Born on July 19, 1834, in Paris, France, Edgar Degas went on to study at the École des Beaux-Arts (formerly the Académie des Beaux-Arts) in Paris and became renowned as a stellar portraitist, fusing Impressionistic sensibilities with traditional approaches. Both a painter and sculptor, Degas enjoyed capturing female dancers and played with unusual angles and ideas around centering. His work influenced several major modern artists, including Pablo Picasso. Degas died in Paris in 1917.Edgar Degas was born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar de Gas on July 19, 1834, in Paris, France. His father, Auguste, was a banker, and his mother, Celestine, was an American from New Orleans. Their family were members of the middle class with nobler pretensions. For many years, the Degas family spelled their name "de Gas"; the preposition "de" suggesting a land-owning aristocratic background which they did not actually have.
As an adult, Edgar Degas reverted back to the original spelling. Degas came from a very musical household; his mother was an amateur opera singer and his father occasionally arranged for musicians to give recitals in their home. Degas attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, a prestigious and rigorous boys' secondary school, where he received a classical education.
Degas also displayed a remarkable skill for drawing and painting as a child, a talent encouraged by his father, who was a knowledgeable art lover. In 1853, at the age of 18, he received permission to "copy" at the Louvre in Paris. (During the 19th century, aspiring artists developed their technique by attempting to replicate the works of the masters.) He produced several impressive copies of Raphael as well, studying the work of more contemporary painters such as Ingres and Delacroix.
In 1855, Degas gained admission into the École des Beaux-Arts (formerly the Académie des Beaux-Arts) in Paris. However, after only one year of study, Degas left school to spend three years traveling, painting and studying in Italy. He painted painstaking copies of the works of the great Italian renaissance painters Michelangelo and da Vinci, developing a reverence for classical linearity that remained a distinguishing feature of even his most modern paintings.
Upon returning to Paris in 1859, Degas set out to make a name for himself as a painter. Taking a traditional approach, he painted large portraits of family members and grand historical scenes such as "The Daughter of Jephtha," "Semiramis Building Babylon" and "Scene of War in the Middle Ages." Degas submitted these works to the all-powerful Salon, a group of French artists and teachers who presided over public exhibitions. It had very rigid and conventional ideas of beauty and proper artistic form, and received Degas's paintings with measured indifference.
In 1862, Degas met fellow painter Edouard Manet at the Louvre, and the pair quickly developed a friendly rivalry. Degas grew to share Manet's disdain for the presiding art establishment as well as his belief that artists needed to turn to more modern techniques and subject matter.
By 1868, Degas had become a prominent member of a group of avant-garde artists including Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley, who gathered frequently at the Café Guerbois to discuss ways in which artists could engage the modern world. Their meetings coincided with tumultuous times in the history of France. In July 1870, the Franco-Prussian War broke out and the highly nationalistic Degas volunteered for the French National Guard. At the war's conclusion in 1871, the infamous Paris Commune seized control of the capital for two terrifying months before Adolphe Thiers reestablished the Third Republic in a bloody civil war. Degas largely avoided the tumult of the Paris Commune by taking an extended trip to visit relatives in New Orleans. Returning to Paris near the end of 1873, Degas, along with Monet, Sisley and several other painters, formed the Société Anonyme des Artistes (Society of Independent Artists), a group committed to putting on exhibitions free of the Salon's control. The group of painters would come to be known as the Impressionists (though Degas preferred the term "realist" to describe his own work), and on April 15, 1874, they held the first Impressionist exhibition. The paintings Degas exhibited were modern portraits of modern women—milliners, laundresses and ballet dancers—painted from radical perspectives.
Over the course of the next 12 years, the group staged eight such Impressionist exhibitions, and Degas exhibited at all of them. His most famous paintings during these years were "The Dancing Class" (1871), "The Dance Class" (1874), "Woman Ironing" (1873) and "Dancers Practicing at the Bar" (1877). In 1880, he also sculpted "The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer," a sculpture so hauntingly evocative that while some critics called it brilliant, others condemned him as cruel for having made it. While Degas's paintings are not overtly political, they do reflect France's changing social and economic environment. His paintings portray the growth of the bourgeoisie, the emergence of a service economy and the widespread entrance of women into the workplace.
In 1886, at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in Paris, Degas exhibited 10 paintings of nude women in various stages of bathing. These nude paintings were the talk of the exhibition and also the source of controversy; some called the women "ugly" while others praised the honesty of his depictions. Degas went on to paint hundreds of studies of nude women. He also continued to paint dancers, contrasting the awkward humility of the dancer backstage with her majestic grace in the midst of performance.
In the mid-1890s, an episode known as the "Dreyfus Affair" sharply divided French society. In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a young Jewish captain in the French military, was convicted of treason on spying charges. Although evidence that proved Dreyfus's innocence surfaced in 1896, rampant anti-Semitism kept him from being exonerated for another 10 years. With the country deeply divided between those in support of Dreyfus and those against him, Degas sided with those whose anti-Semitism blinded them to Dreyfus's innocence. His stance against Dreyfus cost him many friends and much respect within the typically more tolerant avant-garde art circles. Degas lived well into the 20th century, and though he painted less during these years, he promoted his work tirelessly and became an avid art collector. He never married, though he did count several women, including American painter Mary Cassatt, among his intimate friends. Edgar Degas died in Paris on September 27, 1917, at the age of 83.
While Degas has always been recognized as one of the greatest Impressionist painters, his legacy has been mixed in the decades since his death. The misogynist overtones present in his sexualized portraits of women, as well as his intense anti-Semitism, have served to alienate Degas from some modern critics. Still, the sheer beauty of his early works and the distinctly modern self-conscious elusiveness of his later portraits ensure Degas a lasting legacy. One thing remains indisputable about Degas: His were among the most painstakingly polished and refined paintings in history. An obsessive and careful planner, Degas liked to joke that he was the least spontaneous artist alive. "If painting weren't difficult," he once remarked, "it wouldn't be so fun."
Citation Information Article Title Edgar Degas Biography Author Biography.com Editors Website Name The Biography.com website URL http://www.biography.com/people/edgar-degas-9269770 Access Date February 2, 2016 Publisher A&E Television Networks Original Published Date n/a
Along with Claude Monet and others, Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) was one of the founders of impressionism – a revolutionary new development amongst painters. He later moved on from impressionism after being deeply moved by the Italian renaissance Masters.
Short Biography of Auguste Renoir Renoir was born in Limoges on 25 February 1841. His father was a tailor, and Renoir was given an apprenticeship at a porcelain painters. He then had the opportunity to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. It was here that he joined Charles Gleyre’s studio and met many other young French impressionist artists.
moulin Moulin de La Gallete His art was noted for its vibrant combination of colours. In classic impressionist style, he avoided rigid lines, and merged objects giving a sense of dream like consciousness. He also painted many portraits of women – often in nude. They focus not on the sexual aspect but often of everyday experiences.
girl Initially, the art establishment was unimpressed by the new breed of painters and the impressionists struggled to have any exhibitions. Renoir, supplemented his income by drawing more conventional portraits.
In 1881 he visited Algeria and then Italy. In Italy, he was deeply impressed by the Italian masters. After meeting Cezanne near Marseilles, Renoir sought to break away from Impressionism by developing a new structural style of his own.
bywater Yet, he never abandoned his techniques of colour that he learnt during his impressionist period and he developed a combination of classical styles of applying paint with an impressionist perspective of colour.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century he gained increasing fame and respect. In 1892, the French state bought one of his paintings – At the Piano.
As ill-fortune would have it, his fame and greater renown also coincided with the onset of arthritis which made painting difficult and painful. But, he struggled on and continued to paint some great masterpieces.
Citation : Pettinger, Tejvan. “Biography of August Renoir“, Oxford, www.biographyonline.net 26 Dec. 2010
Claude Lorrain, French artist. Also known as Claude, Claude Gellée. Born, 1600, Chamagne, France. Died November 23, 1682, Rome, Italy
Claude Lorrain, byname of Claude Gellée (born 1600, Chamagne, France—died Nov. 23, 1682, Rome [Italy]), French artist best known for, and one of the greatest masters of, ideal landscape painting, an art form that seeks to present a view of nature more beautiful and harmonious than nature itself. The quality of that beauty is governed by Classical concepts, and the landscape often contains Classical ruins and pastoral figures in Classical dress. The source of inspiration is the countryside around Rome—the Roman Campagna—a countryside haunted with remains and associations of antiquity. The practitioners of ideal landscape during the 17th century, the key period of its development, were artists of many nationalities congregated in Rome. Later the form spread to other countries. Claude, whose special contribution was the poetic rendering of light, was particularly influential, not only during his lifetime but, especially in England, from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century.
Life and works Claude Lorrain, usually called simply Claude in English, was born of poor parents at Chamagne, a village in the then independent duchy of Lorraine. He received little schooling, and, according to his first biographer, Joachim von Sandrart, was brought up to be a pastrycook. His parents seem to have died when he was 12 years old, and within the next few years he travelled south to Rome.
In Rome he was trained as an artist by Agostino Tassi, a landscapist and the leading Italian painter of illusionistic architectural frescoes. At what stage and for how long he was apprenticed is uncertain, and, either before or during this period, Claude probably spent two years in Naples with Goffredo Wals, another pupil of Tassi. Tassi taught Claude the basic vocabulary of his art—landscapes and coast scenes with buildings and little figures—and gave him a lasting interest in perspective and, thus, in landscape painting.
In 1625, according to his second biographer, Filippo Baldinucci, Claude left Tassi and went back to Nancy, the capital of Lorraine, where he worked for a year as assistant to Claude Deruet on some frescoes (since destroyed) in the Carmelite church. But, in the winter of 1626–27, Claude returned to Rome and settled there permanently. He never married, but he had a daughter, Agnese (1653–c. 1713), who lived in his house; also staying with him were a pupil, Giovanni Domenico Desiderii, from 1633 to about 1656, and two nephews, Jean from about 1663 and Joseph from about 1680. In 1633, to further his career, Claude joined the painters’ Academy of St. Luke.
Little is known of his personality. He took no part in public events and lived essentially for his work. In his early period he mixed with other artists, especially those who were of northern European origin like himself, but in his 40s he apparently became more solitary. He remained on good terms with the painter Nicolas Poussin, another French master of the ideal landscape, yet there was hardly any artistic contact between them. Although ill-educated in the formal sense (both his spelling and counting were eccentric, and he wrote haltingly in French and Italian), Claude was not the ignorant peasant of legend. The subjects of his paintings show that he had an adequate knowledge of the Bible, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the Aeneid. He had a special feeling for the country, but his mode of life was that of a bourgeois. Industrious, amiable, and shrewd, surrounded by his modest household, and keenly sought after as an artist, he pursued a successful career into old age and amassed a comfortable fortune.
Claude Lorrain: Pastoral Landscape with a Mill [Credit: Photograph by Beesnest McClain. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of The Ahmanson Foundation, M.86.259]No work by Claude survives from before 1627, and he probably did not take up landscape until after that date. His first dated work is Landscape with Cattle and Peasants. Painted in 1629, it hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Soon after, in the early 1630s, he rose to fame. He did this partly on the basis of two or three series of landscape frescoes (all but one, a small frieze in the Crescenzi Palace at Rome, are now lost), but, according to Baldinucci, he achieved renown chiefly because of his skill in representing “those conditions of nature which produce views of the sun, particularly on seawater and over rivers at dawn and evening.” By about 1637—with commissions from Pope Urban VIII, several cardinals, and Philip IV of Spain—Claude had become the leading landscape painter in Italy.
In 1635–36 he began the Liber Veritatis (“Book of Truth”; in the British Museum, London), a remarkable volume containing 195 drawings carefully copied by Claude after his own paintings, with particulars noted on the backs of the drawings indicating the patron for whom, or the place for which, the picture was destined, and, in the second half of the book, the date. Although most paintings executed before 1635 and a few executed afterward are not included, the Liber Veritatis was compiled throughout in chronological order and thus forms an invaluable record of Claude’s artistic development, as well as revealing his circle of patrons. Undertaken, as he told Baldinucci, as a safeguard against forgery of his paintings, the book gradually became Claude’s most precious possession and a work of art in itself; he may also have used it as a stock of motifs for new compositions.
Claude’s patrons were international and predominantly aristocratic, the majority being French or Italian noblemen. He was a fastidious worker and an expensive artist. He always worked on commission, at first sometimes selling his paintings through agents, but later he negotiated directly with patrons, with whom he would agree as to the size, price, and subject. Initially a fast painter, his rate of production subsequently slowed down. His late works are often individually larger and were still more carefully executed. About 250 paintings by Claude, out of a total of perhaps 300, and more than 1,000 drawings have survived. He also produced 44 etchings.
Stylistic development Although they are basically consistent in method and aim, Claude’s paintings show a gradual stylistic evolution, and it is possible to distinguish the phases of his development. His early works, showing the influence of Tassi and of Dutch and Flemish artists, are busy, animated, and picturesque. They are full of charm and effects of surprise. His smaller pictures, painted on copper, reflect the spirit of the German artist Adam Elsheimer, who had died in Rome in 1610. Occasionally Claude painted directly from nature during this period, although no examples have been certainly identified; his normal method of nature study was by means of drawings. A pattern common in the early paintings is a dark mass of foliage on one side in the foreground contrasted with a misty sunlit distance on the other. Herdsmen tending cattle or goats move out from beneath the trees or sit beside a stream (scarcely any of Claude’s paintings at any time are without figures and animals). Simultaneously Claude developed the traditional subject of a coastal scene with boats into a new type of picture: the seaport. This is an idealized harbour scene flanked on one or both sides with palaces, the latter often being adapted from actual ancient or contemporary buildings. Tall ships ride at anchor, recently arrived or preparing to depart. Light, however, is the key feature of the seaport pictures. Its source is often a visible sun just above the horizon, which Claude first introduced in 1634 in Harbour Scene and, in so doing, used the sun as the means of illuminating a whole picture for the first time in art. This use of light from the sky above the horizon, whether emanating directly from the sun or not, enforces another characteristic of Claude’s paintings: recession in depth. Recession is further emphasized by subtle atmospheric perspective achieved through a gradual diminishing of the distinctness of outline and colour from the foreground to the background. The light is nearly always that of dawn or evening.
Beginning around 1640, Claude began to make his compositions more Classical and monumental. The influence of contemporary Bolognese landscape painting, particularly the works of Domenichino, replaces that of Tassi and the northerners. During this decade something like a formula establishes itself: tall trees on one side of the picture balanced by a Classical ruin and smaller trees further back on the other; a foreground “stage” with figures; a winding river conducting the eye by stages through an open landscape to the horizon; and distant hills, often with a glimpse of the sea. The figures are not, as often before, in contemporary dress but are always represented in Classical or biblical costume. Contrary to popular belief, virtually all of Claude’s figures were painted by himself. Sometimes they are merely shepherds, but frequently they embody a subject from Classical mythology or sacred history. The light is clearer than in paintings of the early or late periods. Spacious, tranquil compositions are drenched in an even light, as can be seen in Landscape: The Marriage of Isaac and Rebekah (also called The Mill), dated 1648.
The 1650s witness some still larger and more heroic paintings, including The Sermon on the Mount. In the middle of the following decade, Claude’s style moved into its last phase, when some of his greatest masterpieces were produced. The colour range is restricted, and the tones become cool and silvery. The figures are strangely elongated and by conventional standards ill-drawn. At the same time, the subjects define the mood and sometimes determine the composition of the landscape. The paintings of this period are solemn and mysterious and radiate a sublime poetic feeling. It was in this spirit that Claude painted his famous work The Enchanted Castle.
Achievement as a draftsman Claude’s drawings are as remarkable an achievement as his paintings. About half are studies from nature. Executed freely in chalk or pen and wash, they are much more spontaneous than his paintings or studio drawings and represent informal motifs—trees, ruins, waterfalls, parts of a riverbank, fields in sunlight—that Claude saw on his sketching expeditions in the Campagna. Many were executed in bound books, which have since been broken up. The studio drawings consist partly of preparatory designs for paintings—Claude prepared his work more carefully than any previous landscape artist—and partly of compositions created as ends in themselves.
Claude had only two students. Nonetheless, his paintings influenced a number of Dutch painters who were in Rome during the late 1630s and ’40s, and, in a broad sense, his influence can be seen even in the work of certain English landscape painters of the 19th century.
Michael William Lely Kitson EB Editors