Oil Painting

  Gilbert Stuart
  1755 – 1828
     Gilbert Charles Stuart (born Stewart) was an American portrait painter. Gilbert Stuart is widely considered to be one of America’s foremost portraitists. His best known work, “George Washington”, was completed the 1796. The image of George Washington featured in the painting has appeared on the United States One-Dollar Bill for over a century.

     Gilbert Stuart was born in Saunderstown, Rhode Island in 1755. He was the third son of Gilbert Stewart, a Scottish immigrant, and Elizabeth Anthony Stewart. Stuart’s father worked in the first colonial Snuff Mill in America, which was located in the basement of the family homestead.

     Stuart first began to show great promise as a painter. He was tutored by Cosmo Alexander, a Scottish painter. Under the guidance of Alexander, Stuart painted the famous portrait “Dr. Hunter’s Spaniels”, when he was 12-years-old. His prospects as a portraitist were jeopardized by the onset of the American Revolution and its social disruptions. Following the example set by John Singleton Copley, Stuart departed for England in 1775. There he became the pupil of the expatriate American painter Benjamin West and was much influenced by the work of the English portrait painters Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds. The relationship was a beneficial one. With them Stuart was exhibiting at the Royal Academy as early as 1777.

     In 1792, after establishing himself as a fashionable portrait painter in London and Dublin, Stuart returned to the U.S. Stuart returned to the United States in 1793. In Philadelphia, he opened a studio and gained not only a foothold in the art world, but lasting fame with pictures of many important Americans of the day.

     His portraits, which number nearly 1000, brought him lasting fame, particularly the three he did of George Washington. His two most familiar portraits of Washington, of which he made over 100 copies, are the so-called Vaughan half-length type (1795, Metropolitan Museum, New York City) and the so-called “Athenaeum” portrayal (unfinished; 1796, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). Stuart also did portraits of Presidents John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison and of the British kings George III and George IV.

     Throughout his career, Gilbert Stuart produced portraits of over 1,000 people, including the first six Presidents of the United States. His work can be found today at art museums across the United States and the United Kingdom.

     In 1824 he suffered a stroke, which left him partially paralyzed. Nevertheless, Stuart continued to paint for two years until his death in Boston at the age of 72.

  Théophile Alexandre Steinlen
  1859 -1923
     Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, frequently referred to as just Steinlen, was a Swiss-born French Art Nouveau painter and printmaker.

     Born in Lausanne, Steinlen studied at the local University before taking a job as a designer trainee at a textile mill in Mulhouse in eastern France. In his early twenties he was still developing his skills as a painter when he and his new wife were encouraged by the painter François Bocion to move to the artistic community in the Montmartre Quarter of Paris.

     Once there, Steinlen was befriended by the painter Adolphe Willette who introduced him the artistic crowd at Le Chat Noir that led to his commissions to do poster art for the cabaret owner/entertainer, Aristide Bruant and other commercial enterprises.

     In the early 1890s, Steinlen’s paintings of rural landscapes, flowers, and nudes were being shown at the Salon des Indépendants. His 1895 lithograph titled Les Chanteurs des Rues was the frontispiece to a work entitled Chansons de Montmartre published by Éditions Flammarion with sixteen original lithographs that illustrated the Belle Epoque songs of Paul Delmet.

     Steinlen became a regular contributor to Le Rire and Gil Blas magazines plus numerous other publications including L’Assiette au Beurre and Les Humouristes. Between 1883 and 1920, he produced hundreds of illustrations, a number of which were done under a pseudonym so as to avoid political problems due to their harsh criticisms of societal ills.

     Théophile Steinlen died in 1923 in the Cimetière Saint-Vincent in Montmartre. Today, his works can be found at many important museums around the world including at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., United States.

  Alfred Sisley
  1839 -1899
     Alfred Sisley was an English Impressionist landscape painter living and working in France, was one of the creators of French Impressionism.

     Sisley was born in Paris to English parents, William Sisley and Felicia Sell. After his schooldays, his father, a merchant trading with the southern states of America, sent him to London for a business career between 1857 and 1861. In 1862, having decided to become a painter, his family gave him every support, sending him to Gleyre’s studio, where he met Renoir, Monet and Bazille. The friends often worked together in the open air in the Forest of Fontainebleau, at Chailly. They wanted to realistically capture transient effects of sunlight; which resulted in paintings more colorful and more broadly painted than the public was accustomed to seeing. Consequently, Sisley and his friends initially had few opportunities to exhibit or sell their work.

     Sisley’s student works are lost. His earliest known work, “Lane near a Small Town” is believed to have been painted around 1864. His style at this time was deeply influenced by Courbet and Daubigny, and when he first exhibited at the Salon in 1867 it was as the pupil of Corot.

     Among the Impressionists Sisley has been overshadowed by Monet. Sisley was less experimental, and tended to work on a smaller scale. Described by art historian Robert Rosenblum as having “almost a generic character, an impersonal textbook idea of a perfect Impressionist painting”, his work strongly invokes atmosphere and his skies are always very impressive. His concentration on landscape subjects was the most consistent of any of the Impressionists.

     Apart from a period spent in London in 1857-61-and brief trips to England in 1874, 1881, and 1897-Sisley lived his entire life in France. Little is known about his relationship with the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, which he may well have seen in London, although these artists have been suggested as an influence on his development as an Impressionist painter.

     It was only towards the end of his life, that he received something approaching the recognition he deserved. In 1899, he died in Moret-sur-Loing of a cancer of the throat, at the age of 59. Within a year his canvases were fetching high prices.

     Among Sisley’s best known works are “Street in Moret” and “Sand Heaps”, both owned by the Art Institute of Chicago, and “The Bridge at Moret-sur-Loing” shown at Musée d’Orsay, Paris. “Allée des peupliers de Moret” (“The Lane of Poplars at Moret”) has been stolen three times from the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nice.

  Georges-Pierre Seurat
  1859 – 1891
     Georges-Pierre Seurat was a French painter and the founder of Neo-impressionism. He built upon a dying classic tradition and upon the Impressionists. His large work “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” is one of the icons of 19th century painting.

     Georges Seurat was born in Paris on December 2, 1859 and educated at the Ecole des Beaux-arts. After his painting was rejected by the Paris Salon, Seurat allied himself with the independent artists of Paris. In 1884 he took part in forming the Société des Artistes Indépendants. There he met and befriended fellow artist Paul Signac.

     Seurat’s early paintings were small Impressionist landscapes, but he quickly rejected the soft, irregular brushstroke in favor of pointillism, a technique he developed where the forms are constructed by the application of small dots of unmixed color to a white background. This method of painting was applied to every canvas. He shared his new ideas about pointillism with Signac, who subsequently painted in the same idiom.

     In the summer of 1884 Seurat began work on his masterpiece, “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”. It shows people of all different classes in a park. The tiny juxtaposed dots of multi- colored paint allow the eye of the viewer to blend colors optically, rather than having the colors blended on the canvas or pre-blended as a material pigment. It took Seurat two years to complete this ten foot wide painting, and he spent much time in the park sketching to prepare for the work (there are about 60 studies). It is now exhibited in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

     So whether you like the “fuzziness” of pointillist paintings or not, note the concentration that a pointillist artist would have to have to create a piece that would have to be pleasing to the eye as well as scientifically stimulating.

     During the 19th century, scientist-writers such as Eugène Chevreul, Nicholas Ogden Rood and David Sutter wrote treatises on color, optical effects and perception and translated the scientific research of Helmholtz and Newton into a written form that was understandable by non-scientists. Chevreul was perhaps the most important influence on artists at the time; his great contribution was producing the color wheel of primary and intermediary hues. Seurat took to heart the color theorists’ notion of a scientific approach to painting. He believed that a painter could use color to create harmony and emotion in art in the same way that a musician uses variation in sound and tempo to create harmony in music. Seurat theorized that the scientific application of color was like any other natural law, and he was driven to prove this conjecture. He thought that the knowledge of perception and optical laws could be used to create a new language of art based on its own set of heuristics and he set out to show this language using lines, color intensity and color schema. Seurat called this language Chromoluminarism.

     Seurat died from a form of meningitis. His last ambitious work, “The Circus”, was left unfinished at the time of his death.

  John Singer Sargent
  1856-1925
     John Singer Sargent was American, the most successful portrait painter of his era, as well as a gifted landscape painter and watercolorist.

     Sargent was born in Florence, Italy to American parents. He studied in Italy and Germany, and then in Paris, receiving his formal art education at the École des Beaux-Arts and in the Paris studio of the noted French portraitist Carolus-Duran.

     In the early 1880s Sargent regularly exhibited portraits at the Salon, and these were mostly full-length portrayals of women: “Madame Edouard Pailleron” in 1880, “Madame Ramón Subercaseaux” in 1881, and “Lady with the Rose”, 1882. He continued to receive positive critical notice.

     His best portraits reveal the individuality and personality of the sitters. His most ardent admirers think he is matched in this only by Velázquez, who was one of Sargent’s great influences. The Spanish master’s spell is apparent in Sargent’s “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit”, 1882, a haunting interior which echoes Velázquez’ “Las Meninas”. His “Portrait of Madame X”, done in 1884, is now considered one of his best works, and was the artist’s personal favorite.

     At the time it was unveiled in Paris at the 1884 Salon, it aroused such a negative reaction that it prompted Sargent to move to London. Prior to the Mme. X. scandal of 1884, he had painted exotic beauty such as “Rosina Ferrara of Capri”. He moved to London and spent most of his adult life in England, maintaining a studio there for more than 30 years and visiting America only on short trips.

     About 1907 Sargent tired of portrait painting and accepted few commissions. He resumed his travels through Europe and to America. He painted constantly but turned to landscapes, producing more than 1,000 oils and watercolors. He also gladly accepted the more demanding challenge of murals for the Boston Public Library, for the Museum of Fine Arts and for the Widener Memorial Library at Harvard on which he was still working at the time of his death.

     Sargent died in London in 1925. Criticized for what some believed to be a superficial brilliance, Sargent’s portraits fell into disfavor after his death. Since that time, however, these same canvases have been acknowledged for their naturalism and superb technical skill.

  Alfred Sisley
  1839 -1899
     Alfred Sisley was an English Impressionist landscape painter living and working in France, was one of the creators of French Impressionism.

     Sisley was born in Paris to English parents, William Sisley and Felicia Sell. After his schooldays, his father, a merchant trading with the southern states of America, sent him to London for a business career between 1857 and 1861. In 1862, having decided to become a painter, his family gave him every support, sending him to Gleyre’s studio, where he met Renoir, Monet and Bazille. The friends often worked together in the open air in the Forest of Fontainebleau, at Chailly. They wanted to realistically capture transient effects of sunlight; which resulted in paintings more colorful and more broadly painted than the public was accustomed to seeing. Consequently, Sisley and his friends initially had few opportunities to exhibit or sell their work.

     Sisley’s student works are lost. His earliest known work, “Lane near a Small Town” is believed to have been painted around 1864. His style at this time was deeply influenced by Courbet and Daubigny, and when he first exhibited at the Salon in 1867 it was as the pupil of Corot.

     Among the Impressionists Sisley has been overshadowed by Monet. Sisley was less experimental, and tended to work on a smaller scale. Described by art historian Robert Rosenblum as having “almost a generic character, an impersonal textbook idea of a perfect Impressionist painting”, his work strongly invokes atmosphere and his skies are always very impressive. His concentration on landscape subjects was the most consistent of any of the Impressionists.

     Apart from a period spent in London in 1857-61-and brief trips to England in 1874, 1881, and 1897-Sisley lived his entire life in France. Little is known about his relationship with the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, which he may well have seen in London, although these artists have been suggested as an influence on his development as an Impressionist painter.

     It was only towards the end of his life, that he received something approaching the recognition he deserved. In 1899, he died in Moret-sur-Loing of a cancer of the throat, at the age of 59. Within a year his canvases were fetching high prices.

     Among Sisley’s best known works are “Street in Moret” and “Sand Heaps”, both owned by the Art Institute of Chicago, and “The Bridge at Moret-sur-Loing” shown at Musée d’Orsay, Paris. “Allée des peupliers de Moret” (“The Lane of Poplars at Moret”) has been stolen three times from the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nice.

  Georges-Pierre Seurat
  1859 – 1891
     Georges-Pierre Seurat was a French painter and the founder of Neo-impressionism. He built upon a dying classic tradition and upon the Impressionists. His large work “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” is one of the icons of 19th century painting.

     Georges Seurat was born in Paris on December 2, 1859 and educated at the Ecole des Beaux-arts. After his painting was rejected by the Paris Salon, Seurat allied himself with the independent artists of Paris. In 1884 he took part in forming the Société des Artistes Indépendants. There he met and befriended fellow artist Paul Signac.

     Seurat’s early paintings were small Impressionist landscapes, but he quickly rejected the soft, irregular brushstroke in favor of pointillism, a technique he developed where the forms are constructed by the application of small dots of unmixed color to a white background. This method of painting was applied to every canvas. He shared his new ideas about pointillism with Signac, who subsequently painted in the same idiom.

     In the summer of 1884 Seurat began work on his masterpiece, “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”. It shows people of all different classes in a park. The tiny juxtaposed dots of multi- colored paint allow the eye of the viewer to blend colors optically, rather than having the colors blended on the canvas or pre-blended as a material pigment. It took Seurat two years to complete this ten foot wide painting, and he spent much time in the park sketching to prepare for the work (there are about 60 studies). It is now exhibited in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

     So whether you like the “fuzziness” of pointillist paintings or not, note the concentration that a pointillist artist would have to have to create a piece that would have to be pleasing to the eye as well as scientifically stimulating.

     During the 19th century, scientist-writers such as Eugène Chevreul, Nicholas Ogden Rood and David Sutter wrote treatises on color, optical effects and perception and translated the scientific research of Helmholtz and Newton into a written form that was understandable by non-scientists. Chevreul was perhaps the most important influence on artists at the time; his great contribution was producing the color wheel of primary and intermediary hues. Seurat took to heart the color theorists’ notion of a scientific approach to painting. He believed that a painter could use color to create harmony and emotion in art in the same way that a musician uses variation in sound and tempo to create harmony in music. Seurat theorized that the scientific application of color was like any other natural law, and he was driven to prove this conjecture. He thought that the knowledge of perception and optical laws could be used to create a new language of art based on its own set of heuristics and he set out to show this language using lines, color intensity and color schema. Seurat called this language Chromoluminarism.

     Seurat died from a form of meningitis. His last ambitious work, “The Circus”, was left unfinished at the time of his death.