Nabis Art | History and Sitemap

Ambitious decorative painting enjoyed a resurgence in Europe from the late 1880s through the early twentieth century.

In Paris, Pierre Bonnard🎨, Maurice Denis🎨 and Édouard Vuillard🎨 were among the most influential artists to embrace decoration as painting’s primary function.

Their works celebrate pattern and ornament, challenge the boundaries that divide fine arts from crafts, and, in many cases, complement the interiors for which they were commissioned.

Disaffected with the rigidly representational painting methods taught at the Académie Julian, Bonnard and Denis joined with other like-minded students in the fall of 1888 to form a brotherhood called the “Nabis”, a Hebrew word meaning “prophets”.

The group was spearheaded by Paul Sérusier🎨, who had visited Paul Gauguin in Pont-Aven over the summer and was now spreading an aesthetic message based on his interpretation of Gauguin🎨’s Symbolism.

Paul Sérusier - The Bois d'Amour à Pont-Aven / The Talisman (Le Talisman), 1888, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Macchiaioli Art History and Sitemap

The Macchiaioli were a group of Italian painters active in Tuscany in the second half of the nineteenth century, who, breaking with the antiquated conventions taught by the Italian academies of art, did much of their painting outdoors in order to capture natural light, shade and color.

This practice relates the Macchiaioli to the French Impressionists who came to prominence a few years later, although the Macchiaioli pursued somewhat different purposes.

Federico Zandomeneghi - Il giubbetto rosso, 1895

Art Nouveau | History and Sitemap

From the 1880s until the First World War, western Europe and the United States witnessed the development of Art Nouveau (“New Art”).

Taking inspiration from the unruly aspects of the natural world, Art Nouveau influenced art and architecture especially in the applied arts, graphic work, and illustration.

Sinuous lines and “whiplash” curves were derived, in part, from botanical studies and illustrations of deep-sea organisms such as those by German biologist Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (1834-1919) in Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature, 1899).

Other publications, including Floriated Ornament (1849) by Gothic Revivalist Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-1852) and The Grammar of Ornament (1856) by British architect and theorist Owen Jones (1809-1874), advocated nature as the primary source of inspiration for a generation of artists seeking to break away from past styles.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | In the Studio, 1877

Pierre-Auguste Renoir often used his friends as models for genre scenes, most of which were posed and painted in the studio.

The sitters for this small painting were the amateur critic Georges Rivière and the artist's model Marguerite Legrand, known professionally as Margot.

• Artist: Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919).
• Title: In the Studio (Georges Riviere and Marguerite Legrand).
• Date: Between 1876 and 1877.
• Medium: Oil on canvas.
• Dimensions: 35 x 25 cm.
• Collection: Dallas Museum of Art.

Paul Laurenzi, 1964 | Figurative painter

Paul Laurenzi was born in Antibes, France.

It was after various small interventions in the world of advertising and children's book that Paul Laurenzi, joined an association of painting based in the South of France.

This allows him to participate in various local exhibitions and sympathize with its president, professional artist.

The latter encourages him to present its works in a gallery from Marseille, which so agrees to expose his works of art.

His first "official" exhibition, beside Bernard Buffet's works takes place then, in 1987.

George Spencer Watson | Romantic / Portrait painter

George Spencer Watson R.O.I., R.P., A.R.A., R.A. (8 March 1869, in London - 11 April 1934, in London) was an English🎨 portrait artist of the late romantic school who sometimes worked in the style of the Italian Renaissance.

• Career

He studied at the Royal Academy Schools from 1889, and exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1891.

He won Royal Academy Schools Silver Medals in 1889 and 1891, and the Landseer Scholarship in 1892.

He was elected to the Royal Institute of Oil Painters (ROI) in 1900, Royal Society of Portrait Painters (RP) in 1904, Associate of the Royal Academy in 1923, and a Member of the Royal Academy (RA) in 1932.

• Personal life

in 1909 He married Hilda Mary Gardiner, a dancer and mime artist, and follower of the actor Edward Gordon Craig. They had a daughter, Mary Spencer Watson (1913–2006), who became a sculptor.

In the year of 1923 he bought Dunshay Manor in the hills of the Isle of Purbeck, after already having spent holidays in nearby Swanage.

He died in London and a memorial exhibition was held at the Fine Art Society in the same year. There is a memorial to him in the north vestibule of St James's Church, Piccadilly.

Some of his works are held at Tate Britain, the Harris Art Gallery, Preston and collections in Bournemouth, Liverpool, Plymouth and the National Gallery of Canada.

Born in London, Watson studied at the Royal Academy from 1889; he exhibited there from 1891 and also at the Paris salon. Retrospective exhibitions were held at the Galerie Heinemann, Munich in 1912, and at the Fine Art Society in 1914.

His work A Lady in Black (1922) is owned by the Tate Collection.

Frank Owen Salisbury (1874-1962)

Francis ("Frank") Owen Salisbury (18 December 1874 - 31 August 1962) was an English artist🎨 who specialized in portraits, large canvases of historical and ceremonial events, stained glass and book illustration.

In his heyday he made a fortune on both sides of the Atlantic and was known as “Britain’s Painter Laureate”.

His art was steadfastly conservative and he was a vitriolic critic of Modern Art - particularly of his contemporaries Picasso🎨, Chagall🎨 and Mondrian🎨.

Salisbury was born in on December 18, 1874, in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, as a son of a plumber and glazier. He learned the art of stained glass in the workshop of his brother in St Albans.

Antonio Ambrogio Alciati | Romantic / Portrait painter

Born in Vercelli, Italy, in 1878, Antonio Ambrogio Alciati (1878-1929) moved with his mother and his sister to Milan in 1897 to attend the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, where his teachers were Vespasiano Bignami, Giuseppe Mentessi and Cesare Tallone.

Tallone helped him to perfect his portrait painting technique, and introduced him into wealthy Milan middle class society.

Between 1902-1910 he painted a series of pictures inspired by romantic and family subjects, while also working on the decoration of churches and villas in Lombardy.

In the ten years from 1910 his style underwent an evolution as he abandoned the use of shaded tones and a dull, almost monochromatic range of colors, gradually acquiring greater constructive vigor and a variety of bright colors.