FRENCH ARTISTS
France has long been associated as one of the major art capital of the world. For more than a century now, starting with the bold innovations of French Impressionists and going on to movements such as cubism, abstract art and expressionism, French painters have dominated recent art history. But this wasn’t always the case. Before the nineteenth century, France’s contribution to the art world was not quite so significant, but Finding France has listed France’s greats and their claims to fame below:
Jean Fouquet (c.1420-c.1480) painted magnificent religious paintings, including commissions for Pope Eugenius IV, and in 1475 and 1475 was given the official title of King’s Painter. You can find work by Jean Fouquet, such as Charles VII King of France, in the Louvre.
Jean Clouet (1475-1541) and his son François Clouet (1520-72) painted portraits of Renaissance families. Jean Clouet became the court painter to Francis I, whose portrait in the Louvre is believed to be by him. François Clouet succeeded his father as Court Painter to Francis I and continued in that office under Henri II, Francis II and Charles IX. His masterpiece Elizabeth of Austria is said to be one the finest examples of portrait painting of the era and can be seen today in the Louvre.
Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) is said to be one of the greatest painters of the seventeenth century. After struggling to make a name for himself in Paris, Poussin saved enough money to go to Rome where he received commissions from Cardinal Barberini and quickly became rich and famous. Among his masterpieces dating from this period is his Rape of the Sabine Women which can be seen today in the Louvre. In 1640, King Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu ordered him back to France and appointed him Painter-in-Ordinary to the King. The work he was expected to carry out in this role was not suited to his genius and in 1643 he returned to Rome.
Claude Lorraine (1600-82) was a landscape painter whose work greatly influenced other landscape painters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Watteau and Turner. Claude Lorraine went to Italy in 1613 where he was apprenticed to Italian landscape artist Agostino Tassi. While he returned briefly to France, he spent most of his life in Italy. In 1635 he began recording his compositions in a book of drawings, the Liber Veritatis (now in the British Museum) to guard against copyists.
Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) was born in Valenciennes, France where he studied under a local artist. In 1702 he went to Paris where he worked as a scene painter at the Opera and as a copyist, until in 1717 his painting, Embarquement pour Cythère, won him membership to the Academy. Watteau’s paintings and landscape etchings soon became sought after in high society, in particular his series of idyllic pastoral scenes, his Fêtes Galantes. During the Revolution, Watteau’s painting fell into disfavour as they were regarded as essentially aristocratic in composition. It wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century that they regained popularity and he is now considered a forerunner to the Impressionists in his handling of colour and his study of nature.
Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin (1699-1778) was born in Paris, son of the king’s billiard table maker. As a student studying painting, he showed so much talent that he was selected to assist in the restoration of the royal paintings at Fontainebleu. In 1728 he exhibited a series of still-life paintings at the Exposition de la Jeunesse. These paintings were so successful that he was elected to the Academy the same year. He then emerged as a genre painter and produced many superb pictures of peasant life and domestic scenes which in composition and colouring were unequalled in France.
François Boucher (1703-70) was the purest Rococo painter at the court of Louis XV. As a young man he engraved the work of Watteau. After he was accepted into the Academy, he worked on a range of projects from stage design to tapestries and became Director of the famous Gobelins tapestry factory in 1755. Boucher was also a refined portrait painter and he produced several portraits of Louis XV’s most famous mistress, Madame de Pompadour, and it was she who bought his greatest paintings The Rising and the Setting of the Sun. He was made First Painter to the King (Premier Peintre du Roi) in 1765, but shortly after created a scandal when it was discovered he worked without a model. Today, his work is usually considered as wholly representative of the frivolous spirit of his age.
Jacques Louis David (1748-1825) was a French Neo-classical painter. By the start of the French Revolution he was an established artist and he became heavily involved in the events that followed. David, while continuing to paint, became a representative for Paris in the Convention, voted for the death of Louis XVI and was a member of the Committee of Public Safety. After Robespierre’s death, David was twice imprisoned and narrowly escaped with his life. Released in 1795, he produced his masterpiece The Rape of the Sabines. In 1804, David was appointed court painter by Napoleon, but after the Bourbon restoration, he was banished for regicide and died in Brussels.
Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (1796-1875) embarked on a systematic study of art in 1822 and while he exhibited his work in the years following, it wasn’t until around 1840 that he developed fully his style characterised by great breadth and delicacy, and sacrificing accuracy to unity of impression and harmony of general effect.
Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) painted Liberty Leading the People which has come to symbolise the spirit of the French Revolution. He was the major painter of the Romantic Movement in France. His bold use of colour and choice of dramatic scenes shocked devotees of the austere style of classicism and aroused a storm of criticism.
Theodore Géricault (1791-1824) is famous for his masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts alongside Eugène Delacroix. Géricault was greatly inspired by the realistic approach of 17th century Dutch and Flemish artists and revolted against the current classicism. While his unorthodox approach won the admiration of fellow great Delacroix, he was harshly criticised by the rest of the French art world.
Georges Seurat (1859-91) was the founder of Neo-impressionism and developed a way of painting called Pointillism where an entire picture was composed of tiny dots of colour the blended together when viewed from a distance. He only produced seven canvasses in this incredibly demanding discipline. One of his most famous would be Un Dimanche d’été à la Grande-Jatte.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) was the artist who painted many of the posters and prints that have become iconically French such as Le Chat Noir and the Moulin Rouge. Growing up, Toulouse-Lautrec was physically frail. At age 14, he fell from a horse and broke both his legs which permanently stunted his growth. In 1882, he began to study art seriously in Paris, and by 1885 had a studio in Montmartre. He was never interested in capturing light like the Impressionists, only in form and movement. He had a gift for conveying rapid movement and the whole atmosphere of a scene in only a few strokes. He loathed posed models. Instead his subject matter centred narrowly around the life he led in Montmartre: scenes from dance-halls, cafés, prostitutes or circus artists seen backstage.
Edouard Manet (1832-83) is maybe best known for his painting Déjeuner sur l’herbe which scandalised the society of the day for its depiction of a nude female with clothed male companions. This was followed by an equally scandalous painting, Olympia, which depicted a reclining naked female that was clearly modelled on a prostitute. Despite his unconventional subject matter, Manet was most influenced by conventional painters such as Titian and Raphael. In the 1870s, he came into contact with the Impressionists, in particular Monet, and although he never exhibited with this group, he became more like a father-figure to them because of his stand against the art establishment of the day.
Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) was encouraged to move to Paris and pursue a career in art by his friend, French literary great, Emile Zola. He exhibited at the first and third Impressionist exhibitions in 1874 and 1877. He was greatly influenced by Camille Pissarro who he worked with in Auvers and Pontoise (1872-73). During this period, he began to use his characteristic glowing colours. In his later period (during the 1880s) he started to empahxise the underlying forms in nature such as the cylinder, the sphere, the cone – and in doing this became the forerunner of Cubism. Among his most famous works are Maison du Pendu, L’Homme au chapeau de paille, and Aix: Paysage rocheux. His friendship with Zola finished in 1886 when the latter published his novel l’Oeuvre in which the central character was an unsuccessful and unbalanced Impressionist painter who was in many respects identifiable as Cézanne.
Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) was a member of the Impressionists. Most of his paintings were painted in the countryside round Paris. He is the only one of the Impressionists to exhibit at all eight of the Group’s exhibitions. One of his most known paintings would be Boulevard Montmatre by Night.
Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (1796-1875) was a landscape painter known for his soft, fuzzy style that sacrificed accuracy for unity. Among his masterpieces are Danse de Nymphes, Homère et les Bergers and Le Bûcheron.
Gustave Courbet (1819-77) was the founder of Realism. He scorned the rigid classical outlook, preferring the work of Flemish and Spanish artists of the day. He painted everyday scenes with complete sincerity. One painting, Studio of the Painter: an Allegory of Realism, is like a culmination of his views on painting subject matter. This masterpiece, which hangs in the Louvre today, depicts a scene from the artist’s everyday life, that of him and some of friends in his studio.
Claude Monet (1840-1926) – think Impressionism, think Monet. Monet is possibly the most well-known of the Impressionist painters. Many people are familiar with his paintings of waterlilies and gardens. He captured the light and beauty of these scenes by working on site in open air and by painting quickly. He was first encouraged to work in open air by Eugène Boudin during his youth in Le Havre (north-west of Paris). On moving to Paris, Monet associated with Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley, with whom he exhibited at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. It was one of Monet’s works at that exhibition, Impression: soleil levant, that gave name to the Impressionist Movement.
Eugène (Louis) Boudin (1824-98) is known for his seascapes and is now regarded as a precursor of Impressionism. His chief works include, Deauville and Harbour of Trouville.
Alfred Sisley (1839-99) was an Impressionist painter, born in Paris of English ancestry. He mainly painted landscapes, in particular the valleys of the Seine, the Loire and Thames and his noted for his ability to capture a sky. He associated with Renoir and Monet. Many of is paintings can be seen at Paris’ Musée d’Orsay such as La Barque Pendant l’Inondation Pont-Marly, Le pont de Moret and La Côte du Coeur-Volant à Marly sous la Neige.
Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) was one of the Impressionists. He began at the age of 13 as a painter on porcelain. Sometime after this, it’s believed he saw for the first time the work of Watteau and Boucher, which had a profound influence on his future choice of subject matter. In 1862 he studied at the studio of Charles Gleyre where he met fellow pupils Sisley and Monet. A couple of years later, he began to paint in open air. His controversial but important painting of sunlight filtering through leaves, Moulin de la Galette, was one of the paintings he exhibited at the Impressionist exhibitions.
Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) was an Impressionist painter. Her famous painting The Cradle was exhibited at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. She took formal art training with the artist Corot. In the late 1860s she met Edouard Manet who was to have a great influence on her work. She modelled for him several times. Subsequently she married his younger brother Eugene. Morisot’s paintings regularly featured her family, particularly her sister and her daughter.
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) was a post-Impressionist painter. He started his life as stockbroker and a Sunday-painter who collected the works of the Impressionists. In 1883, he decided to live only for art and so gave up his job, left his Danish wife and five children and went to live in Brittany where he worked from 1886-90 except for visits to Paris, a trip to Panama and Martinique and a disastrous stay of two months in Arles with Van Gogh in 1888. He gradually developed his own style, synthesism, in line with his loathing of civilisation and his identification with the emotional directness of native cultures. He moved to Tahiti in 1891 and then afterwards to the South Sea islands. His remaining years were spent in poverty, illness and continual strife with the colonial authorities through his championing of native causes. A good example of his work produced in Tahiti is No Te Aha De Riri, Why are you angry?
Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was the leader of the group known as the Fauves. His paintings display a bold use of luminous areas of primary colour organised within a rhythmic two-dimensional design such as in his La Danse. His skill in line drawing is evident in many of sketch books and book illustrations. Matisse lived in Nice, where he also designed ballet scenes for Diaghilev.