Claude Monet | L'idillio di Giverny: tra covoni, giardini e cattedrali

Dopo la mostra organizzata da Petit, Monet poté godere del sostegno economico e morale di un pubblico finalmente svincolatosi dalle pastoie della pittura accademica.

La gloria, tuttavia, non offuscò né la sua umiltà né le sue ambizioni pittoriche, finalizzate a rendere «l'immediatezza, l'atmosfera soprattutto e la stessa luce diffusa ovunque».

Volendo indagare in maniera più accurata i problemi della luce e dalle sensazioni di colore, dunque, Monet intraprese le cosiddette serie, nelle quali uno stesso soggetto viene ripreso in decine e decine di tele, in modo tale che l'unico fattore cangiante è proprio la luce: si trattava di una escogitazione pittorica ottimale per dimostrare come la sola luce riuscisse a generare percezioni visive sempre mutevoli e stimolanti.

Jean-Paul Sartre: "Ogni parola ha conseguenze. Il silenzio anche!"

• "Il desiderio si esprime attraverso la carezza, come il pensiero attraverso il linguaggio".

• "Desire is expressed by caress, thought by language".

• "All'inizio, l'uomo esiste, si alza e compare sulla scena, solo in seguito definisce se stesso".

• "Quando i ricchi si fanno la guerra, sono i poveri a morire".

• "When the rich make war, it's the poor that die".

Auguste Rodin | The Thinker (detail) | Musee Rodin

Raoul Du Gardier | Genre / seascape painter

Raoul Alfred Henri Robert du Gardier (1 April 1871 - 17 October 1952) was a French painter.

He was born in Wiesbaden (Ger), the son of a very wealthy French family.

In 1890 he studied at the Écoles des Beaux Arts in Paris under Gustave Moreau, Théobald Chartran, Élie Delaunay and Albert Maignan.

François Mauriac: "Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are"!

• "Dimmi ciò che leggi e ti dirò chi sei, è vero, ma ti conoscerei meglio se mi dicessi quello che rileggi".

• "Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread".

François Mauriac

• "The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book".

• "La macchina tecnologicamente più efficiente che l’uomo abbia mai inventato è il libro".

Herman Northrop Frye

Carl Spitzweg | The Bookworm, 1850 | Grohmann Museum

Maurice Ravel: "The only love affair I have ever had was with music!"

• "Dobbiamo sempre ricordare che la sensibilità e l'emozione costituiscono il vero contenuto di un'opera d'arte".

• "Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second".

• "We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art".

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec | Spanish Dancer | Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Jacques-Émile Blanche | Portrait painter

Jacques-Émile Blanche (1861-1942) was a French painter and writer.

His father, a fashionable nerve specialist, owned a clinic where many of Blanche's sitters had been patients.

As a painter he had both talent and charm, and he enjoyed a great vogue in his day.

His work lacks originality and was much influenced by such contemporaries as James Tissot and John Singer Sargent.

The loose brushwork and subdued colouring of his portraits are also reminiscent of Edouard Manet and English 18th-century artists, especially Thomas Gainsborough.

La Belle Époque

La Belle Époque is a period of French and European history, usually considered to begin around 1871-1880 and to end with the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

Occurring during the era of the Third French Republic, it was a period characterised by optimism, regional peace, economic prosperity, colonial expansion, and technological, scientific, and cultural innovations.

In this era of France's cultural and artistic climate (particularly within Paris), the arts markedly flourished, with numerous masterpieces of literature, music, theatre, and visual art gaining extensive recognition.

Jean Béraud | Seaside Café, 1884 | The Clark Art Institute

Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant | Orientalist painter

Biography from: Christie's

Born in Paris into a Languedoc family, Jean Joseph Benjamin Constant (1845-1902) trained in Toulouse at the local Academie before moving to Paris in 1866.

He enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts and completed his training under the academic master Alexandre Cabanel.

His studies were interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War and the young artist never resumed his formal training.

Instead, in the early 1870s he travelled to Spain, and fell under the spell of the Mudejar architecture of Andalucia.

Fanny Fleury | Academic painter

Fanny Laurent Fleury, known as Madame Fanny (1846-1923) was a French painter.

Fleury was born in Paris, France, and trained with Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran, Marie Durand and Jean-Jacques Henner.

She developed a reputation as a talented portraitist and painter of figure studies.

She also painted genre scenes and still life, which she exhibited at the Salons of Saint-Etienne and Dijon.

Jean-Jacques Henner | Academic painter

Jean-Jacques Henner (5 March 1829 - 23 July 1905) was a French painter, noted for his use of sfumato and chiaroscuro in painting figures, religious subjects and portraits.

Henner was born at Bernwiller (Alsace). He began his studies in art as a pupil of Michel Martin Drolling and François-Édouard Picot.

In 1848, he entered the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, and took the Prix de Rome with a painting of Adam and Eve finding the Body of Abel in 1858.

In Rome, he was guided by Flandrin, and painted four pictures for the gallery at Colmar among other works.

Claude Monet at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Claude Monet | Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son, 1875

From: National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

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From low on a hillside, we look up at a light-skinned woman and boy standing in tall grass against a sunny blue sky in this vertical painting.

The woman stands at the center of the composition, and the moss-green parasol she holds over her head almost brushes the top edge of the canvas.

Her body faces our left but she turns her head to look at us.

Her long dress is painted largely with strokes of pale blue and gray with a few touches of yellow.

Her voluminous skirts swirl around her legs to our left.

René Rousseau-Decelle | Le pesage de Longchamp, 1910

René Rousseau-Decelle studied with the master of French Academic painting, William Bouguereau, in the waning years of the older artist’s life.

It is clear that the young Rousseau-Decelle quickly moved away from the tightly-painted images of French peasant girls and threw himself headlong into the world of the haute bourgeoisie of fin-de-siècle Paris.

Like his master, Rousseau-Decelle found a very commercially successful niche and adhered to that formula throughout his career.

René Rousseau-Decelle | Le pesage de Longchamp, 1910 (detail)

Pierre Jean Edmond Castan | Genre painter

Pierre Jean Edmond Castan (1817-1892) was a French painter.

Born in Toulouse in Haute-Garonne, Castan quickly turns to the drawing, and follows the teaching of Drolling in Paris.

He is then a pupil of neoclassical painter François Pascal Simon Gérard (1770-1837), and begins in the Salon of French Artists in 1868.

Joseph Caraud | Genre painter

Early in his career Joseph Caraud (1821-1905) was inspired, like many other artists, by Italy and Algeria, basing his early Salon entries on his experience in these countries.

But as his career progressed he became more interested in anecdotal, genre scenes in which elegant women in their luxurious clothing with sumptuous patterning recalled the eighteenth-century style and rendering of details found in paintings by Fragonard, Greuze, and Watteau.

Joseph Caraud was born on January 5th, 1821 in Cluny, in the Saône-et-Loire region of France.

Edgar Maxence | Symbolist painter

Edgard Maxence (1871-1954) was a French Symbolist painter.

He was taught by Elie Delaunay and Gustave Moreau at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

He is a contemporary of Henri Evenepoel, Jules Flandrin, Albert Marquet, Henri Matisse, Léon Printemps, Georges Rouault and other notable alumni from this famous school.

He exhibited in the Salon des Artistes Français from 1894 until 1939, and was active on the salon's committees and juries.

Victor Dargaud | Paris painting

Victor Dargaud | The Statue of Liberty in Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi's Studio, Paris

Paul-Joseph-Victor Dargaud (1850-1921), a specialist in topographically accurate views of the fashionable boulevards of Paris, is little known today, although he exhibited at the Salon from 1873 until his death.

This painting, one of his best-known works, represents the fabrication of the Statue of Liberty.

Its sculptor, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, aspired to rival the sublime effect of such monuments as the Pyramids and the Sphinx.

Because of its scale, Bartholdi had to construct Liberty in sections, as shown in this painting of the statue’s left arm.

Although the right arm of the statue was shipped to the United States in 1876 in time for the centennial, the entire statue was not completed until 1883.

Pierre Outin | Genre painter

Pierre Outin (1840-1899) was a French 19th Century painter.

Pierre Outin's father is a wealthy trader that does not approve his son's taste for art and drawing.

Outin's inclination for art begins at the Moulins high school where he learns drawing. His father wants him "back on track" and send him working in England.

He is still under 18 at his return in Paris and is soon hired in a silk trade, to his father's satisfaction.

Outin gets emancipated in 1861 and decides to quit his job.

Émile Pierre Metzmacher | Genre painter

Émile Pierre Metzmacher (1815-1890) was a Parisian painter specialising in genre and portraiture.

A student of Boulanger, Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre and Florent Joseph Marie Willems, Metzmacher debuted at the Salon in 1863.

He obtained honourable mentions for his work in the years 1879 and 1889.

André Brouillet | Academic / Genre painter

Pierre Aristide André Brouillet (1857-1914) was a French academic painter specialising in genre painting, portraits and landscapes.

Born in Charroux, the son of sculptor Pierre-Amédée Brouillet and Élisabeth Leriget, Brouillet began engineering studies at the École centrale Paris in 1876 before entering the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts three years later, where he was a student of Jean-Léon Gérôme.

In the year of his reception at the Salon de peinture et de sculpture in 1879, he attended Jean-Paul Laurens' lessons.

Furcy de Lavault | Still life with flowers

Marie-Albert-Tibule Furcy De Lavault (1847-1915) was a fine painter of landscapes, still lifes and above all, flowers.

Marie-Albert-Tibule Furcy de Lavault was born in Saint-Genis (Charente-Inférieure), France.

He debuted at the Salon of 1880 with Fleurs de Printemps (Spring Flowers) and Nature Morte (Still Life).

These early Salon entries show Furcy de Lavault’s propensities towards the long-established tradition of still lifes and an interest in flowers.