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(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....

(b Utica, NY, Sept 26, 1862; d Florence, Oct 24, 1928).

American painter and illustrator. He first trained as an architectural draughtsman at the Academy of Design, Chicago (1878). After studying briefly at the Art Institute of Chicago, he went to New York, where he attended the Gotham School and the Art Students League (1886–8). By 1887 he was working as an illustrator for Century magazine. A realist landscape painter in the 19th-century academic tradition, he was influenced by the painters of the Hudson River school and particularly by the luminist, dream-like landscapes of George Inness.

Around 1900 Davies’s paintings became Symbolist in style, with the introduction of mystical nude figures in the landscape, as in Meeting in the Forest (1900; Montclair, NJ, A. Mus.) and Autumn—Enchanted Salutation (1907; Philadelphia, PA, Mus. A.). Themes combining Classical figures and landscape, which evolved in a mythical classicist style reminiscent of the work of Puvis de Chavannes, typified Davies’s work throughout his career. Increasingly drawn to ancient art and Greco-Roman civilization, he eventually identified the archaic with modernism, for example in ...

(b Lille, Feb 8, 1861; d Ghent, Jan 7, 1938).

Belgian painter, sculptor, illustrator, and stage designer. He studied music at the Koninklijk Muziekconservatorium and sculpture at the Gewerbeschule, Ghent (after 1877). He visited Paris in 1887 and Italy in 1890, with a grant from the city of Ghent. He was deeply impressed by the masters of the Quattrocento, and was encouraged to take up painting after meeting Constantin Meunier (1891). He painted Symbolist scenes and was influenced by Art Nouveau. After exhibiting his work with Les XX in Brussels (1893), he made decorative panels for Oostakker Castle.

As an illustrator Doudelet worked on Pol De Mont’s Van Jezus (Antwerp, 1897) and books by Maurice Maeterlinck, for example Douze chansons (Paris, 1896) and Pelléas et Mélisande (Brussels, 1892 or 1922). He illustrated the periodicals Réveil (1895–1896), De Vlaamsche school, Mercure de France, Pan, L’Eroica, Nuovo Convito, De Vlaamsche School, Woord en beeld...

French, 19th – 20th century, male.

Born 23 October 1852, in Rheims; died 11 July 1931, in Paris.

Painter (gouache), watercolourist, pastellist, engraver, lithographer, draughtsman, illustrator, caricaturist, poster artist. Figure compositions, figures.

Impressionist group.

Jean Forain was the son of a painter and decorator and was apprenticed to a visiting card engraver. He studied briefly under Gérôme and Carpeaux at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and regularly visited the Louvre, where he copied works by the masters. It is said that for a time he made a precarious living by selling small drawings in the style of Grévin. He went on to collaborate on various publications as a draughtsman and columnist, starting in 1876 on ...

(b Reims, Oct 23, 1852; d Paris, July 11, 1931).

French painter, printmaker and illustrator. Around 1860 he moved with his family to Paris, where he was taught by Jacquesson de la Chevreuse (1839–1903), Jean Baptiste Carpeaux and André Gill. He participated in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) and was a friend of the poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud; the latter is the presumed subject of a portrait (1874; priv. col., see 1982 exh. cat., no. 1) that may have influenced Manet’s late portrait of Mallarmé (1876; Paris, Louvre). Forain first met Manet through his friendship with Degas in the early 1870s at the salon of Nina de Callias. He continued to associate with Manet, meeting the group of young Impressionists at the Café Guerbois and the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes. In 1878 Forain painted a small gouache, Café Scene (New York, Brooklyn Mus.), which probably influenced Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère (...

(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 (...

(b Paris, Nov 30, 1867; d Paris, Feb 1936).

French printmaker, illustrator and painter. He became one of the original members of the Nabis as an art student at the Académie Julian, Paris, in 1888–9. He joined in the early group ventures such as printmaking, puppet plays and theatre design, but he was never involved with the more esoteric Symbolist aspirations of some of the group’s leading members. He first exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1891 and participated in the Nabis’s group shows at Louis Le Barc de Boutteville’s gallery. With Edouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis, he was quick to attract public attention, the nature of his work earning him the sobriquet ‘le Nabi journaliste’. His art was inspired by contemporary life, with subjects drawn from the spectacle of modern Paris, particularly from the café, circus and boxing ring. Both in subject and technique he can be likened to such artists as Adolphe Willette, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, and his work shares many characteristics with theirs, notably an economy of line and a simplicity of shapes and colours. Such features derived in Ibels’s case from the art of Honoré Daumier, Japanese printmakers and Paul Gauguin and the Pont-Aven group....

(b nr Termonde, Sept 12, 1858; d Brussels, Nov 12, 1921).

Belgian painter, illustrator, sculptor, designer, photographer and writer. He was one of the foremost Symbolist artists and active supporters of avant-garde art in late 19th-century Belgium. His wealthy family lived in Bruges from 1859 to 1864, moved to Brussels in 1865, where Khnopff remained until his death, and spent their summers at a country home in Fosset, in the Ardennes. Fosset inspired numerous landscapes that owe a strong debt to Barbizon-style realism (see 1979 cat. rais., p. 210), which dominated advanced Belgian painting in the late 1870s. Khnopff abandoned law school in 1875, and, turning to literature and art, he studied with Xavier Mellery at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. During visits to Paris (1877–80) he admired the work of Ingres and was especially attracted to the painterly art of Rubens, Rembrandt, the Venetian Renaissance and particularly Delacroix. At the Exposition Universelle of 1878 in Paris he discovered Gustave Moreau and Edward Burne-Jones, both of whom indelibly influenced his art. He studied with ...

(b Narbonne, 1875; d Fontenay-aux-Roses, nr Paris, 1931).

French painter, watercolourist and illustrator. Laprade had good basic training, first at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts at Montauban and later at the Académie Carrière in Paris. He exhibited first at the Salon des Indépendants in 1901 and later showed his work regularly at the Salon d’Automne and at the Salon des Tuileries. A Post-Impressionist who looked above all to the example of Cézanne, he was also a great admirer of the work of 18th-century French painters, and it is their example that accounts for his loose, fluid brushstrokes, subdued colours, delicacy and tendency to sentimentality. He travelled often to Italy, making three prolonged visits there from 1908 to 1914, and underwent the influence of Italian artists such as Giovanni Fattori and Filippo Carcano. In his pictures he treated both intimiste interiors and melancholic landscapes, for example The Corn (1919; Paris, Pompidou) and the watercolour Les Alyscamps (Montpellier, Mus. Fabre). He also produced a number of suggestive views of French cities, for example ...

(b Champsecret, Orne, July 23, 1862; d Paris, May 24, 1934).

French painter, illustrator, and sculptor. He went to Paris in 1878 to study under the painter Emile Bin until 1885, when he entered the atelier of Alexandre Cabanel. From 1883 onwards, he exhibited landscapes, genre scenes, and portraits (those of women and children being particularly popular) in oil and pastel at the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français.

Léandre also taught drawing until 1897. His fame was due chiefly to the vast number of Symbolist drawings he produced for newspapers and magazines. His first post was as a caricaturist for Le Chat noir, and he later worked for Le Journal, Le Figaro, Le Gaulois, and Le Journal amusant; his most important work was for Le Rire, for which he often illustrated the front page. In 1907 he helped to found the Société des Artistes Humoristes, publishing a magazine, Les Humoristes, in 1910.

Léandre produced posters for the nightclubs of Montmartre, artists’ balls, and chansonniers’ tours, and for the first two exhibitions of the Société des Peintres Lithographes. He illustrated many literary works, of which the most famous was Gustave Flaubert’s ...

(b Banyuls-sur-Mer, Oct 8, 1861; d Perpignan, Sept 24, 1944).

French sculptor, painter, designer and illustrator. He began his career as a painter and tapestry designer, but after c. 1900 devoted himself to three-dimensional work, becoming one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century. He concentrated almost exclusively on the nude female figure in the round, consciously wishing to strip form of all literary associations and architectural context. Although inspired by the Classical tradition of Greek and Roman sculpture, his figures have all the elemental sensuousness and dignity associated with the Mediterranean peasant.

Maillol first intended to become a painter and went to Paris in 1881, where he lived in extreme poverty. Three years later the Ecole des Beaux-Arts finally accepted him as a pupil, where he began studies under Alexandre Cabanel. He found the teaching there discouraging and his early painted work was more strongly influenced by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Paul Gauguin, and the Nabis group which he joined around ...

(b Chazelles-sur-Lyon, 1855; d Paris, May 7, 1917).

French painter and illustrator. On 9 November 1872 he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lyon where he worked with the engraver J.-B. Danguin (1823–94) and on 19 March 1877 he was enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and joined Henri Lehmann’s studio, where he befriended Seurat. In 1879 he sent some drawings to the Salon and in the following year two paintings, Hunting and Fishing (untraced). Shortly afterwards he became the pupil of Puvis de Chavannes, working closely with him for the next ten years. Séon assisted Puvis principally with his murals for the Panthéon in Paris and the great staircase of the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon. In 1884 he won first prize in the competition organized by the municipality of Courbevoie for the decoration of the banqueting halls of the town hall, choosing the theme of The Seasons (executed in 1889). During this period he was appointed drawing-master for the schools of the city of Paris. He believed that ‘art should be instructive’ and interested himself deeply in social problems. In ...