Pierre Bonnard was born October 3, 1867, in Fontenay-aux-Roses, France. He began law studies in Paris in 1887. That same year, Bonnard also attended the Académie Julian and in 1888 he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he met Edouard Vuillard, who became his lifelong friend. Thus Bonnard gave up law to become an artist, and, after brief military service, in 1889 he joined the group of young painters called the Nabis, who were organized by Paul Sérusier and included Maurice Denis, Paul Ranson, Roussel, Vuillard, and others. The Nabis, influenced by Paul Gauguin and the fashionable Japanese woodblock prints, experimented with arbitrary color, expressive line, and flat, patterned surfaces.

In 1890, Pierre Bonnard shared a studio with Vuillard and Denis, and he began to make color lithographs. The following year, he met Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Also in 1891, he showed for the first time at the Salon des Indépendants and in the Nabis’s earliest exhibitions at Le Barc de Boutteville. Bonnard exhibited with the Nabis until they disbanded in 1900. He worked in a variety of mediums; for example, he frequently made posters and illustrations for La Revue Blanche.

In 1895 he designed a stained-glass window for Louis Comfort Tiffany. His first solo show, at Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1896, included paintings, posters, and lithographs. In 1897, Ambroise Vollard published the first of many albums of Bonnard’s lithographs and illustrated books.

In 1903, Bonnard participated in the first Salon d’Automne and in the Vienna Secession, and from 1906 he was represented by Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris. He traveled abroad extensively and worked at various locations in Normandy, the Seine Valley, the south of France, as well as Paris. He bought a villa in Le Cannet near Cannes in 1925.

Pierre Bonnard did not paint from life but rather drew his subject—sometimes photographing it as well—and made notes on the colors. He then painted the canvas in his studio from his notes. Bonnard is known for his intense use of color. His often complex compositions—typically of sunlit interiors of rooms and gardens populated with friends and family members—are both narrative and autobiographical. His wife Marthe was an ever present subject over the course of several decades. She is seen seated at the kitchen table, with the remnants of a meal; or nude, as in a series of paintings where she reclines in the bathtub. He also painted several self-portraits, landscapes, and many still lifes which usually depict flowers and fruit.

The Art Institute of Chicago mounted a major exhibition of the work of Pierre Bonnard and Vuillard in 1933.  He finished his last painting, The Almond Tree in Flower, a week before his death in Le Cannet in 1947. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City organized a posthumous retrospective of Bonnard’s work in 1948, although originally it was meant to be a celebration of the artist’s eightieth birthday.  Two major exhibitions of Bonnard’s work took place in 1998: February through May at the Tate Gallery in London, and from June through October at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

William Trost Richards was born in Philadelphia on November 14, 1833 and he died in Newport, RI on November 9, 1905. He studied in Philadelphia with Paul Weber in 1850 before studying in Florence, Rome and Paris from 1853-1856.

In 1855 Richards sailed for Dusseldorf where he studied with Leutze and Albert Bierstadt, the latter of whom inspired Richards. After painting landscapes in France and Italy, Richards married and returned to Germantown, PA.

By 1856, Richards was enthused by the work of Frederick Edwin Church and John Kensett. They painted majestic landscapes and seascapes bathed in the mystical light of a pristine sky with an emphasis on natures grand scale. Capturing this light and atmosphere is an American art movement of the 19th century called luminism, an outgrowth of the Hudson River School. It was Church’s use of luminism that Richards began to imitate and two years later he was painting outdoors.

In 1866, Richards traveled to England and his focus turned from landscapes to marine painting. A year later a storm at sea caught the painter’s attention and he began to study the structure of waves and how weather affects the sea and shore.

Few artists are able to paint the sea and beach as well as Richards. His wet sandy beaches are often littered with portions of shipwrecks or seaweed to show that a tide has come and gone or that a storm’s fury has past and left its mark. The artist was adept at painting light coming through steep, lifting waves, the foam created when they slap to the ground and the reflective qualities surrounding them.

At the end of the Hudson River School era, Richards purchased the first of his many properties in and around Newport, Rhode Island (1874). Richards loosened his palette years later in the British Isles and the Channel Islands, where oftentimes he lightened his palette to an almost green-gold overall tonality. adorning the charm of solitude and the breadth of the sea, Richards peacefully painted on the island of Conanicut at Mackerel Cove, Jamestown, Rhode Island until 1899.

In the late 1860s two notable art collectors gravitated to William Trost Richards’s work: the Reverend Elias Lyman Magoon, who in 1864 sold his collection to Matthew Vassar for the newly constructed Vassar College Art Gallery and George Whitney, who gave William Trost Richards financial security.

Chaïm Soutine was the 10th child of a Jewish family living in a Lithuanian ghetto. He was brought up in the strict observance of the Jewish orthodox religion, Soutine somewhat rebelled against his father, who was a tailor, and managed to attend the Academy of Fine Arts of  Vilno at 14, before settling in Paris in 1911. There he was admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and worked under Fernand Cormon.

Soutine lived in one of the famous studios of la Ruche near Montparnasse. He then befriended Chagall and Modigliani and after a short period he came to find his own style mixing his Jewish feelings with the teachings of Fauvism and Cubism.

In fact, Soutine could never detach himself from the memories of the hardship suffered during his younger days. A kind of feverish passion drove him to produce distorted and violently colored paintings and on reaching fame he said that if he had failed in his attempt to become a great artist he would probably have given up painting to become a boxer. Ill-tempered and unsociable, Soutine was kind only with women. Often facing depression he was once saved from suicide by his friend Krémègne.

After a period during which he was deeply affected by the death of Modigliani in 1920 he however worked intensely and managed to sell one hundred of his works to Dr Barnes, a well-known American collector. Investing himself in painting with a rage reminiscent of that shown previously by Van Gogh, he went on to produce landscapes, still lifes and portraits which were true masterpieces. Constantly obsessed by forms and colors, often dejected and unsatisfied, Soutine destroyed many paintings during fits of despair. Soutine portrayed artist friends, hotel valets, choir boys, and cooks; he also painted still lifes and landscapes. His art was turbulent, slashing, and visceral. He depicted slaughterhouses and human corrosion and depravity, powerfully expressing a tortured sensibility. Characteristic is his Page Boy at Maxim’s, executed in brilliant color and heavy impasto. Soutine is represented in many leading collections including the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., and the Art Institute, Chicago. The Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pa., owns 100 of his works. He seldom showed his works, apart during the important exhibition of Independent Art held in 1937 in Paris where he was at last hailed as a great painter.

His glory was however short-lived since a few months after the invasion of France by German troops he had to flee the French capital and live like a fugitive in order to escape arrest by the hands of the Gestapo or the Vichy police. Humiliated and persecuted, he had to move from one place to another and was sometimes forced to seek shelter in forests, sleeping in open-air at night. Suffering from a stomach ulcer and bleeding badly he had to leave a safe hiding place in order to undergo urgent surgery.

After perilous travel during which he was hidden in a hearse he died a few hours after a surgical operation in a Paris hospital on August 8th 1943, just two weeks before the French capital was freed by Allied troops. Known as a major Expressionist painter, Chaïm Soutine, so miserable during his lifetime, became a legend after his death.

Fernand Achille Lucien Bivel was born in Paris on October 14th 1888 and he died in 1950. Bivel was a talented painter of landscapes, portraits and still-lifes. He was a pupil of François Cormon and Jean Boutry. Fernand Bivel attained the distinction of being a member of the renowned Société des Artistes Français at 24 years of age. He exhibited with them for 27 years (1912-1939), obtaining an honorable mention in 1914, a bronze medal in 1921, a silver medal in 1922 and a gold medal 1924 paired with a traveling scholarship from the French government.  Bivel distinguished himself for his bravery during the First World War and was awarded the The Croix de Guerre for an act of heroism involving combat with enemy forces. In 1920 Bivel was named a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, the highest honor bestowed on a civilian by the French government. Fernand Bivel’s career was marked by a rising reputation as a master painter and he reached his peak with the attainment of a gold medal during  l’Exposition Universelle in 1937. Bivel’s paintings were loved by the public, the academy, fellow painters and influential government officials. Due to his popularity the French government asked Fernand Bivel to create designs for mail stamps which carried his work around the world.

Henri Matisse the French artist and leader of the fauve group is regarded as one of the great formative figures in 20th-century art, a master of the use of color and form to convey emotional expression.

Matisse was born in Le Cateau in northern France on December 31, 1869. The son of a middle-class family, he studied and began to practice law. In 1890, however, while recovering slowly from an attack of appendicitis, he became intrigued by the practice of painting. In 1892, having given up his law career, he went to Paris to study art formally. His first teachers were academically trained and relatively conservative; Matisse’s own early style was a conventional form of naturalism, and he made many copies after the old masters. He also studied more contemporary art, especially that of the impressionists, and he began to experiment, earning a reputation as a rebellious member of his studio classes.

Matisse’s true artistic liberation, in terms of the use of color to render forms and organize spatial planes, came about first through the influence of the French painters Paul Gauguin and Paul Cezanne and the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh, whose work he studied closely beginning about 1899. Then, in 1903 and 1904, Henri Matisse encountered the pointillist painting of Henri Edmond Cross and Paul Signac.  Cross and Signac were experimenting with juxtaposing small strokes (often dots or “points”) of pure pigment to create the strongest visual vibration of intense color. Matisse adopted their technique and modified it repeatedly, using broader strokes. By 1905 he had produced some of the boldest color images ever created, including a striking picture of his wife, Green Stripe(Madame Matisse) (1905, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen). The title refers to a broad stroke of brilliant green that defines Madame Matisse’s brow and nose. In the same year Matisse exhibited this and similar paintings along with works by his artist companions, including Andre Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck. Together, the group was dubbed les fauves (literally, “the wild beasts”) because of the extremes of emotionalism in which they seemed to have indulged, their use of vivid colors, and their distortion of shapes.

While he was regarded as a leader of radicalism in the arts, Henri Matisse was beginning to gain the approval of a number of influential critics and collectors, including the American expatriate writer Gertrude Stein and her family. Among the many important commissions he received was that of a Russian collector who requested mural panels illustrating dance and music (both completed in 1911; now in the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg). Such broadly conceived themes ideally suited Matisse; they allowed him freedom of invention and play of form and expression. His images of dancers and of human figures in general, convey expressive form first and the particular details of anatomy only secondarily. Matisse extended this principle into other fields; his bronze sculptures, like his drawings and works in several mediums, reveal the same expressive contours seen in his paintings.

Although intellectually sophisticated, Matisse always emphasized the importance of instinct and intuition in the production of a work of art. He argued that an artist did not have complete control over color and form; instead, colors, shapes, and lines would come to dictate to the sensitive artist how they might be employed in relation to one another. He often emphasized his joy in abandoning himself to the play of the forces of color and design, and he explained the rhythmic, but distorted, forms of many of his figures in terms of the working out of a total pictorial harmony.

From the 1920s until his death, Henri Matisse spent much time in the south of France, particularly Nice, painting local scenes with a thin, fluid application of bright color. In his old age, he was commissioned to design the decoration of the small Chapel of Saint-Marie du Rosaire at Vence (near Cannes), which he completed between 1947 and 1951. Often bedridden during his last years, he occupied himself with decoupage, creating works of brilliantly colored paper cutouts arranged casually, but with an unfailing eye for design, on a canvas surface.

Henri Matisse died in Nice on November 3, 1954. Unlike many artists, he was internationally popular during his lifetime, enjoying the favor of collectors, art critics, and the younger generation of artists.

Jules Dupré, born in Nantes, began his career at the age of eleven as an apprentice to his father, a porcelain decorator.  In 1829, Dupré went to Paris, where he met Ducamps, Jeanron, and Huet, and developed a friendship with Cabat

Jules Dupré was one of the leading Barbizon painters who influenced impressionism alongside Rousseau in the Fontainebleau Forest, South of Paris. Dupré began exhibiting in the Paris Salon in 1831.  He traveled to England in 1834 and discovered the painters Constable & Turner who introduced him to a humble subject matter with dynamic of light.  Painting directly from life, plein air, and depicting everyday, genre scenes with thick, scumbled paint was an approach that produced a scandalous uprising that the staunch, academic art world needed to give birth to Impressionism.

In 1835, four of Dupré’s landscapes were exhibited at the Paris Salon, and he won a third-place medal.  It was around this period in his life that he became a key figure in the Barbizon School.

In 1839, Dupré exhibited at the Salon for the last time until 1852.  His refusal to show at the Salon was rooted in his belief that the jury system was insensitive to artists.  Along with other artists, including Cabat, Rousseau, and Huet, Dupré organized a petition to change the jury system, and later became a member of the commission to reorganize the Salon.  In 1849, he received the Legion d’honneur.  He exhibited at both the Exposition Universelle and the Exposition Centennale.

Jules Dupré is considered a first-tier Barbizon painter with paintings in the Louvre; Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Chicago Institute of Art, The National Gallery, Washington D.C.; National Gallery, London, etc.

A student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, he benefited from the ‘nature lessons’ of the older Charles Frechon. Disenchanted with local painting groups, he decided to set up the Société des Artistes Rouennais. An indefatigable organizer and man of action, and a strong defender of the artistic patrimony, he was a founding member of the Société des Monuments et Sites de L’Eure. He was a great lover of beauty in all its guises, from monumental sculpture to quaint thatched cottages. In his highly colourful works, flowers such as roses, tulips and lilacs dominated.

Early Life

Pierre Dumont was born in Paris in 1884, but lived most of his life in Rouen, where his family moved when he was only three years old. From an early age Pierre displayed an interest in art and painting, studying at the Lycee Corneille with Robert Antoine Pinchon and Marcel Duchamp under the supervision of Philippe Zacharie. By the age of 21, he had completed his first major paintings. These early works were mainly painted in the fauvist style, popular at the time, and depicted the Normandy region which surrounded the young painter. However, fauvism was merely Dumont’s entry into the artistic world, and as he continued on in his artistic career he abandoned this style.

Dumont’s Artistic Career

Despite facing opposition from his father, who feared painting was not a lucrative career, and his own financial struggles, Dumont continued to pursue a career as an artist. And it did not take long for his efforts to pay off. When the artist was 22, Dumont was given his first solo exhibition at Galerie Legrip, where his fiery temperament as a colorist was confirmed. This success prompted Pierre to move back to Paris where he continued to achieve success, his work being accepted into the 1911 Salon d’Automne, and he himself beginning to contribute to the journal La Section d’Or. Though the journal was short lived, it inspired Dumont, and put him in contact with several other painters of the time, including Apollinaire, Duchamp, and Picabia. Due to Apollinaire’s manifesto on ‘orphic Cubism’ (which was included in the journal), Dumont began to paint in this style, producing several cubist canvases from 1911 to 1913.

Dumont remained in Paris through World War I – when most other artists abandoned the city – but left for Normandy in 1920 and would ultimately spend the rest of his life there. Normandy inspired him, and the years he spent there were highly productive. Ever the versatile artist, Dumont continued to explore various other styles of painting, painting a range of subjects including landscapes, cityscapes and portraiture.

Death

However, though his artistic career was thriving, his health was declining. Dumont developed a nervous disease and would experience frequent attacks. In 1936, at the age of fifty-two, Dumont died from this disease, leaving behind a great legacy of painting.

Merio Ameglio was born in San Remo, Italy on October 4, 1897 Ameglio was raised in the aristocratic intimacy of the Cote d’ Azure amidst the promenade and the Mediterranean Sea. Here, were seeded the initial nuances for his ability along the Mediterranean Sea.  He first began his studies on the French coast before moving to Paris in 1938 where he explored and perfected his artistic abilities. Montmartre became not only his main residence but also the beginning of his cultural awakening.

Ameglio established his atelier within walking distance of the heart of Montmartre, la Butte, at 23, rue Clauzel. Although considered to be self taught, Ameglio’s formal education was provided through his encounters and friendships with other well known artists.  He met many of the avant-garde artists such as Pablo Picasso, Jacques Villon and Jean Paul Francois Galle, Van Dongen and Severini. Painters of the new movements defining the postimpressionists, the abstractionists and the futurists.

Ameglio became a member of the salons and was a continuous participant. In 1938 during the International Art Exposition he won considerable acclaim and was awarded his first honorable mention for the painting, Cathedrale de Rouen. Thus he was established.

Although he lived in France, Ameglio was never completely comfortable with the French language; he kept largely to himself, devoting his energies to his passion for painting.  He traveled throughout France and painted a number of different regions including Rouen, Marseille, the Loire and Seine valleys and Chartres.  As a result, at the time of his death in 1970, he had produced an abundant collection of colorful canvases of Paris and Montmartre and the surrounding environs.

Ameglio also traveled extensively throughout Europe, but primarily to his homeland of Italy. There he captured the beauty of the landscapes of rural Italy. He painted for the most part in his preferred medium, oil, but he engaged in the use of various other mediums at times. His subjects are rendered with obvious affection. The finished work is as masterful in technique as it is sensitive to the eye.

On October 29, 1969, a year prior to his passing, a retrospective exhibition was held in his honor at Galerie Cambaceres in Paris. Merio Ameglio’s work is in many private and public collections worldwide. He continues to gain recognition in the French art market, most notably for those works done in the tradition of the Impressionist masters and painted en plein air.

The noted French critic, Mr. Marcel Guicheteau said of Ameglio, “The works of this artist are always filled with a certain reverie. His harmony, the softness of his tones, his delicate touch all make Ameglio a painter to evoke poetry.”

Merio Ameglio passed away on July 29, 1970 at his home in Montmartre.