Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842) | Neoclassical painter

Elisabeth Louise Vigée-Le Brun was one of the most successful portraitists of 18th century France, gaining renowned in particular for her self-portraits and depictions of courtly women, Queen Marie Antoinette most famously.

Born in Paris as the eldest child of the portraitist Louis Vigée (1715-1767) and Jeanne Maissin, Vigée Le Brun was trained by her father from an early age.

She succeeded in gaining entrance to the Académie de Saint-Luc at the age of just nineteen, a remarkable accomplishment for a woman at the time.

Istvan Sàndorfi (1948-2007) | Hyper-Surrealist painter

István Sándorfi🎨 [1948-2007] also known as Étienne Sandorfi, was a naturalised French painter of Hungarian origin.

He received his formal art education at École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts and at École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris.

He mastered what art critics now term hyperrealism. But he did so with his very own blend of Surreal🎨 elements. Having been introduced to oil painting at the age of 12, Sandorfi🎨 dedicated much of his life to perfecting his painting techniques in order to achieve the photoreal and at the same time pull the carpet away under the viewer by letting part of a person dissappear in thin air.

Maxime Maufra (1861-1918) Impressionist painter

Maxime Maufra was a French🎨 landscape and marine painter, etcher and lithographer.

Maufra first began painting at 18.

He was encouraged to do so by two artists from Nantes such as the brothers Charles Leduc and Alfred Leduc and the landscape painter Charles Le Roux.

Henri Matisse | Art Quotes

• "What I am after, above all, is expression".
• "Ciò che sto cercando, soprattutto, è l'espressione".
• "I have worked to enrich my intelligence and meet my mind’s various needs, striving with all of my being for an understanding of the different interpretations of art given by the ancient and modern masters".
• "Ho lavorato per arricchire la mia intelligenza, per soddisfare le differenti esigenze del mio spirito, sforzando tutto il mio essere alla comprensione delle diverse interpretazioni dell'arte plastica date dagli antichi maestri e dai moderni".

Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) | Genre Rococo Era painter

Jean-Baptiste Greuze was a French painter🎨 of portraits, genre scenes🎨 and history painting.

Greuze studied first at Lyon and afterward at the Royal Academy in Paris.

He first exhibited at the Salon of 1755 and won an immediate success with his moralizing genre painting of Father Reading the Bible to His Children (1755).

Hyacinthe Collin de Vermont | Allegories of the Four Seasons

Hyacinthe Collin de Vermont | Autumn from Allegories of the Four Seasons

Hyacinthe Collin de Vermont (19 January 1693, Versailles - 16 February 1761, Paris) was a French painter🎨.

He was born into a prosperous family: his father was a teacher and engineer, and his brother François Collin de Blamont (1690-1760) was Surintendant de la Musique de la Chambre.

Collin de Vermont was a pupil of Jean Jouvenet and Hyacinthe Rigaud.

In 1715 Collin came second in the Prix de Rome competition with the Gratitude of the People towards Judith (untraced).

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Portraits / Figures | Page 2

• "Shall I tell you what I think are the two qualities of a work of art? First, it must be indescribable, and, second, it must be inimitable".
• "Vuoi sapere quali sono le due qualità di un'opera d'arte? In primo luogo, deve essere indescrivibile e, in secondo luogo, deve essere inimitabile".

Pierre-Auguste Renoir🎨

Gustave Caillebotte | A Balcony in Paris

Those boulevards, don’t forget, were still pretty new in 1877.

In the mid-19th Century, Napoléon III had ordered a massive redevelopment of the unruly French capital - led by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the prefect of the Seine, who boldly (you might say pitilessly) cleared out Paris’s dense, politically restless faubourgs.

In their place arose standardised blocks of housing, fronting new extended axes that showcased landmarks like so many imperial baubles.

Camille Claudel | L'âge mûr / L'Età matura, 1902

The Age of Maturity/L'âge mûr is probably the work that most lends itself to an interpretation based on autobiographical narrative: the end of the relationship between Claudel🎨 and Rodin🎨.

In actual fact, the association of the three figures with Camille Claudel🎨, Auguste Rodin🎨 and Rose Beuret arose some time after the sculpture was first exhibited. The critics initially saw it as the “symbolic representation of Destiny, in which the ageing man is torn away from love, youth and life”.

Auguste Rodin | Victor Hugo et les Muses, 1890

After Victor Hugo’s death in 1885, it was decided to erect a monument in his honour in the Panthéon as a pendant to Injalbert’s statue of Mirabeau. Auguste Rodin🎨 was awarded🎨 the commission in 1889. The sculptor chose to depict Victor Hugo in exile, seated amongst the rocks of Guernsey, his arm outstretched as if to calm the waves. It was an image both of the poet lost in contemplation and of the champion of the Republican cause.

This first project, “which lacked clarity and whose silhouette was muddled”,was unanimously rejected. In 1891, the Ministry of Fine Arts found another site for it. It would eventually be erected in the gardens of Palais-Royal.

Édouard Manet | Le déjeuner sur l'Herbe, 1863

Rejected by the jury of the 1863 Salon, Manet🎨 exhibited Le déjeuner sur l’herbe under the title Le Bain at the Salon des Refusés (initiated the same year by Napoléon III) where it became the principal attraction, generating both laughter and scandal.

Yet in Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, Manet🎨 was paying tribute to Europe's artistic heritage, borrowing his subject from the Concert champêtre - a painting by Titian🎨 attributed at the time to Giorgione🎨 (Louvre) - and taking his inspiration for the composition of the central group from the Marcantonio Raimondi engraving after Raphael's Judgement of Paris🎨.

Georges Seurat (1859-1891) | Pointillist painter

Georges-Pierre Seurat was a French🎨 post-Impressionist artist. He is best known for devising the painting techniques known as chromoluminarism as well as pointillism🎨.

While less famous than his paintings, his conté crayon drawings have also garnered a great deal of critical appreciation.

Seurat's artistic personality was compounded of qualities which are usually supposed to be opposed and incompatible: on the one hand, his extreme and delicate sensibility, on the other, a passion for logical abstraction and an almost mathematical precision of mind.

His large-scale work, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-1886)🎨, altered the direction of modern art by initiating Neo-impressionism, and is one of the icons of late 19th-century painting.

Gustave Caillebotte | Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877

This complex intersection, just minutes away from the Saint-Lazare train station, represents in microcosm the changing urban milieu of late nineteenth-century Paris.

Gustave Caillebotte🎨 grew up near this district when it was a relatively unsettled hill with narrow, crooked streets.

As part of a new city plan designed by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, these streets were relaid and their buildings razed during the artist’s lifetime. In this monumental urban view, which measures almost seven by ten feet and is considered the artist’s masterpiece, Caillebotte strikingly captured a vast, stark modernity, complete with life-size figures strolling in the foreground and wearing the latest fashions.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Portraits / Figures | Page 6

• "It took me twenty years to discover painting: twenty years looking at nature, and above all, going to the Louvre".
• "Mi ci sono voluti venti anni per scoprire la pittura: venti anni guardando la natura e, soprattutto, andando al Louvre".
• "You come to nature with all your theories, and she knocks them all flat".
• "Tu ti avvicini alla natura pieno di tue teorie ma lei le abbatte tutte".

Pierre-Auguste Renoir🎨

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Portraits / Figures | Page 5

• "On the whole, the modern palette is the same as the one used by the artists of Pompeii... I mean it has not been enriched. The ancients used earths, ochres, and ivory-black - you can do anything with that palette".
• "Nel complesso, la tavolozza moderna è la stessa utilizzata dagli artisti di Pompei ... Voglio dire, non è stata arricchita. Gli antichi usavano terre, ocre e nero-avorio - puoi fare qualsiasi cosa con quella tavolozza".

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Portraits / Figures | Page 4

• "I've known painters who never did any good work because instead of painting their models they seduced them".
• "Ho conosciuto pittori che non hanno mai fatto un buon lavoro perché invece di dipingere i loro modelli li hanno sedotti".
• "People love to be nice, but you must give them the chance".
• "Alla gente piace essere gentile, ma devi dargli la possibilità".

Pierre-Auguste Renoir🎨

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Portraits / Figures | Page 3

• "The only way to understand painting is to go and look at it. And if out of a million visitors there is even one to whom art means something, that is enough to justify museums".
• "L'unico modo per capire la pittura è andare a guardarla. E se su un milione di visitatori ce n'è anche uno per cui l'arte significa qualcosa, questo è sufficiente per giustificare i musei".

• "Photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits".
• "La fotografia ha liberato la pittura da molte faccende noiose, a cominciare dai ritratti di famiglia".

Pierre-Auguste Renoir🎨

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Portraits

• "The work of art must seize upon you, wrap you up in itself and carry you away. It is the means by which the artist conveys his passion. It is the current which he puts forth which sweeps you along in his passion".
• "L'opera d'arte deve afferrarti, avvolgerti in se stesso e portarti via. È il mezzo con cui l'artista trasmette la sua passione. È la corrente che egli emette che ti trascina nella sua passione".

- Pierre Auguste Renoir

Gustave Caillebotte | Impressionist painter | Page 4

Painter and Patron of Impressionism, Gustave Caillebotte (French, 1848-1894) may be considered also part of the first movement after Impressionism: Neo-Impressionism🎨.

He made a giant impact on the history of France when he invested in his Impressionist friends' artwork: Claude Monet🎨, Auguste Renoir🎨, and Camille Pissarro🎨 among others.

Caillebotte was born on 19 August 1848 to an upper-class Parisian family living in the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis.

For biographical notes -in english and italian- and other works by Caillebotte see:

• Gustave Caillebotte | Impressionist painter | Page 1🎨
• Gustave Caillebotte | Impressionist painter | Page 2🎨
• Gustave Caillebotte | Impressionist painter | Page 3🎨

Gustave Caillebotte | Impressionist painter | Page 3

Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894), French painter, art collector and impresario who combined aspects of the academic and Impressionist styles in a unique synthesis.

Born into a wealthy family, Caillebotte trained to be an engineer but became interested in painting and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

He met Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet in 1874 and showed his works at the Impressionist exhibition of 1876 and its successors.