François Boucher | Rococo painter

François Boucher (1703-1770) was a French painter, draughtsman and etcher, who worked in the Rococo style.

Boucher is known for his idyllic and voluptuous paintings on classical themes, decorative allegories, and pastoral scenes.

He was perhaps the most celebrated painter and decorative artist of the 18th century.

Alfred Boucher | The Mentor to Camille Claudel

A French sculptor and painter, Alfred Boucher (1850-1934), was Camille Claudel's teacher and the founder of the artists' city La Ruche in Paris.

Born in Bouy-sur-Ovin (Nogent-sur-Seine), he was the son of a farmhand who became the gardener of the sculptor Joseph-Marius Ramus, who, after recognizing Boucher's talent, opened his studio to him.

He won the Grand Prix du Salon in 1881 with La Piété Filiale.

Jean-François Millet: "To tell the truth, peasant subjects suit my nature best.."

• "Art will never come except from some small disregarded corner where an isolated and inspired man is studying the mysteries of nature".

• "L'arte non verrà mai se non da qualche piccolo angolo trascurato dove un uomo isolato e ispirato sta studiando i misteri della natura".

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes | Symbolist painter

French painter Pierre Cécile Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898) is known for his mural painting - large-scale decorative painting - in the Symbolism style.

Puvis's work is seen as symbolist in nature, even though he studied with some of the romanticists, and he is credited with influencing an entire generation of painters and sculptors, particularly the works of the Modernists.

One of his protégés was Georges de Feure.

Gabriel Ferrier | Orientalist painter

Gabriel-Joseph-Marie-Augustin Ferrier (29 September 1847 in Nîmes - 6 June 1914 in Paris) was a French portrait painter and orientalist.

His father was a pharmacist.

He began his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he worked with Ernest Hébert and Isidore Pils.

His first exhibit was at the Salon in 1869.

Marc Chagall's Colors

An early modernist, Marc Chagall (1887-1985) was associated with the École de Paris as well as several major artistic styles and created works in a wide range of artistic formats, including painting, drawings, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and fine art prints.

He experienced modernism's "golden age" in Paris, where "he synthesized the art forms of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism, and the influence of Fauvism gave rise to Surrealism".

Marc Chagall: "Lo stile non è importante. Esprimersi lo è"

• "Color is everything. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration".

• "Despite all the troubles of our world, in my heart I have never given up on the love in which I was brought up or on man's hope in love. In life, just as on the artist's palette, there is but one single colour that gives meaning to life and art–the colour of love".

Anne Bachelier, 1949 | Surrealist /Visionary painter

French painter and illustrator Anne Bachelier, was born in Louvigne du Desert, France.

Metamorphosis, transition, and evolution provide the common threads of the art of Anne Bachelier.

The artist captivates her audience with compelling, highly imaginative images that are distinct, unique, inventive and immediately recognizable.

William Bouguereau | La magliaia, 1873

Subito dopo che Adolphe William Bouguereau (1825-1905) completò Tricoteuse, nel 1874, Goupil trasferì il dipinto nella loro galleria all'Aia e lo vendette alla famiglia Poortman.

Il Tricoteuse è rimasto nei Paesi Bassi da allora e con la stessa famiglia per quasi un secolo.

Senza dubbio con l'aiuto del suo potente commerciante, Goupil, Bouguereau era stato acquisito da molti collezionisti nei Paesi Bassi in quel momento.

Il Tricoteuse avrebbe sicuramente contribuito alla reputazione di Bouguereau ai massimi livelli della società olandese.

L'immagine di una contadina in costume italiano, è uno dei primi esempi sul tema della maglieria, a cui ritorna per tutta la sua carriera.

Claude Monet | Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, 1865-1866

From: Musée d’Orsay, Paris

This fragment, there is a second also in the Musée d'Orsay, is one of the remaining parts of the monumental Luncheon on the Grass by Monet.

The work was started in the spring of 1865 and measured over four metres by six.

It was intended to be both a tribute and a challenge to Manet whose painting of the same title had been the subject of much sarcasm from the public as well as the critics when it was exhibited in the Salon des Refusés in 1863.

But the project was abandoned in 1866, just before the Salon where Monet intended to show it, opened.

Sonia Delaunay | Mother of Abstraction

From: MoMa, The Museum of Modern Art

"We are...only at the beginning

of color research (full of mysteries

still to be discovered)...."

Sonia Delaunay-Terk (13 November 1885 - 5 December 1979)

Red and green, blue and orange, yellow and violet: these color combinations were vital to the artistic practice and theory of Sonia Delaunay-Terk, whose vast body of work-paintings and drawings, prints and illustrations, textiles and furnishings, clothing and accessories-enthralled its earliest viewers, users, and wearers.

While living in Paris in the 1910s, Delaunay-Terk and her husband, Robert Delaunay, began to explore the visual properties of contrasting colors-colors opposite one another on the color wheel.

Franck Gérard, 1969 | AI retro creations

Franck Gérard is a self-taught French visual artist living and working in Angers, France who worked creating computer graphics for architecture for over 20 years.

He began presenting geometric abstract artworks on Instagram in 2020.

With 190,000 followers in 3 years Franck Gérard is recognised as an innovative visual artist.

Francine Van Hove, 1942 | Modern painter

Francine Van Hove is a contemporary French painter.

Born in Saint-Mandé (Seine, France), she studied in Paris and received a Fine Arts degree with qualifications to teach in secondary schools.

After teaching one year at Lycee de Jeunes Filles in Strasbourg, she resigned from her position and decided to come back to Paris in 1964 where she now lives and continues to paint.

Carlotta Edwards | Ballet dancers

Carlotta Edwards (1894-1977) was the daughter of the French painter Ferdinand Pourrier. She is well know for her paintings of ballet scenes and exhibited at both the Royal Society of Portrait Painters and the Paris Salon.

The Medici Society published many pints of her work and these are still widely available.

In the 1950's framed copies of Carlotta Edward's prints were very popular.

Edgar Degas | Repasseuses / Le Stiratrici, 1884-1886

Degas often made portraits of his family and friends but he was also an attentive observer of the working world in millinery workshops or laundries.

Only Daumier before him had taken an interest in washerwoman, who became one of Degas's favorite subjects between 1869-1895.

At first he painted single figures seen against the light, picked out sharply against the white linen.

Then, about 1884-1886, he dwelled more heavily on the subject, this time depicting two women in a laundry.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Pan’s Party, 1879

Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted this florid allegorical canvas, La fête de Pan, in the summer of 1879.

Commissioned to adorn the drawing room of the Bérard family’s country home, the Château de Wargemont, La fête de Pan depicts a spring festival devoted to the ancient Greek god, Pan - a rare example of a mythological subject in Renoir’s oeuvre.

This jubilant painting combines the artist’s careful observations of nature en plein air with his imaginative fantasies of beauty, both feminine and floral.

Léon Cogniet | The massacre of the Innocents, 1824

The Massacre of the Innocents (Location: Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes.) is the biblical account of infanticide by Herod the Great, the Roman-appointed King of the Jews.

According to the Gospel of Matthew, Herod ordered the execution of all young male children in the vicinity of Bethlehem, so as to avoid the loss of his throne to a newborn King of the Jews whose birth had been announced to him by the Magi.

In typical Matthean style, it is understood as the fulfillment of an Old Testament prophecy.

Victor Hugo | Ti Auguro / I wish you / Je te souhaite

Ti auguro in primo luogo di amare e che, amando, tu sia riamato.

E se non è così, che sia breve il ricordo, e finito il ricordo che tu non conservi rancore.

Ti auguro che non sia così,

ma se così fosse, che tu sappia vivere senza disperazione.

Vladimir Kush | Symphony of the Sun

Bernard Buffet | Expressionist painter

Bernard Buffet (1928-1999) was a French painter of Expressionism and a member of the anti-abstract art group L'homme Témoin (the Witness-Man).

Bernard Buffet represents a typical demonstration of the divorce between the French and Contemporary Art.

Popular artist by excellence, Bernard Buffet loved by the public is however detested by elitists whom hold against him his prolixity: 8,000 paintings, water colors,drawings, lithographs and engravings.

Johann Sebastian Bach: "La musica aiuta a non sentire dentro il silenzio che c’è fuori"!

• "Tre cose sono necessarie per un buon pianista: la testa, il cuore e le dita".

• "La perfezione si raggiunge per gradi".

• "Ai miei occhi ed alle mie orecchie l’organo è il re di tutti gli strumenti".

• "La musica non è nelle note, la musica è tra le note".

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

• "Buffone è chi non ride mai".

• "Ogni difficoltà su cui si sorvola, diventa un fantasma che turberà i nostri sonni".

Johann Sebastian Bach (1714-1788), Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) e Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)