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(b Hamina, Nov 9, 1870; d Stockholm, Nov 26, 1925).

Finnish painter and designer. He was the leading figure in the generation of Finnish Symbolist artists that included Ellen Thesleff. After studying in Finland he travelled to Paris in 1891 and enrolled at the Académie Julian. He remained in Paris almost uninterruptedly until the spring of 1894. He was immediately attracted by the current in contemporary French painting that modelled itself on primitive art, the work of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and the work of Manet at the time of his Olympia (1865; Paris, Mus. d’Orsay). Enckell was also strongly influenced by the literary mysticism of the Soleil d’Or groups and of Joséphin Péladan. He firmly rejected Realism and developed a sculptural and synthetist style, adopting extreme asceticism in his treatment of colour, which was limited almost entirely to various shades of grey, black and ochre.

In the early 1890s Enckell’s preferred subjects were solitary figures, usually nude, androgynous boys (e.g. ...

(b Verviers, Dec 30, 1865; d Woluwe-Saint-Pierre-lez-Bruxelles, 1966).

Belgian painter and designer. He studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels under Jean-François Portaels, and worked with the designer Cir Jacques. His early Symbolist work, influenced by Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949), expresses anguish through its depiction of wild-eyed and deformed figures. He described this as his ‘nightmare period’, exemplified by The Offering (1894; Brussels, Mus. A. Mod.). In 1892 Fabry took part in the first exhibition of the group ‘Pour l’Art’, which he founded with Jean Delville, and in 1893 and 1895 exhibited at the Salons de la Rose+Croix, established by Joséphin Péladan. In the late 1890s he began to work with the Art Nouveau architects Victor Horta and Paul Hankar. At this point his work became more serene and increasingly monumental. He designed the interior of the sculptor Philippe Wolfers’s villa, built by Hankar, and also the interior of Horta’s mansion Aubecq (destr.)

Fabry became drawing teacher at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in ...

British, 19th – 20th century, male.

Active in France from 1895.

Born 1849, in Stuttgart, to English parents; died 1910.

Painter, watercolourist. Portraits, genre scenes, landscapes.

Post-Impressionism, Symbolism.

Louis Welden Hawkins studied with William Bouguereau, Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre at the Académie Julian in Paris; he later settled in Paris and became naturalised French in 1895. He was closely involved with the members of the Symbolist movement, including the painters Eugène Carrière, Puvis de Chavannes, the sculptor Auguste Rodin and the writers Stéphane Mallarmé, Laurent Tailhade, Paul Adam, Jean Lorrain and Robert de Montesquiou, and was at first a Symbolist painter. Subsequently, he began to use Impressionist techniques, striving to bring the two styles together. His portraits are inspired by Pre-Raphaelite work....

(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 ...

Ukrainian, 19th – 20th century, male.

Born 1842, in Mariupol'; died 24 July 1910, in St Petersburg.

Painter. Landscapes.

Symbolism.

Group: Peredvizhniki (Wanderers).

Archip Kuindshi was an impressionist landscape painter who was highly respected in Russia. He taught for many years at the Academy of Fine Art in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) and gave his name to an Art Society in the city. He painted landscapes, which were given a fantastic effect by the use of light. He often painted moonlit scenes....

(b Nantes, Sept 17, 1871; d La Bernerie-en-Retz, Loire-Atlantique, 1954).

French painter. He was a pupil of Jules-Elie Delaunay and Gustave Moreau at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and helped to popularize Symbolism in the 1890s by applying a highly finished academic technique to Symbolist subjects. His best-known paintings, which include Girl with a Peacock (before 1896; Paris, G. Levy priv. col., see Jullian, p. 2) and the Soul of the Forest (c. 1897; Nantes, Mus. B.-A.), are decorative, vaguely religious or allegorical images of beautiful women in medieval dress, influenced by early Italian Renaissance and late English Pre-Raphaelite art. Maxence often enriched the surface of his works with gold or silver foil and gilt plaster relief and mounted them in elaborate frames of his own design. He also painted fashionable portraits such as Woman with an Orchid (1900; Paris, A. Lesieutre priv. col., see 1986 exh. cat., p. 29) and Impressionist landscapes. Though he participated in the avant-garde Salon de la Rose + Croix between ...

(b Amersfoort, March 7, 1872; d New York, Feb 1, 1944).

Dutch painter, theorist, and draughtsman. His work marks the transition at the start of the 20th century from the Hague school and Symbolism to Neo-Impressionism and Cubism. His key position within the international avant-garde is determined by works produced after 1920. He set out his theory in the periodical of Stijl, De, in a series of articles that were summarized in a separate booklet published in Paris in 1920 under the title Le Néo-plasticisme (see Neo-plasticism) by Léonce Rosenberg. The essence of Mondrian’s ideas is that painting, composed of the most fundamental aspects of line and colour, must set an example to the other arts for achieving a society in which art as such has no place but belongs instead to the total realization of ‘beauty’. The representation of the universal, dynamic pulse of life, also expressed in modern jazz and the metropolis, was Mondrian’s point of departure. Even in his lifetime he was regarded as the founder of the most ...

( Vasil’yevna )

(b Wiesbaden, Jan 31, 1870; d Chêne Bougerie, nr Geneva, Dec 27, 1902).

Russian painter, decorative artist and designer . She was a major Symbolist artist in Russia and played a significant role in the revival of folk traditions in Russian art in the late 19th century. She grew up in Moscow and studied (1885–8) under Yelena Polenova and Vasily Polenov as an external student at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Subsequently she joined Yelena Polenova’s group for the study of the historical and archaeological monuments of Moscow and became closely associated with the Abramtsevo group. From 1888 she spent winters in Paris, where she enrolled as a student at the Académie Julian. Her paintings, sometimes consisting of melancholic depictions of decaying mansions in the manner of Viktor Borisov-Musatov, were dominated by decorative landscapes. Always striving to express the synthetic inner vitality of organic life, she concentrated on forest motifs (e.g. The Window and Aspen and Fir Tree (both pokerwork and oil on panel, ...