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(b Ghent, Jan 9, 1866; d Ghent, June 9, 1922).

Belgian painter and etcher . The son of a successful mill-owner and an excellent musician, he was a pupil and friend of Gustave Den Duyts (1850–97), and later, at the Ghent Académie, of Jean Delvin (1853–1922). He was involved in the exhibiting society L’Essor in Brussels as well as the triennial salons held in Brussels, Antwerp and Ghent in rotation. Among his earliest important works are The Scheldt at Dendermonde (1887; Ghent, Mus. S. Kst.), which he painted beside Isidore Meyers (1836–1917) and Franz Courtens in a Realist style characteristic of the Dendermonde school. In 1889–90 he attended the studio of Alfred Roll in Paris, where he met Jacques-Emile Blanche and Charles Cottet, and became particularly closely associated with Frits Thaulow, Emile-René Ménard and Edmond Aman-Jean. He exhibited regularly at the Salon in Paris. Although Baertsoen is considered to be one of the first Belgian ...

(b Salem, MA, March 24, 1862; d Salem, Nov 15, 1951).

American painter, etcher and teacher. Benson attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 1880 to 1883 as a student of Otto Grundmann (1844–90) and Frederick Crowninshield (1845–1918). In 1883 he travelled with his fellow student and lifelong friend Edmund C(harles) Tarbell to Paris, where they both studied at the Académie Julian for three years with Gustave(-Clarence-Rodolphe) Boulanger and Jules(-Joseph) Lefebvre. Benson travelled with Tarbell to Italy in 1884 and to Italy, Belgium, Germany and Brittany the following year. When he returned home, Benson became an instructor at the Portland (ME) School of Art, and after his marriage to Ellen Perry Peirson in 1888 he settled in Salem, MA. Benson taught with Tarbell at the Museum School in Boston from 1889 until their resignation over policy differences in 1913. Benson rejoined the staff the next year and taught intermittently as a visiting instructor until ...

(Polhill)

(b Hove, Aug 5, 1865; d London, July 8, 1925).

English painter and lithographer. He studied at the Westminster School of Art and in Paris. In 1890–91, having encountered Paul Sérusier at the Académie Julian in Paris, he made his first visit to Brittany, where he worked with the Pont-Aven group; he also developed an interest in lithography. After contact with Renoir, Bevan made a second visit to Brittany in 1893–4, when he met and was influenced by Gauguin. From the early 1900s Bevan adopted a divisionist or pointillist style in paintings that often depicted London street scenes and horse trading, as in Horse Sale at the Barbican (1913; London, Tate), and landscapes painted on summer holidays in Devon and Cornwall, of which Green Devon (1919; Plymouth, City Mus. & A.G.) is a striking example. In the last years of his life his style changed, the paint becoming thicker and more textural, with a new attention to the juxtaposition of masses. At times he approached a Cubist geometry of form, for example in rural scenes such as ...

(b Fontenay-aux-Roses, nr Paris, Oct 3, 1867; d Le Cannet, Jan 27, 1947).

French painter, printmaker and photographer. He is known particularly for the decorative qualities of his paintings and his individual use of colour. During his life he was associated with other artists, Edouard Vuillard being a good friend, and he was a member of the Nabis.

Bonnard spent some of his childhood at Grand-Lemps in the Isère, where his family owned a house surrounded by a large park. There was a farm adjoining the house, and from an early age he developed a love of nature and animals. After obtaining the baccalauréat at 18, he enrolled in the Law faculty in order to please his father, who wanted him to have a steady job. He graduated when he was 21, and he was sworn in as a barrister in 1889. In the meantime he was already drawing and painting, having enrolled at the Académie Julian, Paris, in 1887. In an attractive ...

Russian, 19th – 20th century, male.

Born2 April 1870, in Saratov; died 26 October 1905, in Tarusa.

Painter, engraver, ceramic designer. Painting, portraits, landscapes. Impressionism/Post-impressionism, Symbolism.

Saratov Society of Lovers of the Fine Arts, Moscow Association of Artists, Union of Russian Artists.

Viktor Borisov-Musatov began his artistic training in the 1890s at the Saratov Society of Lovers of the Fine Arts. He then spent time in both Moscow and St Petersburg, first at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (...

(b Brussels, June 13, 1884; d Dilbeek, Jan 9, 1953).

Belgian painter and printmaker. He was apprenticed to an engraver and lithographer and with these skills entered the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (1897). Soon, however, he transferred to painting and between 1900 and 1906 studied under Guillaume Van Strydonck (1861–1937), Isidore Verheyden and Jean Delville. In 1907 he shared a studio with Rik Wouters and befriended the future Brabant Fauvists, among whom was Auguste Oleffe. He joined the circle known as L’Effort and in 1912 participated in a group exhibition of the Bleus de la G.G.G. (Galerie Georges Giroux in Brussels) with Constant Permeke, Léon Spilliaert, Edgard Tytgat and Wouters. For several years common themes, a bold use of colour and the influence of Cézanne united Brusselmans even more closely with Oleffe, Wouters and Ferdinand Schirren. He had his first one-man show in Antwerp at the Galerie Breckpot in 1921. Three years later he decided to stay in Dilbeek, exhibited at the Expressionist Galerie Le Centaure and became friendly with Louis Thévenet. A founder of the ...

(b Cuisery, Saône-et-Loire, April 24, 1862; d Saulieu, Côte d’Or, Oct 29, 1928).

French painter, illustrator and printmaker. He was taught by his father, Victor Bussière, a decorative painter in Mâcon. He went to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lyon and then to Paris, where he studied in the atelier of Alexandre Cabanel. During further studies under Puvis de Chavannes, he came into contact with Gustave Moreau. Symbolist paintings followed, drawing on French legend, as in the Song of Roland (exh. Salon 1892), and Nordic myth (Valkyries, exh. Salon 1894); he exhibited at the Symbolist Salon de la Rose+Croix, 1893–5. In 1905 he rented a studio at Grez-sur-Loing on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau. Paintings such as the Rhine Maidens (1906; Mâcon, Mus. Mun. Ursulines) drew on observations of the forest, populating its streams with adolescent water nymphs. Such studies of the female nude—a lifelong speciality of Bussière’s—uphold a rigorous draughtsmanship that is yet not devoid of sensuality....

French, 19th century, male.

Born 17 October 1810, in Paris; died 3 October 1880, in Honfleur.

Painter, draughtsman, engraver. Figures, portraits, genre scenes, interiors with figures, landscapes with figures, landscapes, harbour scenes, still-lifes.

Impressionist group. Honfleur (or St-Siméon) School.

Adolphe-Félix Cals was born into a humble family, but his parents did everything in their power to ensure that their reserved and rather frail son might be spared the rigours of manual labour. In light of the family's circumstances, it was thought best that Félix-Adophe be apprenticed to the engraver Anselin, a close friend of the Cals family. When Anselin died suddenly, Félix-Adolphe continued to learn his craft, first under the engraver Ponce (with whom he worked for three years), then under Bosc, who taught him cold-chisel engraving. Cals finally entered Cogniet's atelier at the École des Beaux-Arts, where it is recorded that Cogniet and his new pupil did not see eye to eye: the paternalistic Cogniet advised Cals to work in a 'popular' mode, but Félix-Adolphe declined, arguing that he was prepared to assume the consequences of developing a more personal style. Cogniet is then reputed to have told him he was jeopardizing his career, admonishing Cals that he was simply 'another Corot'; in other words, that he [Cogniet] washed his hands of him. Despite this withdrawal of official support, Cals went his own way. He married, but the marriage did not last....

(b Gournay, Seine-et-Oise, Jan 27, 1849; d Paris, March 27, 1906).

French painter and printmaker. The eighth of nine children of a poor insurance salesman, he was brought up in Strasbourg, where he received his initial training in art at the Ecole Municipale de Dessin as part of his apprenticeship in commercial lithography. In 1868, while briefly employed as a lithographer, he visited Paris and was so inspired by the paintings of Rubens in the Louvre that he resolved to become an artist. His studies under Alexandre Cabanel at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts were interrupted by the Franco–Prussian War (1870–71), during which he was taken prisoner. In 1872–3 he worked in the studio of Jules Chéret. In 1878 he participated in the Salon for the first time, but his work went unnoticed. The following year he ended his studies under Cabanel, married and moved briefly to London where he saw and admired the works of Turner. Success eluded him for a number of years after he returned to Paris and he was forced to find occasional employment, usually with printers, until as late as ...

French, 19th century, male.

Born 19 January 1839, in Aix-en-Provence; died 22 October 1906, in Aix-en-Provence.

Painter (including gouache), watercolourist, engraver. Allegorical subjects, figure compositions, portraits, figures, nudes, landscapes with figures,waterscapes, landscapes,seascapes, interiors with figures, still-lifes (including flowers/fruit).

Impressionist group.

Paul Cézanne and his sister Marie were the illegitimate offspring of a liaison between their hatmaker father and one of his employees, Honorine Aubert, whom he finally married in 1844. A third child, Rose, was born in 1854. Marie Cézanne remained unmarried and was a loyal supporter of her brother....

(b Williamsburg, IN, Nov 1, 1849; d New York, Oct 25, 1916).

American painter and printmaker. Chase received his early training in Indianapolis from the portrait painter Barton S. Hays (1826–75). In 1869 he went to New York to study at the National Academy of Design where he exhibited in 1871. That year he joined his family in St Louis, where John Mulvaney (1844–1906) encouraged him to study in Munich. With the support of several local patrons, enabling him to live abroad for the next six years, Chase entered the Königliche Akademie in Munich in 1872. Among his teachers were Alexander von Wagner (1838–1919), Karl Theodor von Piloty and Wilhelm von Diez (1839–1907). Chase also admired the work of Wilhelm Leibl. The school emphasized bravura brushwork, a technique that became integral to Chase’s style, favoured a dark palette and encouraged the study of Old Master painters, particularly Diego Velázquez and Frans Hals. Among Chase’s friends in Munich were the American artists Walter Shirlaw, J. Frank Currier and Frederick Dielman (...

[Delacroix, Henri-Edmond-Joseph]

(b Douai, May 20, 1856; d Saint-Clair, May 16, 1910).

French painter and printmaker. The only surviving child of Alcide Delacroix, a French adventurer and failed businessman, and the British-born Fanny Woollett, he was encouraged as a youth to develop his artistic talent by his father’s cousin, Dr Auguste Soins. He enrolled in 1878 at the Ecoles Académiques de Dessin et d’Architecture in Lille, where he remained for three years under the guidance of Alphonse Colas (1818–87). He then moved to Paris and studied with Emile Dupont-Zipcy (1822–65), also from Douai, whom he listed as his teacher when exhibiting at Salons of the early 1880s. His few extant works from this period are Realist portraits and still-lifes, painted with a heavy touch and sombre palette (example in Douai, Mus. Mun.)

To avoid working under the shadow of his celebrated namesake, Eugène Delacroix, in 1881 he adopted an abbreviated English version of his surname, signing his works ‘Henri Cross’ until around ...

(b Paris, July 19, 1834; d Paris, Sept 27, 1917).

French painter, draughtsman, printmaker, sculptor, pastellist, photographer and collector. He was a founder-member of the Impressionist group and the leader within it of the Realist tendency. He organized several of the group’s exhibitions, but after 1886 he showed his works very rarely and largely withdrew from the Parisian art world. As he was sufficiently wealthy, he was not constricted by the need to sell his work, and even his late pieces retain a vigour and a power to shock that is lacking in the contemporary productions of his Impressionist colleagues.

The eldest son of a Parisian banking family, he originally intended to study law, registering briefly at the Sorbonne’s Faculté de Droit in 1853. He began copying the 15th- and 16th-century Italian works in the Musée du Louvre and in 1854 he entered the studio of Louis Lamothe (1822–69). The training that Lamothe, who had been a pupil of Ingres, transmitted to Degas was very much in the classical tradition; reinforced by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which he attended in ...

originally de Gas

French, 19th – 20th century, male.

Born 19 July 1834, in Paris, France; died 26 September 1917, in Paris.

Painter, pastellist, sculptor, printmaker (monotypes, etchings, aquatints, lithographs), draughtsman, photographer. History painting, figures, nudes, portraits, genre scenes, interiors with figures, sporting subjects.

Japonisme.

Impressionist group.

Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas was born in Paris into a well-to-do banking family. His father, whose family originated from Breton nobility, was born in Naples and his Creole mother, Célestine Musson, was born in New Orleans. She died in 1847 when Degas was 13 years old. His grandfather (who had left France at the time of the French Revolution) and his father always signed their names ‘de Gas’, a usage that Edgar continued until about 1870. He only signed works when he sold or exhibited them, and after his death, the executors of his estate stamped red signatures on all the works in his studio. Degas rarely dated his works....

(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 ...

French, 20th century, male.

Born 24 November 1892, in Gresswiller.

Painter, engraver.

Auguste Dubois attended the art academy in Munich from 1910 to 1914. His figurative painting was influenced by a traditional Post-Impressionist style. He contributed works to the Salon des Artistes Français and held several solo exhibitions in Strasbourg between ...

(b Ostend, April 13, 1860; d Ostend, Nov 19, 1949).

Belgian painter, printmaker and draughtsman. No single label adequately describes the visionary work produced by Ensor between 1880 and 1900, his most productive period. His pictures from that time have both Symbolist and Realist aspects, and in spite of his dismissal of the Impressionists as ‘superficial daubers’ he was profoundly concerned with the effects of light. His imagery and technical procedures anticipated the colouristic brilliance and violent impact of Fauvism and German Expressionism and the psychological fantasies of Surrealism. Ensor’s most memorable and influential work was almost exclusively produced before 1900 (see The Intrigue, 1890), but he was largely unrecognized before the 1920s in his own country. His work was highly influential in Germany, however: Emil Nolde visited him in 1911, and was influenced by his use of masks; Paul Klee mentions him admiringly in his diaries; Erich Heckel came to see him in the middle of the war and painted his portrait (...

(b Thann, Alsace, Nov 28, 1863; d Brest, Jan 11, 1928).

French painter and engraver. He studied in Paris at the Académie Colarossi. He settled in Brittany in 1889, where he was associated with Gauguin and his circle at Pont-Aven, but he remained a mystic and a recluse. The Breton setting, with its stark landscape and devout peasant inhabitants, provided fertile ground for the development of Filiger’s mystical imagery and deliberate archaisms. Filiger’s friend, the painter Emile Bernard, characterized Filiger’s style as an amalgam of Byzantine and Breton popular art forms. The hieratic, geometric quality and the expressionless faces in his gouaches of sacred subjects such as Virgin and Child (1892; New York, A. G. Altschul priv. col., see 1979–80 exh. cat., p. 71) reveal Filiger’s love of early Italian painting and the Byzantine tradition. Evident too in the heavy outlines and flat colours of his work are the cloisonnism of the Pont-Aven school and the influence of Breton and Epinal popular prints. Filiger’s landscapes, such as ...

American, 20th century, female.

Born 18 May 1938, in Boston.

Painter, watercolourist, graphic artist, printmaker. Still-lifes, figures, landscapes.

Janet Fish’s grandfather, Clark Voorhees, was an American Impressionist painter, her father was an art history teacher, and her mother, Florence Whistler Fish, was a sculptor and ceramicist. Fish studied sculpture and printmaking at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, obtaining a BA in 1960; at Yale University School of Art and Architecture, in New Haven (1961–1963), receiving a BFA and an MFA; and at Skowhegan School of Art, Maine (summer 1962). She has taught at the School of Visual Arts, New York; Skowhegan School of Art; Institute of Fine Arts, Santa Fe; Vermont Studio Center, Johnston; and has held the Albert Dorne visiting professorship at the University of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Fish lives in New York City and near Rutland, Vermont.

Fish specialises in realistic still-life paintings, most often including glass items which allow for the depiction of chromatic and light effects. She always works from life, favours large-scale formats, and explores formal issues of arrangement and shape. In the 1960s, Fish painted enlarged fruit and vegetables and, by ...