David's Hall of Fame

"Jeune Orpheline au cimetière", ou "Jeune Fille assise dans un cimetière. 65,5 x 54 cm, Painted 1824. Location: Paris, Musée du Louvre.

Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (26 April 1798 – 13 August 1863) was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school.[1] Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement. A fine lithographer, Delacroix illustrated various works of William Shakespeare, the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott, and the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres, Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on color and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modeled form. Dramatic and romantic content characterized the central themes of his maturity, and led him not to the classical models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North Africa, in search of the exotic.[2] Friend and spiritual heir to Théodore Géricault, Delacroix was also inspired by Byron, with whom he shared a strong identification with the "forces of the sublime", of nature in often violent action.[3]

However, Delacroix was given neither to sentimentality nor bombast, and his Romanticism was that of an individualist. In the words of Baudelaire, "Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible." (Source: Wikipedia)

The Gleaners, 1857. en:Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

Jean-François Millet (October 4, 1814 – January 20, 1875) was a French painter and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France. He is noted for his scenes of peasant farmers. He can be categorized as part of the movement termed "naturalism", but also as part of the movement of "realism". (Source: Wikipedia)

Photo: This image (or other media file) is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.

Born into a family of artists, Daubigny worked as a decorator of trinkets for a clockmaker and then as a restorer of paintings in the Louvre. His formal training began when he entered the studio of Pierre Anasthasie Théodore Sentiès in 1835. He also studied briefly with Paul Delaroche. Daubigny traveled independently to Italy in 1836, before competing unsuccessfully for the Prix de Rome in historical landscape in 1837 and 1841. He began exhibiting regularly at the Salon of 1838, making trips to the provinces each summer in search of landscape motifs. He met Corot on one such excursion to Crémieu in 1852.

Although Daubigny achieved considerable success by the early 1850s, critics consistently complained about the rough execution and lack of finish in his landscapes. In the autumn of 1857 he purchased his famous studio boat, the "Botin," which prompted him to turn increasingly to riverscapes.

Daubigny's career reached its apogee in 1859, when he received his third first-class medal at the Salon, was awarded a major commission to decorate a government office in the Louvre, and was named Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur. Shortly thereafter, however, his fortunes began to decline as complaints over his sketchy execution intensified. In 1865 Daubigny traveled to London, where he met Whistler. and to Trouville, where Monet, Courbet, and Boudin were also working. Daubigny was first elected to the Salon jury in 1866 and became notorious for his support of the younger generation, particularly Pissarro. Cezanne, and Renoir. He resigned from the jury of the 1870 Salon over the rejection of a painting by Monet.

(Source: www.artchive.com/artchive/D/daubigny.html)

Self Portrait or Desperate Man, by Gustave Courbet. 1843-45. Oil on canvas, 45x54cm. Private Collection.

The painter Courbet started and dominated the French movement toward realism. Art critics and the public were accustomed to pretty pictures that made life look better than it was. Courbet, against much opposition, truthfully portrayed ordinary places and people.

Gustave Courbet was born on June 10, 1819, to a prosperous farming family in Ornans, France. He went to Paris in 1841, supposedly to study law, but he soon decided to study painting and learned by copying the pictures of master artists. In 1844 his self-portrait, Courbet with a Black Dog, was accepted by the Salon, an annual public exhibition of art sponsored by the influential Royal Academy.

In 1848 a political revolution in France foreshadowed a revolution in art, as people in the arts became more open to new ideas. Courbet's early work was exhibited successfully in 1849. That same year he visited his family in the countryside and produced one of his greatest paintings, The Stone-Breakers, followed by Burial at Ornans in 1850. Both were quite unlike the romantic pictures of the day because they showed peasants in realistic settings instead of the rich in glamorized situations. In 1855 he completed a huge canvas, The Artist's Studio, and, when it was refused for an important exhibition, Courbet boldly displayed his work himself near the exhibition hall.

Courbet visited Germany in 1856, where he was welcomed by the artistic community. By 1859 he was the undisputed leader of the new generation of the French realist movement. He painted all varieties of subjects, including admirable portraits and sensuous female nudes but, most of all, scenes of nature. His series of seascapes with changing storm clouds wafting overhead begun in 1865 had a great influence on impressionist painters.

Politically a socialist, Courbet took part in some revolutionary activities for which he was imprisoned for six months in 1871. He was also fined more than he could pay, so he fled to Switzerland, where he died in the town of La Tour-de-Peilz on Dec. 31, 1877.

(Source: Biography used with permission from www.artsender.com)

Camille Pissarro was born in St. Thomas in the West Indies, son of a prosperous Jewish merchant, and was sent to boarding school near Paris. By 1885 he was commited to being a painter, and formed friendships with Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, and Emile Zola. Pissarro was one of the key organizers of the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874. He was the only artist to exhibit in all eight Impressionist Exhibitions. Like Monet and sometimes accompanied by Cézanne, he painted out in the fields, a revolutionary concept at the time. In the 1880's, Pissarro joined a younger generation of artists including Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, adopting the Neo-Impressionist technique of paint application of small dots of pure, unmodulated color.

Pissarro abandoned Neo-Impressionism in the 1890's, returning to the style that captured his sensations of nature. He continued to paint rural landscapes, but he also added city subjects such as town squares and marketplaces. City or countryside, Pissarro painted with unaffected naturalism but within a classical pictorial structure." (Biography used with permission from Aquavella Galleries)

Photo courtesy of: Archives Musée Camille Pissarro, Musées de Pontoise, France.