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 :. | The River Bank | sunset herblay | Gypsies at Port-en-Bessin | The woman Reading | Camaret |
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Miles Evergood
Australian Painter, 1871-1939, was an Australian artist. Evergood was born Myer Blashki in Melbourne, eleventh child of Philip Blashki, jeweller, and his wife Anna, nee Imergud. He studied for a while at the national gallery school under Bernard Hall between 1893 and 1895. He exhibited at the Victorian Artists Society, and the Royal Art Society, Sydney, before leaving for the United States in 1898. He worked principally in New York, with frequent visits to Europe, for about 30 years, establishing a good reputation as a painter. He changed his name to Miles Evergood while in the United States. Evergood returned to Australia about the end of 1931 and worked for a year in Queensland and became a member of the Royal Queensland Art Society. He then went to Sydney and Melbourne holding exhibitions of his work, and died of cancer in Melbourne on 3 January 1939. Evergood was a capable artist, who mostly painted landscapes in oil with affinities to the post impressionists.
Aleksei Savrasov
Russian Painter , 1830-1897
George Willison
Portrait painter who was born in Edinburgh in 1741 and returned there to spend his retirement. He was a pupil of Mengs in Rome, before Mengs left for Madrid in 1761. He painted "Boswell" in Rome in 1765 which is now in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Willison was in London from 1767 and exhibited at the Scottish Academy between 1767 - 1770, and at the Royal Academy in 1771 and 1772. He left London for an opulent retirement in Edinburgh around 1784.