1824-1898 French Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Art Galleries Born in Lyons on Dec. 14, 1824, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes belonged to the generation of Gustave Courbet and ??douard Manet, and he was fully aware of their revolutionary achievements. Nevertheless, he was drawn to a more traditional and conservative style. From his first involvement with art, which began after a trip to Italy and which interrupted his intention to follow the engineering profession that his father practiced, Puvis pursued his career within the scope of academic classicism and the Salon. Even in this chosen arena, however, he was rejected, particularly during the 1850s. But he gradually won acceptance. By the 1880s he was an established figure in the Salons, and by the 1890s he was their acknowledged master. In both personal and artistic ways Puvis career was closely linked with the avant-grade. In the years of his growing public recognition, when he began to serve on Salon juries, he was consistently sympathetic to the work of younger, more radical artists. Later, as president of the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts - the new Salon, as it was called - he was able to exert even more of a liberalizing influence on the important annual exhibitions. Puvis sympathy to new and radical artistic directions was reflected in his own painting. Superficially he was a classicist, but his personal interpretation of that style was unconventional. His subject matter - religious themes, allegories, mythologies, and historical events - was clearly in keeping with the academic tradition. But his style eclipsed his outdated subjects: he characteristically worked with broad, simple compositions, and he resisted the dry photographic realism which had begun to typify academic painting about the end of the century. In addition, the space and figures in his paintings inclined toward flatness, calling attention to the surface on which the images were depicted. These qualities gave his work a modern, abstract look and distinguished it from the sterile tradition to which it might otherwise have been linked. Along with their modern, formal properties, Puvis paintings exhibited a serene and poetic range of feeling. His figures frequently seem to be wrapped in an aura of ritualistic mystery, as though they belong in a private world of dreams or visions. Yet these feelings invariably seem fresh and sincere. This combination of form and feeling deeply appealed to certain avant-garde artists of the 1880s and 1890s. Although Puvis claimed he was neither radical nor revolutionary, he was admired by the symbolist poets, writers, and painters - including Paul Gauguin and Maurice Denis - and he influenced the neoimpressionist painter Georges Seurat. During his mature career Puvis executed many mural paintings. In Paris he did the Life of St. Genevieve (1874-1878) in the Panth??on and Science, Art, and Letters (1880s) in the Sorbonne. In Lyons he executed the Sacred Grove, the Antique Vision, and Christian Inspiration (1880s) in the Mus??e des Beaux-Arts. He painted Pastoral Poetry (1895-1898) in the Boston Public Library. These commissions reflect the high esteem with which Puvis was regarded during his own lifetime. Among his most celebrated oil paintings are Hope (1872) and the Poor Fisherman (1881). He died in Paris on Oct. 10, 1898.  Related Paintings of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes :. | Village Firemen | Die Hoffnung | The Poor Fisherman | Summer | The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist |
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Mikolas Ales
(November 18, 1852 in Mirotice near Pisek - July 10, 1913 in Prague) was a Czech painter. Ales was born in 1852 in Mirotice into a relatively rich family that was in debt at the time. He was taught history by his brother Frantisek until his death in 1865; he expressed interest in painting at an early age. In 1879 he got married to Marina Kailova and moved to Italy where he continued his career in painting. He moved back to Prague working on the new artwork at the Prague National Theatre; he died in Prague at the age of 60. Ales is estimated to have had over 5,000 published pictures, he has painted for everything from magazines to playing cards to textbooks. His paintings were not publicized too widely outside Bohemia, but many of them are still available, and Mikolas Ales is certainly regarded as one of the country's best painters
WILLAERTS, Adam
Dutch painter (b. 1577, Antwerpen, d. 1664, Utrecht) During his early years in Antwerp he was impressed with the colourful paintings of the Fleming Jan Breughel the elder, but the subject and style of his earliest known picture, Dutch East Indiamen off the West African Coast (1608; Amsterdam, Hist. Mus.), presumably painted after the artist's arrival in Holland, shows the influence of the Dutch marine painter Hendrick Cornelisz. Vroom. In this painting Willaerts adopted Vroom's austere compositional scheme of an uninterrupted horizontal expanse of water with no framing devices,
Max Pechstein
German Expressionist Painter, 1881-1955,German painter and printmaker. He was apprenticed as a decorator in Zwickau from 1896 to 1900, when he moved to Dresden to enrol at the Kunstgewerbeschule, where he met the architect Wilhelm Kreis and the painter Otto Gussmann (1869-1926) and obtained decorative commissions. He continued his studies from 1902 until 1906 as Gussmann's pupil at the Dresden Kunstakademie. Through Kreis, Pechstein was introduced to Erich Heckel in 1906 and was invited by him to join DIE BRECKE, a group founded in the previous year that was quickly to become a major force in the rise of German Expressionism.