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 :. | tertre denis | Impression | the jetty cassis opus | Landscape with a Ruined Castle | Two Milliners,Rue du Caire |
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MASTER of Heiligenkreuz
Austrian Northern Renaissance Painter, 15th Century,was an Austrian painter active at the beginning of the fifteenth century; a tentative lifespan of 1395 to 1430 has been put forth, but this appears highly conjectural. His name is taken from a diptych that once belonged to the Cistercian Abbey of Heiligenkreuz, located in southeastern Austria near the present-day border with Hungary. The left panel depicts the Annunciation on the obverse; the reverse is a depiction of the Madonna and Child. The right panel depicts the Mystical Marriage of Saint Catherine, with Saint Dorothy on its reverse. Details of costume and iconography combine with associations with the International Style to indicate a date of around the first decade of the fifteenth century. It was initially proposed, by Betty Kurth in 1922, that the artist was French and had some association with the court in Paris. Other writers have disagreed, and various nationalities including French, Austrian, German, or Bohemian have been posited for the Master. Some have further suggested that he was an itinerant court artist, trained in France but active in Austria. Various clues have been used in an attempt to describe his nationality. These include his use of finely-worked gold decoration, in which some have seen a link to Franco-Burgundian goldsmith's work of the late fourteenth century. Others, instead, see it as a link to the school of panel painting then active at the court in Prague. Consequently, it seems highly unlikely that the artist's nationality will be conclusively established.
John Trumbull
1756-1843 John Trumbull Gallery Trumbull was born in Lebanon, Connecticut, to Jonathan Trumbull, who was Governor of Connecticut from 1769 to 1784. He entered the 1771 junior class at Harvard University at age fifteen and graduated in 1773. Due to a childhood accident, Trumbull lost use of one eye, which may have influenced his detailed painting style. As a soldier in the American Revolutionary War, Trumbull rendered a particular service at Boston by sketching plans of the British works, and witnessed the famous Battle of Bunker Hill. He was appointed second personal aide to General George Washington, and in June 1776 deputy adjutant-general to General Horatio Gates, but resigned from the army in 1777. In 1780 he traveled to London where he studied under Benjamin West, who suggested to him that he paint small pictures of the War of Independence and miniature portraits, of which he produced about 250 in his lifetime. On September 23, 1780 and October 2, 1780, British agent Major John Andr?? was, respectively, captured and hanged as a spy in America. News reached Europe, and as an officer of similar rank as Andr?? in the Continental Army, Trumbull was imprisoned for seven months in London's Tothill Fields Bridewell. In 1784 he was again in London working under West, in whose studio he painted his Battle of Bunker Hill and Death of Montgomery, both of which are now in the Yale University Art Gallery. In 1785 Trumbull went to Paris, where he made portrait sketches of French officers for The Surrender of Cornwallis, and began, with the assistance of Jefferson, Declaration of Independence, well-known from the engraving by Asher Brown Durand. This latter painting was purchased by the United States Congress along with his Surrender of General Burgoyne, Surrender at Yorktown, and Washington Resigning his Commission, and these paintings now hang in the United States Capitol. Trumbull's The Sortie Made by the Garrison of Gibraltar, 1789, owned by the Boston Athenaeum, is now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Walter Langley.RI
1852-1922