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[Mokugo; Mokugyo]

(b Edo [now Tokyo], June 21, 1856; d Kyoto, Dec 16, 1907).

Japanese painter . He was the leading Western-style (Yōga; see Japan, §VI, 5, (iv)) landscape painter of the Meiji period (1868–1912) and one of the founder-members of the Meiji Bijutsukai (Meiji Fine Arts Society, established 1889; later absorbed into the Taiheiyō Gakai [Pacific Painting Society]), the first association of Western-style painters in Japan. Asai was born into a samurai family retained by the Sakura clan. He was originally trained in Japanese bird-and-flower painting (kachōga) in the literati (Nanga or Bunjinga) style, but turned later to oil painting and at the age of 19 entered the Shōgidō, a private school of Western-style painting. The school had been opened in Tokyo the previous year by the artist Shinkurō Kunisawa (1847–77), who had studied painting under John Wilcolm in London.

When the government-sponsored Kōbu Bijutsu Gakkō (Technical Art School) was opened in Tokyo in ...

(b Isleworth, Middx, May 17, 1863; d Godden Green, Kent, May 23, 1942).

English designer, writer, architect and social reformer . He was educated at King’s College, Cambridge. As a young man he was deeply influenced by the teachings of John Ruskin and William Morris, and particularly by their vision of creative workmanship in the Middle Ages; such a vision made work in modern times seem like mechanical drudgery. Ashbee played many parts and might be thought a dilettante; but his purpose was always to give a practical expression to what he had learnt from Ruskin and Morris. An intense and rather isolated figure, he found security in a life dedicated to making the world a better place.

In 1888, while he was training to be an architect in the office of G. F. Bodley and Thomas Garner (1839–1906), Ashbee set up the Guild and School of Handicraft in the East End of London. The School lasted only until 1895, but the Guild, a craft workshop that combined the ideals of the Arts and Crafts Movement with a romantic, apolitical socialism, was to be the focus of Ashbee’s work for the next 20 years. There were five guildsmen at first, making furniture and base metalwork. In ...

(b Carrigrenane, Co. Cork, May 28, 1837; d Killiney, Co. Dublin, Dec 10, 1921).

Irish architect . He received his early education at the Collège de St Servais, Liège. While at St Mary’s College, Oscott (1851–5), with which A. W. N. Pugin was strongly associated, he studied drawing and perspective and developed an interest in architecture. Between 1856 and 1860 he was articled to E. W. Pugin (whose sister Mary he married in 1860) and in 1858 he entered the Royal Academy Schools, London. When in 1859 E. W. Pugin received the commission for SS Peter and Paul, Cork, he made Ashlin a partner with responsibility for their Irish work, a position he retained until about 1870 (see Pugin family, §3). Their practice was primarily ecclesiastical, the remodelling (1869) of Enniscorthy Castle for Isaac Newton Wallop (1825–91), 5th Earl of Portsmouth, being one of their few domestic projects. They worked on some 25 religious buildings. The Augustinian church of SS Augustine and John, Thomas Street, Dublin (commissioned ...

(Rossi)

(b Alderstone, England, Jan 27, 1851; d Bondi, Sydney, April 27, 1942).

Australian painter and writer . He attended the West London School of Art and, following the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, the Académie Julian in Paris. In 1878 the newspaper owner David Syme invited Ashton to Melbourne to produce black-and-white illustrations for the Illustrated Australian News. After a disagreement with the management he transferred to the rival Australasian Sketcher. In 1883 he went to Sydney, where he joined the staff of the Picturesque Atlas of Australia and also contributed to the Sydney Bulletin. Ashton was an ardent disciple of Impressionist painting and claimed to have executed the first plein-air landscape in Australia: Evening, Merri Creek (1882; Sydney, A.G. NSW). Much of his work, as in the watercolour A Solitary Ramble (1888; Sydney, A.G. NSW), had a strong sentimental streak. In addition to his outdoor works Ashton painted a number of portraits, such as that of Helen Ashton...

(b Lima, 1866; d Lima, Jan 12, 1914).

Peruvian painter. He studied at the Academia de S Fernando in Madrid, where he lived from 1883 to 1893; his friends there included Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, a fellow student. On his return to Lima in 1893 he painted portraits and for 14 years taught drawing at the Academia Concha. He also worked as an illustrator for the review ...

(b Avignon, 1862; d Paris, 1935).

French architect. He entered the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1881. He studied there under Drouillard and Victor Laloux (the architect of the Gare d’Orsay). Astruc received his diploma in architecture in January 1889, submitting a collection of designs for a railway station ‘following German principles’—a plan that he had presented to the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français in the previous year. He went on to design a large number of private buildings, but he is chiefly known for the church of Notre-Dame du Travail (1899–1901), 59, Rue Vercingétorix, 14e, Paris. Like Victor Baltard’s church of St Augustin (1860–67) and Louis-Auguste Boileau’s St Eugène (1854–5), Notre-Dame du Travail is built of stone and metal, but unlike them it uses industrial T-section and I-section iron girders, which are riveted and welded together. Its spacious, relatively empty surface at ground level, the openings high up that diffuse an even light throughout the building, and the use of brick and buhrstone make the church seem more closely related to contemporaneous factories than to other Parisian churches built with metal frameworks in various revival styles. The resemblance is intentional as the curate of the parish, Soulange-Bodin, required that the building should reflect, in its structure and materials, the factories in which the parishioners of this working-class suburb worked—hence also the dedication to Notre-Dame du Travail. He launched a nation-wide appeal to raise money by popular subscription so that this universal church could be consecrated on the occasion of the Exposition Universelle (...

(b Libourne, nr Bordeaux, Feb 12, 1857; d Paris, Aug 4, 1927).

French photographer. An only child of working-class parents, he was orphaned at an early age and went to sea. Determined to be an actor, he managed to study at the Conservatoire d’Art Dramatique in Paris for a year but was dismissed to finish his military service. Thereafter he acted for several seasons in the provinces but failed to distinguish himself and left the stage. An interest in painting but lack of facility led him to take up photography in the late 1880s. At this time photography was experiencing unprecedented expansion in both commercial and amateur fields. Atget entered the commercial arena. Equipped with a standard box camera on a tripod and 180×240 mm glass negatives, he gradually made some 10,000 photographs of France that describe its cultural legacy and its popular culture. He printed his negatives on ordinary albumen-silver paper and sold his prints to make a living. Despite the prevailing taste for soft-focus, painterly photography from ...

[Laurence]

(b Manchester, Jan 17, 1873; d Paris, Sept 21, 1931).

English painter, sculptor and draughtsman. He studied singing and music in Berlin and Paris. At first he earned his living by establishing himself as a singing teacher in Liverpool and London. By July 1913, when he exhibited in the Allied Artists’ Association in London, he was devoting an increasing amount of his energies to painting. His early work was Fauvist in affiliation, reflecting perhaps the teaching he had received at La Palette in Paris. Contact with Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists led him to pursue a more abstract path. In the spring of 1914 he joined the Rebel Art Centre with Wyndham Lewis and other artists who appeared in Blast magazine later that year.

Little is known about the development of Atkinson’s work at this crucial stage in his career. His signature was on the manifesto in the first issue of Blast, but his work was not reproduced in the magazine; his continuing involvement with other forms of art was demonstrated when his book of poems, ...

[Murillo, Gerardo ]

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

Mexican painter, printmaker, writer, theorist, vulcanologist and politician. Better known by his pseudonym, which signifies ‘Doctor Water’ in Náhuatl and which he adopted in 1902, Murillo first studied art in Guadalajara and from 1890 to 1896 at the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City, where his vocation became clear. In 1899 he travelled to Europe and settled in Rome, where the work of Michelangelo had a profound impact on him. He travelled to other countries to study and to learn about avant-garde painting. He went back to Mexico in 1904 and seven years later returned to Europe, only to rush back when the Revolution broke out in Mexico. He joined the revolutionary movement, taking an active role in its various activities, including the muralist movement, through which he was associated with Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Although he practised portrait painting, his passion was for landscape in a variety of techniques and materials, some of them invented by him; for example, he used ‘atlcolours’, which were simply crayons made of wax, resins and pigment with which he could obtain textures not obtainable with oil paint. His favoured supports were rigid surfaces such as wood or hardboard....

(b Detroit, MI, July 7, 1869; d Southampton, NY, Oct 18, 1956).

American architect, urban planner and writer. Atterbury studied at Yale University, New Haven, CT, and travelled in Europe. He studied architecture at Columbia University, New York and worked in the office of McKim, Mead & White before completing his architecture studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Atterbury’s early work consisted of suburban and weekend houses for wealthy industrialists, such as the Henry W. de Forest House (1898) in Cold Springs Harbor on Long Island, NY. De Forest was a leader in the philanthropic movement to improve workers’ housing, an interest that Atterbury shared; through him Atterbury was given the commission for the model housing community of Forest Hills Gardens, NY, begun in 1909 under the sponsorship of the Russell Sage Foundation; the co-planners and landscape designers were the brothers John Charles Olmsted (1852–1920) and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr (1870–1957), the sons of Frederick Law Olmsted. Atterbury developed a system of precast concrete panels to build a varied group of multiple units and town houses suggesting an English country hamlet. He continued his research into prefabrication largely at his own expense throughout his life....

(b Longwy, Meurthe et Moselle, July 3, 1837; d Capbreton, Landes, Aug 23, 1916).

French sculptor. In 1851 he entered the Ecole Gratuite de Dessin, Paris, also studying with Antoine-Laurent Dantan, and in 1854 moved to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. A grant from his native département enabled him to travel to Italy in 1866–7, though he was evidently little influenced by antique or Renaissance works of art. Apart from his bronze monument to Dante Alighieri (1879–80; Paris, Square Monge), his work is in a neo-Rococo style, as exemplified in his terracotta bust of his daughter Marcelle Aubé (1910; Paris, Mus. d’Orsay). Besides many portrait busts he also executed public monuments to notable Frenchmen, several of which were destroyed on the orders of the Vichy government in 1941. The most important, and most controversial, was that to Léon Gambetta (bronze, 1884–8), built in collaboration with the architect Louis-Charles Boileau in the courtyard of the Louvre in Paris; it was damaged during World War II and dismantled from ...

(b Lausanne, Aug 18, 1872; d Lausanne, Oct 11, 1957).

Swiss draughtsman, painter and illustrator. He began his career as an apprentice banker but abandoned this to study music and languages in Dresden, and then painting at the South Kensington School of Art, London (1895). In 1896 he went to Paris where he took courses in anatomy and became the pupil of Luc Olivier Merson and possibly of Whistler. In 1897 he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts but continued to frequent Merson’s studio. At the end of 1899, after a short stay in Bavaria, Auberjonois went to Florence, where he passed several months studying and copying the paintings of the Old Masters and painting the Tuscan landscape. Returning to Paris in 1901, he began to work independently, exhibiting for the first time at the Salon in Paris and at the Exposition Nationale Suisse des Beaux-Arts in Vevey. From 1901 to World War I he lived alternately in Paris and in Switzerland....

(b Elgin, 1838; d New York, 1925).

Scottish architect, designer and writer. Trained as an architect, he moved to Liverpool, Lancs, in 1856 and set up an architectural practice with his brother William James Audsley (b 1833) in 1863. With him he wrote Handbook of Christian Symbolism (1865), and together they designed a number of buildings in and around Liverpool, among them the Welsh Presbyterian Church, Prince’s Road, Toxteth (1865–7), Christ Church, Kensington (1870), and the church of St Margaret, Belmont Road, Anfield (1873). For the merchant William Preston they designed the church of St Mary (1873) in the grounds of his house, Ellel Grange, Lancs. Other commissions were for a synagogue and a tennis club. He was among the earliest publishers to exploit the graphic potential of chromolithography, and, contrary to other major books on ornament, he made a case for classifying designs by their basic motif rather than by nationality. He was an expert on Japanese art, lecturing on the subject and between ...

(b Wädenswil, April 16, 1847; d Konstanz, Aug 30, 1906).

Swiss architect, teacher and writer. In Zurich he was trained (1863–4) by a master carpenter called Brunner and he then studied (1865–8) under Gottfried Semper at the Polytechnikum. He moved to Vienna to study (1869–70) at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste with Theophilus Hansen. From 1870 to 1884 he was Hansen’s pupil and later chief collaborator. He was a professor at the Staatsgewerbeschule, Vienna (1884–8), and at Berne University (from 1890), from which time he was a member of almost every competition jury in Switzerland. In Vienna, Auer made major contributions to Hansen’s buildings, including the Börse (1871–7) and the Reichsrat (1873–88). In his architecture as well as in his teaching he was centrally concerned with the Renaissance, two examples in this style being Dr Eder’s Sanatorium (1886–7), Vienna, which has a domed vestibule, and the post office (...

[Georges] (Hulot)

(b Beauvais, April 26, 1863; d Paris, Feb 6, 1938).

French illustrator, typographical designer, writer and printmaker . He went to Paris in 1883 to pursue a literary career. His first humorous essays were published that year in the Chat Noir journal. He was introduced to the many avant-garde artists and writers who frequented the Chat Noir cabaret in Montmartre and contributed to the journal. Of these Henri Rivière and Eugène Grasset were especially important to his artistic development, Rivière coaching Auriol in drawing while Grasset introduced him to typographical design. Auriol’s close association with Rivière culminated in the latter’s album of lithographs, Les Trente-six Vues de la Tour Eiffel (1902; for illustration see Japonisme), for which Auriol designed the decorative cover, end-papers and typography.

Auriol served as writer, illustrator and editor of the Chat Noir for ten years (1883–93). He produced book covers for the Chat-Noir Guide (1888) and the two-volume Les Contes du Chat Noir...

(b Rose Bank, Staten Island, NY, March 17, 1866; d New York, June 9, 1952).

American photographer. She was introduced to photography by a friend, Oswall Muller, sometime around 1876, and quickly learnt the complexities of working with a variety of cumbersome cameras, dry-plate negatives and contact printing. As an avid amateur photographer, she documented a social history of a bygone era. Her work, dating between the 1880s and 1930s, recorded a charming portrait of the genteel activities of upper middle-class society on Staten Island. Although her photographs primarily documented the everyday life of the wealthy inhabitants and friends of her home, Clear Comfort, which overlooked New York’s Upper Bay, she also produced a challenging series of images of New York’s Lower East Side. These ‘street types’ were published as a portfolio by the Albertype Company in 1896.

Unlike those of Jacob A. Riis and Lewis W. Hine, Austen’s images of immigrants revealed no concern for social reform, but evidenced a hesitancy and curiosity experienced by both photographer and subject. Her life of stability was abruptly ended by the Stock Market Crash of ...

(b Dolenčice, nr Škofja Loka, May 30, 1862; d Munich, Aug 5, 1905).

Slovenian painter and teacher, active in Germany . He trained in Ljubljana with the Slovenian painter Janez Wolf (1825–84), who taught him in a style derived from Anselm Feuerbach and the work of the Nazarenes and emphasized the ethical ideals and role of art. Ažbe studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna (1882–4), and at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich (1884–91), where he became an excellent draughtsman, especially with nudes and portrait heads. In the spring of 1891 he opened his own private school, the Ažbè-Schule, which established a reputation. From 1898 to 1901 Igor’ Grabar’ joined him as a teacher there. Its students included the Slovenian Impressionists Matija Jama (b 1872), Rihard Jakopič and Matej Sternen (b 1870), the Serbian Nadežda Petrović, the Croatian Josip Račić (1885–1909) and the Czech Ludvík Kuba, as well as Vasily Kandinsky and ...

(b São Paulo, Dec 8, 1851; d Guarujá, June 13, 1928).

Brazilian architect. He studied at the Escola Militar in Rio de Janeiro (1869–72) and then trained as an engineer–architect, graduating in 1878 from the University of Ghent, Belgium, under the patronage of the Visconde de Parnaíba, who subsequently provided him with his first commissions in Rio. His architectural education was based on the classicism of the Beaux-Arts tradition, and one of his designs represented his school at the Exposition Internationale (1878) in Paris. He began his career in 1883 in Campinas, where his family had originated, when he completed some unfinished work on the 18th-century parish church; this project became well known for his use of the taipa de pilão (Port.: ‘pounded gravel wall’) construction techniques of the earlier builders, a considerable engineering feat.

In 1886 Azevedo began to work in São Paulo and designed for the government two neo-Renaissance buildings, the Tesouraria da Fazenda Nacional (...

American architectural partnership formed in 1884 by George Fletcher Babb (b New York, 1836; d Holden, MA, 1915), Walter Cook (b Buffalo, NY, 22 July 1846; d New York, 25 March 1916) and Daniel Wheelock Willard (b Brookline, MA, 1849; d California, after 1902). Babb trained in the office of T. R. Jackson in the late 1850s before going into partnership (1859–65) with Nathaniel G. Foster. He then joined the office of Russell Sturgis, becoming senior draughtsman in 1868. Cook graduated from Harvard in 1869, then studied architecture at the Polytechnikum (1871–3) in Munich and the Ecole de Beaux-Arts (1873–6), Paris, where he joined the atelier of Emile Vaudremer. He returned to America in 1877, when he went into partnership with Babb, their first major commission being a warehouse (or loft; 1877–80) on Duane Street, New York. This had a brick façade of deeply cut arcades, an arcuated parapet and cast terracotta details, suggesting 15th-century Italian influences. Willard, who had trained as an engineer, joined the firm in ...

(b Islay, Arequipa, 1867; d Neuilly-sur-Seine, Feb 20, 1941).

Peruvian painter and draughtsman. His family moved to Chile when he was four, and in 1882 he entered the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Santiago. In recognition of his rejection of an offer of Chilean nationality, the Peruvian government invited him to Lima in 1887 to assist him with his studies. In 1890 he went to Paris, continuing on to Rome where he studied under Francisco Pradilla at the Academia Española de Bellas Artes and again in Paris under Jean-Paul Laurens and Benjamin Constant at the Académie Julien in 1893. In Paris he was commissioned to paint important society and government figures; in 1908 the American banker and collector J. Pierpont Morgan summoned him to New York, where he lived for 20 years, painting 120 portraits. In 1926 he became a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and three years later he settled in Paris again. His painting was academically accomplished and realist in style, influenced by Leonardo, Rembrandt and Hans Holbein. He was a careful observer of detail, and he achieved astonishing physical resemblance to his subjects. The prominent figures he portrayed include ...