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 :. | Le Boulevard De Clichy La Neige | Sailor-s Cross | Woman by Lamplight | port tn bessin | Cote d'Azur |
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Filippo Napoletano
(c. 1587 - November 1629) was an Italian artist, with a peculiar output, mainly landscape and genre scenes and also drawings or etchings of diverse, often particular, items such as exotic soldiers, skeletons of animals, or cityscapes. He began his career in his native city, Naples (1600-1613) and moved to Rome in 1614-1617), where he appears to have encountered and felt influenced by the successful Flemish landscape painters such as Paul Bril, Goffredo Wals, and Adam Elsheimer. In 1617 Cosimo II dee Medici summoned him to Florence, where he worked closely with Jacques Callot. From notebooks, Filippo is known to have made hundreds of sketches of Tuscan landscapes and towns. Starting in 1620 he reproduced in etchings part of his collection of animal skeletons owned by Johann Faber, a Bavarian physician-naturalist residing in Rome and a member of the scientific Accademia dei Lincei. In 1622, Napoletano published twelve etchings of caprices (capprici) and military uniforms (which he signed as signed Teodor Filippo de Liagno). He is described by Giovanni Baglione as possessing a collection, a Wunderkammer of bellissime bizzarrie ("beautiful bizarre objects"), including among the objects exotic weaponry; fossilized plants; tiger, lion, and turtle skulls; oriental porcelain and sculpted crockery; a vest made of human skin; a harness for dragging whales on ice; a three-legged flea, Persian uniforms, and antiquities such as Roman coins, bronze lamps, and a few statuettes. After Napoletano death at Rome in 1628, bidding for such material was made by collectors such as Cardinal Ippolito Aldobrandini (future Clement VIII) and Cassiano dal Pozzo.
Axel Haig
Swedish etcher and architectural draughtsman , 1835-1921 Swedish printmaker, painter and architect. He studied shipbuilding in Karlskrona from 1850 to 1856. The following year he joined the shipbuilders Lawrence Hill & Co. in Glasgow, but soon left to study architecture in London, where he worked with the English architect Ewan Christian (1814-95) and with William Burges. Under the influence of Burges he became especially interested in Gothic architecture. In the late 1870s he began etching, with the intention of illustrating a book on Scotland's medieval architecture. Haig contributed illustrations to numerous English magazines, including The Architect. (For Haig's drawing of William Burges's competition entry for the Law Courts, London) In 1882 he was awarded a medal for his etchings at the Paris Salon and elected an honorary member of the Swedish Royal Academy.
William Sawrey Gilpin
William Sawrey Gilpin (1762-1843)