DEATH:
1781 LE PRINCE
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BIRTH: 1865 LÉVY~DHURMER
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Died
on 30 September 1781: Jean-Baptiste Le Prince,
French artist born on 17 September 1734. A great traveller (Finland, Lithuania, Russia, Siberia), he introduced Russian subjects into France. Born in Metz, Leprince became known in France for his history paintings, landscapes, portraits, and genre scenes, as well as for his engravings. He studied with the greatest official painter of eighteenth-century France, François Boucher (1703-1770), often painting pastoral scenes in his master's rococo style. In 1758, when he was twenty-four, Leprince went to Russia for five years to work for the Imperial Palace in St. Petersburg. He decorated much of that palace and many others with his interior designs and paintings. He returned to France in December 1763. LINKS A Russian Baptism. (73x92cm). The Tartar Camp (1765, 175x223cm) The Necromancer (1775, 77x63cm) Three versions of this subject are known, including one in the Hermitage, St Petersburg. It is not known which of the three was the one exhibited at the Salon of 1775. Evidently a popular composition, it was also engraved in 1785. Le Prince specialised in genre scenes often, like this one, with an exotic flavor. The Four Seasons: Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer, (1763 Four paintings, Autumn 49x87cm, Winter 50x87cm, Spring 49x86cm, Summer 50x87cm). These four allegorical oil paintings, each still in its elegant original frame, probably decorated the interior walls of an important home, and, consequently, are very thinly painted. Each one uses a female nude to personify one of the four seasons. Le Prince's Seasons derive almost directly from the designs of Boucher, if we judge from the strong similarity between Spring and an engraving after Boucher entitled Venus Crowned by Cupids. |
Born
on 30 September 1865: Lucien Lévy~Dhurmer,
French Art Nouveau painter who died in 1953. One of the best and strangest French Symbolists. Master of pastels, painter of fantastical scenes, portraits and beautiful Mediterranean landscapes. From 1879, attended drawing and sculpture classes at his local school in Paris. In 1886, he met Raphael Collin, who advised him. From 1887-1895 he lived at Golfe Juan, working as a decorator of porcelain figurines and objets d'art. Discovered classical art on a trip to Italy. Returning to Paris in 1869, he exhibited under a pseudonym, adding the last two syllables of his mother's maiden name (Goldhurmer) to his own, probably to avoid confusion with another artist called Lévy. His characteristic style, a hazy academicism, was appreciated in equal measure by the public and by other artists. While maintaining an academic approach to detail, he assimilated the lessons of Impressionism, creating works whose astonishingly successful coloristic harmony invariably relates to the idea or vision he sought to invoke. After 1901, he gave up his Symbolist themes to some extent, the exception being his idealised female nudes which ilustrate the music of Beethoven, Fauré and Debussy. LINKS Portrait of Georges Rodenbach (1895) Woman with a Medallion (Mystery) (1896) Medusa (The Angry Wave) (1897) A Portrait of a Young Girl in Autumn A Vase of Flowers After Beethoven: Moonlight Dusk in Britanny Fountain at Versailles La Petite Bacchante Marguerite _ The predominant colors are blue-gray and dark green, and the lettering is an imitation of primitive painting. Marguerite Moreno, dans Le Voile de Georges Rodenbach (56x36cm) Meditation Nude |