1863-1935 French Paul Signac Galleries Paul Victor Jules Signac was born in Paris on November 11, 1863. He followed a course of training in architecture before deciding at the age of 18 to pursue a career as a painter. He sailed around the coasts of Europe, painting the landscapes he encountered. He also painted scenes of cities in France in his later years. In 1884 he met Claude Monet and Georges Seurat. He was struck by the systematic working methods of Seurat and by his theory of colours and became Seurat's faithful supporter. Under his influence he abandoned the short brushstrokes of impressionism to experiment with scientifically juxtaposed small dots of pure colour, intended to combine and blend not on the canvas but in the viewer's eye, the defining feature of pointillism. Many of Signac's paintings are of the French coast. He left the capital each summer, to stay in the south of France in the village of Collioure or at St. Tropez, where he bought a house and invited his friends. In March 1889, he visited Vincent van Gogh at Arles. The next year he made a short trip to Italy, seeing Genoa, Florence, and Naples. The Port of Saint-Tropez, oil on canvas, 1901Signac loved sailing and began to travel in 1892, sailing a small boat to almost all the ports of France, to Holland, and around the Mediterranean as far as Constantinople, basing his boat at St. Tropez, which he "discovered". From his various ports of call, Signac brought back vibrant, colourful watercolors, sketched rapidly from nature. From these sketches, he painted large studio canvases that are carefully worked out in small, mosaic-like squares of color, quite different from the tiny, variegated dots previously used by Seurat. Signac himself experimented with various media. As well as oil paintings and watercolours he made etchings, lithographs, and many pen-and-ink sketches composed of small, laborious dots. The neo-impressionists influenced the next generation: Signac inspired Henri Matisse and Andr?? Derain in particular, thus playing a decisive role in the evolution of Fauvism. As president of the Societe des Artistes Ind??pendants from 1908 until his death, Signac encouraged younger artists (he was the first to buy a painting by Matisse) by exhibiting the controversial works of the Fauves and the Cubists.  Related Paintings of Paul Signac :. | Study of Sunday | Women at the Well | Unknown work | the jun ction at bois colombes | Bridge |
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J.Thornthwaite
British.fl.late eighteenth century
NEUREUTHER, Eugen
German painter b. 1806, Mnchen, d. 1882, Menchen,German lithographer, illustrator, decorative artist and painter. He was the son of the painter and printmaker Ludwig Neureuther (d 1832), and began his studies in Munich in 1823. His tutors included Peter von Cornelius, who enlisted him and several other young painters to help decorate the Glyptothek, and Wilhelm von Kobell. In 1830, fired with enthusiasm for the July Revolution in France, Neureuther went to Paris. He produced numerous studies from life (Munich, Staatl. Graph. Samml.), which are among his best works. From 1836-7 he was in Rome. From 1848 to 1856 he ran the Nymphenburg Porzellanmanufaktur, and for ten years from 1868 he taught decorative mural painting at the Munich Kunstgewerbeschule. Neureuther's principal importance lay in the field of book illustration. His reputation was established with the Vignettes for Goethe's Ballads and Romances (Randzeichnungen zu Goethes Balladen und Romanzen), published by J. G. Cotta in five booklets of 46 lithographic contour drawings in Munich, Stuttgart and Tebingen between 1829 and 1839. Goethe, to whom Cornelius had mentioned Neureuther, repeatedly spoke of these works in public, realizing their similarity to the prayer book of the Emperor Maximilian illustrated by Albrecht Derer, Lukas Cranach the elder, Hans Baldung, Albrecht Altdorfer and others. A new edition of this work, with lithographs by August Strixner (b 1820) had appeared in 1808. Neureuther later illustrated many other texts, but his approach became increasingly naturalistic and picturesque, and there was a notable decline in the artistic standard of the work.
Jacques de Stella
1596-1657 French Jacques de Stella Gallery