flemish Northern Renaissance and Mannerist landscape painter. He is also defined as a eeMosan landscape painter active during the second third of the 16thcentury (i.e., second generation of landscape painters).ee Very little is positively known about the artist. He is believed to be a certain Herry de Patenir who joined Antwerp's Guild of St. Luke in 1535 as a painter and is also believed to be a court painter for the d'Este Dukes of Ferrara, where he ended his career known as "Il Civetta". He contributed, along with his possible-uncle Joachim Patinir, to a distinct style of Northern Renaissance landscape painting that combined small history or religious scenes into compositions defined by perspective and atmospheric effects. Also, along with a group of Antwerp-based followers of Hieronymus Bosch that included Jan Mandyn, Pieter Huys, and Jan Wellens de Cock, Met de Bles continued the tradition of fantastic imagery into northern Mannerism.
BERCKHEYDE, Job Adriaensz
Dutch painter (b. 1630, Haarlem, d. 1693, Haarlem). He was apprenticed on 2 November 1644 to Jacob Willemsz. de Wet, whose influence is apparent in his first dated canvas, Christ Preaching to the Children (1661; Schwerin, Staatl. Mus.), one of the few biblical scenes in his oeuvre. On 10 June 1653 he repaid a loan from the Haarlem Guild of St Luke, which he subsequently joined on 10 March 1654. During his stay in Heidelberg, Job painted portraits and hunting scenes at the court of the Elector Palatine, who rewarded him with a gold chain, perhaps the one he wears in his early Self-portrait (c. 1655; Haarlem, Frans Halsmus.), his only documented work from the 1650s. Job is better known for his later work, which consists mainly of interior views of St Bavo's church in Haarlem and simple genre scenes recalling those of his Haarlem contemporaries Adriaen van Ostade and Jan Steen.