1824-1898 French Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Art Galleries Born in Lyons on Dec. 14, 1824, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes belonged to the generation of Gustave Courbet and ??douard Manet, and he was fully aware of their revolutionary achievements. Nevertheless, he was drawn to a more traditional and conservative style. From his first involvement with art, which began after a trip to Italy and which interrupted his intention to follow the engineering profession that his father practiced, Puvis pursued his career within the scope of academic classicism and the Salon. Even in this chosen arena, however, he was rejected, particularly during the 1850s. But he gradually won acceptance. By the 1880s he was an established figure in the Salons, and by the 1890s he was their acknowledged master. In both personal and artistic ways Puvis career was closely linked with the avant-grade. In the years of his growing public recognition, when he began to serve on Salon juries, he was consistently sympathetic to the work of younger, more radical artists. Later, as president of the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts - the new Salon, as it was called - he was able to exert even more of a liberalizing influence on the important annual exhibitions. Puvis sympathy to new and radical artistic directions was reflected in his own painting. Superficially he was a classicist, but his personal interpretation of that style was unconventional. His subject matter - religious themes, allegories, mythologies, and historical events - was clearly in keeping with the academic tradition. But his style eclipsed his outdated subjects: he characteristically worked with broad, simple compositions, and he resisted the dry photographic realism which had begun to typify academic painting about the end of the century. In addition, the space and figures in his paintings inclined toward flatness, calling attention to the surface on which the images were depicted. These qualities gave his work a modern, abstract look and distinguished it from the sterile tradition to which it might otherwise have been linked. Along with their modern, formal properties, Puvis paintings exhibited a serene and poetic range of feeling. His figures frequently seem to be wrapped in an aura of ritualistic mystery, as though they belong in a private world of dreams or visions. Yet these feelings invariably seem fresh and sincere. This combination of form and feeling deeply appealed to certain avant-garde artists of the 1880s and 1890s. Although Puvis claimed he was neither radical nor revolutionary, he was admired by the symbolist poets, writers, and painters - including Paul Gauguin and Maurice Denis - and he influenced the neoimpressionist painter Georges Seurat. During his mature career Puvis executed many mural paintings. In Paris he did the Life of St. Genevieve (1874-1878) in the Panth??on and Science, Art, and Letters (1880s) in the Sorbonne. In Lyons he executed the Sacred Grove, the Antique Vision, and Christian Inspiration (1880s) in the Mus??e des Beaux-Arts. He painted Pastoral Poetry (1895-1898) in the Boston Public Library. These commissions reflect the high esteem with which Puvis was regarded during his own lifetime. Among his most celebrated oil paintings are Hope (1872) and the Poor Fisherman (1881). He died in Paris on Oct. 10, 1898.  Related Paintings of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes :. | Marseilles,Gateway to the Orient | The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist | The Dream | Pastoral | the poor fisherman |
Related Artists:
Christian Ernst Bernhard Morgenstern
(29 September 1805 - 12 Februar 1867) was a German landscape painter. Morgenstern is regarded as one of the pioneers in Germany of early Realism in painting. He gained this reputation in Hamburg 1826-1829 together with his contemporary Adolph Friedrich Vollmer while both were still studying; from 1830 onwards, Morgenstern, together with Friedrich Wasmann, Johan Christian Dahl and Adolph Menzel, introduced Munich to Realist painting. Morgenstern was born in Hamburg as one of six children to a painter of miniatures, Johann Heinrich Morgenstern (1769-1813). After the early death of his father he was placed as an apprentice in the graphic workshop of the brothers Suhr. Cornelius Suhr took the young Morgenstern as his servant on a two-year journey through Germany to publicise the panorama prints which the brothers Suhr produced. 1822 followed another long journey to St. Petersburg, where they stayed for a year and to Moscow. On their return to Hamburg Morgenstern succeeded in leaving Suhr (Vollmer took his place). He became a student of the Hamburg painter Siegfried Bendixen with whom he stayed from 1824 to 1827, then continued his studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen (1827-1828) and undertook study journeys through Sweden and Norway. Bendixen introduced him to the wealthy aristocrat and supporter of the arts, Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, patron to many young Hamburg artists, on whose estate in Holstein he spent several summers. In 1830 Morgenstern went to Munich on Ruhmor's advice. He settled there permanently while undertaking extensive yearly study trips: for the first years through Bavaria, then in the summer of 1836 and in the following summers to the Alsace as guest of a patron of the arts. The winter 1839/40 he returned to Hamburg to stay with his mother. In 1841 he visited Venice and Trieste together with the landscape painter Eduard Schleich and in 1843, and again in 1846 the central Alps. In the summer of 1850 he stayed on Heligoland.
frances reynolds
1729-1807
MIGNON, Abraham
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1640-1679 Dutch painter, was born at Frankfurt. His father, a merchant, placed him under the still-life painter Jacob Marrel, by whom he was taken to the Netherlands about 1660. He then worked under Jan Davidszoon de Heem at Utrecht, where in 1675 he married the daughter of the painter Cornelis Willaerts. Sibylle Merian (1647-1717), daughter of the engraver Matthew Merian, became his pupil and achieved distinction as a flower painter. He died at Utrecht. Mignon devoted himself almost exclusively to flowers, fruit, birds and other still-life, though at times he also attempted portraiture. His flower pieces are marked by careful finish and delicate handling. His favourite scheme was to introduce red or white roses in the centre of the canvas and to set the whole group of flowers against a dark background. Nowhere can his work be seen to better advantage than at the Dresden Gallery, which contains fifteen of his paintings, twelve of which are signed. Six of his pictures are at the Louvre, four at the Hermitage, and other examples are to be found at the museums of Amsterdam,