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[Murillo, Gerardo]

(b Guadalajara, Oct 3, 1875; d Mexico City, Aug 14, 1964).

Mexican painter, printmaker, writer, theorist, volcanologist, and politician. Murillo first studied art in his native Guadalajara with the painter Félix Bernardelli (1866–1905). Murillo relocated to Mexico City in 1896, studying briefly at the Academia de San Carlos, before securing support from the government to continue his education in Europe. He stopped briefly in Paris in 1897 before moving on to Rome and beginning his studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti and the Real Academia de España. Murillo’s encounters with European art had a profound impact on him, particularly Impressionism. He also achieved a measure of success on the European art scene, and his Self-portrait (1899; priv. col.) was awarded the silver medal at the Paris Salon. During his six-year stay Murillo also became absorbed by French and Italian socialist political theory.

Murillo returned to Mexico in 1904, joining the staff of the Academia de San Carlos, where he became an agitator for reform, clashing with the school’s administration over teaching methods and becoming a hero to students, among them José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. The debates culminated in the student strike of ...

(b Castres, Tarn, Nov 15, 1813; d Paris, Jan 17, 1882).

French writer, arts administrator and engraver. The younger brother of the journalist and politician Louis Blanc, he settled in Paris around 1830 to study engraving under Luigi Calamatta and Paolo Mercuri (1804–84). He engraved a series of portraits in the 1830s of famous contemporary figures such as François-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot and the composer and conductor Philippe Musard. However, his interest lay principally in art criticism: between 1836 and 1840 he wrote reviews of the Salons and articles on art for journals such as Bon Sens and Le Progrès and also contributed to Courrier français, L’Artiste and Journal de Rouen. By this time he had already joined the Republican opposition to Louis-Philippe and was running Propagateur de l’Aube.

Blanc’s experience as an art critic and his support for the Republican–Socialist cause, as well as the protection of his elder brother (who became a member of the provisional government after the Revolution of ...

(Heinrich)

(b Copenhagen, May 23, 1834; d Feb 22, 1890).

Danish painter and etcher. He studied under Wilhelm Marstrand at the Kunstakademi in Copenhagen. His early work includes genre scenes, prompted by the art historian Niels Laurits Andreas Høyen, who called for painting representing the everyday life of the people. Bloch depicted farm life, as in a Boy Waking a Girl with a Feather (1856), and the life of the fishermen, as in Fisher Families Awaiting the Return of the Men in an Impending Storm (1858; both Copenhagen, Hirschsprungske Saml.). From 1859 to 1866 Bloch lived in Italy, and this stay provided him with a rich source on his return, as in such humorous scenes of daily life as a Monk with Toothache (1871; untraced; see Magnussen, p. 66).

Bloch’s stay in Italy was particularly important for his history painting. He was influenced by contemporary examples of the genre, and he produced large-scale historical works there. He achieved his greatest success when ...

(b Paris, Feb 11, 1830; d Parays, Tarn-et-Garonne, June 3, 1890).

French critic, collector and etcher. He studied drawing and painting before becoming art critic of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1859. His extensive articles examined such issues as the etching revival (see Etching, §II, 4), modernization of the industrial arts, the cult of Japonisme and Impressionism. With his notices in the newspaper Le Rappel (1869–71) and the avant-garde journal La Renaissance littéraire et artistique (1871–2), the periodical of the emerging Symbolist poets, Burty passionately espoused the taste for Japanese art and culture and coined the term Japonisme in 1872. His apartment, which contained a vast collection of Japanese works of art, attracted many collectors also fascinated by Japan, including Edmond de Goncourt, Félix Bracquemond and Edgar Degas. Burty’s meetings and his collection and staunch advocacy of Japonisme influenced many, including his Impressionist friends, in whose compositions the subtle assimilation of Japanese print design is evident. The marriage of Burty’s daughter Madeleine to the entrepreneur ...

[il Sordino]

(b Bologna, Feb 23, 1740; d Bologna, May 5, 1815).

Italian painter, biographer, draughtsman and engraver. He was a pupil of Giuseppe Varotti (1715–80). While a student at the Accademia Clementina, Bologna, he received two awards, including the Premio Marsili for the Sacrifice of Noah (1758; Bologna, Accad. B.A. & Liceo A.). He pursued literary interests throughout his life and became a member of the avant-garde Accademia Letteraria degli ‘Ingomiti’ in Bologna in 1763. His early paintings, notably the St Francis de Sales (1764; Bologna, Ospizio dei Preti), continue the strict classical strain within the Bolognese figurative tradition; they show the influences of Ercole Graziani, Marc Antonio Franceschini and Donato Creti. Calvi primarily painted sacred subjects, receiving numerous, mainly local, commissions. From about 1770 onwards many pictures, including his superb Self-portrait (1770; Bologna, Pin. N.), became increasingly austere and Raphaelesque in both style and design, anticipating 19th-century Bolognese Neo-classicism. In 1766 he frescoed an Assumption of the Virgin...

(b Stevenage, Jan 16, 1872; d Vence, France, July 29, 1966).

English theatre director, designer, theorist, printmaker and typographer. He was one of the great, if controversial, innovators of the modern theatre movement. The son of the actress Ellen Terry and the architect Edward William Godwin, Craig was born into a strong theatrical tradition. He abandoned a promising career as an actor with Henry Irving’s Lyceum Company in 1897 to concentrate on directing and developing ideas about ‘the theatre of the future’. Inspired by Hubert von Herkomer’s scenic experiments with auditorium lighting and three-dimensional scenery in productions at the Bushey Art School, Herts, Craig exchanged the conventions of realistic scenery for a suggestive, abstract interplay of form, light, movement and music. This new total theatre drew on the imagination to create an architectonic vision of choreographic movement, colour harmony, visual simplicity and atmospheric effect united under the sole control of a single artist. Influenced by his relationship with the dancer Isadora Duncan, he also proposed a concept of the rhythms and movements in nature acting as the vehicle for an emotional and aesthetic experience....

(b Paris, May 7, 1869; d Paris, Nov 9, 1927).

French collector, writer and etcher. He began to collect prints at the age of 13 and rapidly established a reputation as a connoisseur and expert, particularly in the field of modern prints. His principal work is the 31-volume series Le Peintre-graveur illustré (Paris, 1906–30); his other publications include works on 19th- and 20th-century prints and c. 500 auction-room catalogues. His own etchings were exhibited at the Salons of 1888 and 1897, and he was an officer of the Société des Peintres-graveurs Français and the Société pour l’Etude de la Gravure Française. His first print collection was sold at auction in 1890, the second in Paris, 13–15 June 1928, comprising 404 lots of modern prints.

(b Granville, Nov 25, 1870; d Paris, Nov 13, 1943).

French painter, designer, printmaker and theorist. Although born in Normandy, Denis lived throughout his life in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, just west of Paris. He attended the Lycée Condorcet, Paris, where he met many of his future artistic contemporaries, then studied art simultaneously at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and at the Académie Julian (1888–90). Through fellow student Paul Sérusier, in 1888 he learnt of the innovative stylistic discoveries made that summer in Pont-Aven by Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard. With Sérusier and a number of like-minded contemporaries at the Académie Julian—Pierre Bonnard, Paul Ranson, Henri-Gabriel Ibels and others—Denis found himself fundamentally opposed to the naturalism recommended by his academic teachers. They formed the Nabis, a secret artistic brotherhood dedicated to a form of pictorial Symbolism based loosely on the synthetic innovations of Gauguin and Bernard. Denis’s first article, ‘Définition du néo-traditionnisme’, published in Art et critique in 1890 (and republished in ...

Belgian, 19th – 20th century, male.

Born 1863, in Brussels.

Painter, draughtsman, lithographer. Portraits.

Jules Dujardin was primarily an art historian and critic. He exhibited Portrait of a Child and Portrait of Mrs J.D.J. at the 1910 Brussels Exhibition. He also published a series of lithographs entitled ...

American, 19th – 20th century, male.

Born 9 November 1872, in Cincinnati (Ohio); died 1961.

Painter, draughtsman, lithographer, art theorist. Figures, landscapes, winter landscapes.

Edward Eisenlohr was a pupil of Gustav Schönleber at the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts. He then became a teacher in America. He was also a lecturer, art theorist and writer of several works: ...

French, 19th century, male.

Born 1 November 1806, in Lyons; died August 1887, in Lyons.

Engraver.

Son of a Lyons librarian; studied theory and practice at the École des Beaux-Arts in that city in 1833 and went on to exhibit drawings and etchings of Lyons and the surrounding region ...

(b Paris, March 25, 1813; d Montigny-lès-Corneilles, nr Paris, Jan 16, 1880).

French painter, writer and lithographer. He was given his first art lesson by his uncle, Nicolas-Auguste Hesse, in Paris, then moved to the studio of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. According to Auvray in the Dictionnaire général, he also studied with the sculptor Denys Foyatier. Like a number of Ingres’s pupils, Galimard was involved in decorating the newly built or newly restored churches of the July Monarchy and the Second Empire. At his first Salon in 1835 he exhibited Three Marys at the Tomb, a Châtelaine of the 15th Century and a portrait of his cousin, Mme Lefèvre (all untraced). The following year he exhibited one of his first attempts at glass painting, The Queen of the Angels (broken by a gust of wind during the exhibition), and a painting, Liberty Leaning on Christ Flanked by the Apostles James and John (untraced), a subject indicating sympathy with the social ideology of Charles Fourier or Saint-Simon. In ...

(b Paris, Dec 8, 1881; d Avignon, June 23, 1953).

French painter, printmaker and writer. He grew up in Courbevoie, a suburb of Paris, and as a student at the Collège Chaptal became interested in theatre and painting. At 19, his father put him to work in the family interior design and fabric business, an experience that contributed to a lifelong respect for skilled workmanship. The first paintings he exhibited, at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1902, were Impressionist in character, but the work accepted within two years at the Salon d’Automne showed a shift to social themes, a tendency that accelerated until 1908. Compulsory military service from 1903 to 1905 thrust him into the company of working-class people, arousing a permanent sense of solidarity with their aspirations and needs. The results were immediately apparent in the Association Ernest Renan, which he helped to establish in 1905, a kind of popular university with secular and socialist aims. He was also one of the founders of a community of intellectuals based near Paris, the ...

French family of writers, critics, printmakers, painters and collectors. Edmond de Goncourt (b Nancy, 26 May 1822; d Champrosay, 16 July 1896) and his brother Jules de Goncourt (b Paris, 17 Dec 1830; d Paris, 20 June 1870) were born into a minor aristocratic family. Their father, Marc-Pierre Huot de Goncourt, died in 1834, and after the death of their mother, Annette-Cécile Guérin, in 1848 they were sufficiently well-off to set up as painters. Jules was notably talented, his etchings being published in 1876. However, the Goncourts soon turned to literature, in which, in a remarkable collaboration that lasted until the death of Jules in 1870, they made their name, first as journalists and historians, and a little later as novelists and art critics. Their finest and best-known works, such as L’Art du XVIIIe siècle (published in 12 fascicles between 1859 and 1875) and Manette Salomon...

(b Paris, May 15, 1786; d Paris, Feb 16, 1857).

French architect, writer and engraver. He was a pupil of Jean-Antoine Alavoine and Jean-Nicolas Huyot at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and began his career as a vérificateur (1811–15) in the Direction des Travaux Publics from its creation in 1811, subsequently becoming Chef de la Révision (1815–19). He was sous-inspecteur for the restoration (1819–20) of the Porte St Martin, Paris, and then inspecteur of the Bourse (1821–6) and architect of the reserve granary (1827–31). At the same time he worked (1819–33) for the Conseil des Bâtiments Civils, serving as its secretary from 1824 to 1831. In 1835 he was involved in important work on several cathedrals on behalf of the Ministère des Cultes, including the choir at Nantes and rebuilding the nave roof at Chartres, following a fire in 1836. Gourlier was also an engraver and exhibited at the Salon many architectural designs, which were published in ...

(b Lausanne, May 25, 1841; d Paris, Oct 23, 1917).

French illustrator, decorative artist and printmaker of Swiss birth. Before arriving in Paris in the autumn of 1871, Grasset had been apprenticed to an architect, attended the Polytechnic in Zurich and travelled to Egypt. In Paris he found employment as a fabric designer and graphic ornamentalist, which culminated in his first important project, the illustrations for Histoire des quatre fils Aymon (1883). Grasset worked in collaboration with Charles Gillot, the inventor of photo-relief printing and an influential collector of Oriental and decorative arts, in the production of this major work of Art Nouveau book design and of colour photomechanical illustration. Grasset used a combination of medieval and Near Eastern decorative motifs to frame and embellish his illustrations, but most importantly he integrated text and imagery in an innovative manner which has had a lasting influence on book illustration.

In 1881 he was commissioned by Rodolphe Salis to design furnishing in a medieval style for the latter’s new Chat Noir cabaret in Montmartre. This project brought him in direct contact with Montmartre avant-garde artists such as Adolphe Willette, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, Henri Rivière and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Grasset’s numerous posters include ...

(b London, Dec 15, 1875; d Tonbridge, Jan 20, 1952).

English painter, printmaker, art historian and museum curator. Educated at St Paul’s School, London, and Trinity College, Cambridge, he came from a family closely associated with the arts, one of his uncles being John Pettie. At Cambridge, Hardie studied etching under Frank Short (1857–1945), and he developed into an able etcher and watercolour painter (examples Oxford, Ashmolean); from 1908 he was a regular exhibitor in London at the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers and the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours. In 1898 Hardie was appointed to an assistant post at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; in 1914 he was made Assistant Keeper, and from 1921 until his retirement in 1935 he served as Keeper in the Print Department. Under his direction the Department was extended to include the collection and study of posters and of various aspects of theatre arts. Hardie was a prolific writer, celebrating and recording all the arts with which he was for so long connected, and he produced books and pamphlets on numerous individuals, including Samuel Palmer, whose reputation had fallen into total neglect. He also wrote on posters and coloured books and produced an edition of ...

German, 19th century, male.

Born 22 May 1811; died 1903, in Munich.

Draughtsman, engraver.

He was the pupil of Georg Schneider and Hubert Muller. As a celebrated art historian, he was summoned by Maximilian II, Duke of Bavaria, to curate his collections.

British, 19th – 20th century, male.

Born 11 November 1868, in Preston; died 7 December 1936, in London.

Painter, engraver, watercolourist, art historian. Landscapes.

Charles Holmes worked in publishing and was mainly self-taught. He began exhibiting with the New English Art Club in 1900 and became a member in ...

(b Amsterdam, Dec 4, 1868; d Bloemendaal, Dec 31, 1938).

Dutch painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer and stained-glass artist. He trained at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (1886–90), under the directorship of August Allebé. Having initially painted and drawn Impressionistic landscapes, he started working in the ’t Gooi region in 1892, where, influenced by Vincent van Gogh and Jan Toorop, he made a number of Symbolist drawings and lithographs. In 1896 he married the Dutch writer Henriette van der Schalk. They both devoted themselves to the recently founded Sociaal Democratische Arbeiders Partij. In the years up to c. 1900 Holst produced among other things a series of lithographs of political cartoons with socialist content, as well as serene landscapes and paintings of girls from the village of Huizen. His allegorical murals (1902; in situ), on topics such as ‘Industry’ or ‘Commerce’, in the new Koopmansbeurs in Amsterdam by H. P. Berlage (1876–1903), marked an important point in his career as his first opportunity to construct a monumental piece of work. Partly inspired by the murals in the town hall at ’s Hertogenbosch by Antoon Derkinderen, he developed a tight, stylized type of design, which he believed to be ideal for visually representing idealistic and exalted thoughts. In his murals (...