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| The world famous Musée du Louvre in Paris! |
France has been on the cutting edge of making art into our understanding of Art. From the Renaissance through the Impressionist period, and into our modern day, the Art world would not be the same without French influence.
I'm going to share some of the most famous classic works of art by some of the biggest names to enter the Art World, as well as what is going on in modern French Art.
Read more about my favorite French artists and their works after the jump!
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| La Grande Odalisque, 1814, Oil on Canvas |
Famous French painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres was born at Montauban (Tarn-et-Garonne, Midi Pyrenees, France) on the August 29th, 1780. His first lessons in art he received from his father, who was a painter and sculptor. Ingres continued then his training in the Toulouse Academy. In 1801 he won the Prix de Rome with his painting masterpiece the Ambassadors of Agamemnon, and since that time gained wide recognition. He is known as one of the major portrait painters of the 19th century. The Ingres museum in Montauban, founded 1843, received the contents of his studio by bequest. Numerous of his famous paintings and great amount of drawings are exhibiting there. Among Ingres' fine masterpieces are these on our display: The Grande Odalisque (above), The Odalisque, The Girls Montagus, The m-le Riviere, The Source, The Turkish bath.
Paul Cezanne (1839 - 1906)
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| Mont Sainte Victoire, 1882-1885, Post-Impressionism |
Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)
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| Moulin de la Galette, 1876, Oil on Canvas |
At the table first at the right some Renoir's friends are depicted: Norbert Goeneutte, Frank Lamy and George Riviere. The girl on the front plan (in the striped dress) is thought to be Estelle, the younger sister of Renoir's model, Jeanne. The girl in the pink dress is another of artist's model Margot. She is dancing with the painter Cardenas.
Renoir painted some other versions of the Moulin de la Galette. A painting smaller than that one in the Louvre is now in the John Hay Whitney collection in the USA; a small design is now in the Ordrupgard Museum in Denmark. It is a matter of some doubt up to now which canvas was painted on the spot in the Moulin de la Galette cafe. If it was the Louvre largest canvas, it would in any case have been worked and finished in the artist's studio in Paris.
Claude Monet (1840–1926)
Undoubtedly one of the most famous french artists of all, and claimed to be the founder of Impressionism. Monet was born in Paris but moved to Normandy with his family in 1845. He spent his later years in Normamdy but also spent time in London and Holland.
In 1890 Monet purchased his home in Giverny where he spent the remaining years of his life.
Monet was particularly interested in the effect of light and would paint the same scene in different lighting conditions or times of the day. For example, he painted around 20 versions of the Rouen Cathedral from dawn . Water Lilies (above) was a series of approximately 250 oil paintings by Monet during the French Impressionist period. The paintings depict Monet's flower garden in Givenchy, France, and were the main focus of Monet's artistic production during the last thirty years of his life. Many of the works were painted while Monet suffered from cataracts.
Henri Matisse (1869-1954)Matisse was one of the most important famous french artists of the 20th century. He's also my favorite!
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Woman with a Hat, 1905, Oil on Canvas, Fauvism
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He had a long and varied artistic career, painting in different styles ranging from impressionist to abstract.
His paintings are known for their vivid, sensual colours; some of his most striking paintings were completed when he spent time on the French Riviera.
Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. Although he was initially labelled a Fauve (wild beast), by the 1920s he was increasingly hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. His mastery of the expressive language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art.
Georges Braque (1882 –1963)
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| Fruitdish and Glass, 1912, papier colle |
Braque's paintings of 1908–1913 reflected his new interest in geometry and simultaneous perspective. He conducted an intense study of the effects of light and perspective and the technical means that painters use to represent these effects, seeming to question the most standard of artistic conventions. In his village scenes, for example, Braque frequently reduced an architectural structure to a geometric form approximating a cube, yet rendered its shading so that it looked both flat and three-dimensional by fragmenting the image.
Beginning during 1909, Braque began to work closely with Pablo Picasso, who had been developing a similar style of painting. At the time Pablo Picasso was influenced by Gauguin, Cézanne, African Tribal Masks, and Iberian sculpture, while Braque was interested mainly in developing Cézanne's ideas of multiple perspectives. A comparison of the works of Picasso and Braque during 1908 reveals that the effect of his encounter with Picasso was more to accelerate and intensify Braque’s exploration of Cézanne’s ideas, rather than to divert his thinking in any essential way. The invention of Cubism was a joint effort between Picasso and Braque, then residents of Montmartre, Paris. These artists were the style's main innovators. After meeting in October or November 1907, Braque and Picasso, in particular, began working on the development of Cubism in 1908. Both artists produced paintings of monochromatic color and complex patterns of faceted form, now termed Analytic Cubism.
A decisive time of its development occurred during the summer of 1911 when Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso painted side by side in Céret in the French Pyrenees, each artist producing paintings that are difficult—sometimes virtually impossible—to distinguish from those of the other. In 1912, they began to experiment with collage and papier collé (above).
