Happy Birthday Édouard Manet!

It’s Édouard Manet’s birthday - born on this day - January 23, 1832. To this day, Manet is still considered to be the father of modernism.

Édouard Manet -the eldest son of an official in the French Ministry of Justice- had early hopes of becoming a naval officer. After twice failing the training school's entrance exam, the teenager instead went to Paris to pursue a career in the arts. There he studied with Thomas Couture and diligently copied works at the Musée du Louvre.

The biennial (and later, annual) Parisian Salons were considered the most expedient way for an artist to make himself known to the public, and Manet submitted paintings to Salon juries throughout his career. In 1861, at the age of twenty-nine, he was awarded the Salon's honorable mention for The Spanish Singer.

Alfred Stevens | Academic Classical painter

Alfred Émile Léopold Stevens (11 May 1823 - 24 August 1906) was a Belgian painter, known for his paintings of elegant modern women.

After gaining attention early in his career with a social realist painting depicting the plight of poor vagrants, he achieved great critical and popular success with his scenes of upper-middle class Parisian life.

In their realistic style and careful finish, his works reveal the influence of 17th-century Dutch genre painting.

Gustave de Jonghe (1829-1893)

Gustave Léonard de Jonghe, Gustave Léonard De Jonghe or Gustave de Jonghe (4 February 1829 – 28 January 1893) was a Flemish/ Belgian painter known for his glamorous society portraits and genre scenes. After training in Brussels, he started out as a painter of historical and religious subjects in a Realist style. After moving to Paris where he spent most of his active career, he became successful with his scenes of glamorous women in richly decorated interiors.

Life

Gustave Léonard de Jonghe was born in Kortrijk as the son of the prominent landscape painter Jan Baptiste de Jonghe.

He received his first art lessons from his father. He continued his studies in Brussels at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts where leading Belgian painter François-Joseph Navez was one of his teachers.

The history painter Louis Gallait was his close friend and mentor. When de Jonghe’s father died when he was only 15 years old, his native city granted him a scholarship.

Happy birthday Berthe Morisot!

Berthe Morisot was an essential figure in the Impressionist movement (a small group of inventive creators who organized independent exhibitions in protest against established art institutions in Paris).

Morisot’s paintings are visual poems.

Staying true to the tenets of impressionism, at first glance, you immediately notice her loose brushstrokes and colors that reflect the hues of nature.

Then, you realize later the absorbing quality of her work. Her paintings are hard to stop thinking about when you leave them.

Why?

Because Morisot had an understanding of women and their experiences that was uncommon for an artist at the time.

She painted women existing in their everyday lives in a way that was not present in the work of her male counterparts.

Rather than simply looking at these women, in Morisot’s work, you take time to think about what it’s like to be them and in their world. | National Gallery of Art

Gabriele Münter | Expressionist painter

Gabriele Münter (19 February 1877 – 19 May 1962) was a German expressionist painter who was at the forefront of the Munich avant-garde in the early 20th century.

She studied and lived with the painter Wassily Kandinsky and was a founding member of the expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter.

Early life

Münter was born to upper middle-class parents in Berlin on 19 February 1877.

Her family supported her desires to become an artist. Her father died in 1886. She began to draw as a child.

As she was growing up, she had a private tutor. In 1897, at the age of twenty, Münter received artistic training in the Düsseldorf studio of artist Ernst Bosch and later at the Damenschule (Women's School) with artist Willy Spatz.

By the time she was 21 years old, both of her parents had died and she was living at home with no occupation.

In 1898, she decided to take a trip to America with her sister to visit extended family. They stayed in America for more than two years, mainly in the states of Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri; six sketchbooks survive from Münter's period in America, depicting images of people, plants and landscapes.

Loie Fuller | Modern Dance Pioneer

Loie Fuller, original name Marie Louise Fuller, (born Jan. 15, 1862, Fullersburg [now part of Hinsdale], Ill., U.S.- died Jan. 1, 1928, Paris, France), American dancer who achieved international distinction for her innovations in theatrical lighting, as well as for her invention of the "Serpentine Dance", a striking variation on the popular "skirt dances" of the day.

Fuller made her stage debut in Chicago at the age of four, and over the next quarter century she toured with stock companies, burlesque shows, vaudeville, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, gave temperance lectures and Shakespearean readings, and appeared in a variety of plays in Chicago and New York City.

Sculpture of modern dance pioneer Loie Fuller at Brookgreen Gardens SC

Laura Alma-Tadema | Genre painter

Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema -née Epps (1852-1909) was an English painter specialising in domestic and genre scenes of women and children.

Eighteen of her paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy. Her husband, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, was also a painter.

Life

A daughter of Dr. George Napoleon Epps (who was brother of Dr. John Epps), Lady Alma-Tadema had two sisters who were also painters (Emily studied under John Brett, a Pre-Raphaelite, and Ellen under Ford Madox Brown), while Edmund Gosse and a stockbroker called Rowland Hill were her brothers-in-law.

It was at Madox Brown's home that Alma-Tadema first met her in December 1869, when she was aged 17 and he 33. (His first wife had died in May that year.)

Gabriele D'Annunzio | Voglio un amore doloroso / I want a slow painful love

Voglio un amore doloroso, lento,

che lento sia come una lenta morte,

e senza fine (voglio che più forte

sie della morte) e senza mutamento.

Voglio che senza tregua in un tormento

occulto sien le nostre anime assorte;

e un mare sia presso a le nostre porte,

solo, che pianga in un silenzio intento.

Francesca Strino | Iside e Osiride Resurrezione