Developments in the 19th Century


 

Art Styles in 19th century - Art Map


 

SYMBOLISM

in

FRANCE



(Between Romanticism and Expressionism)




 

Louis Anquetin

(1861 - 1932)
 

Self-Portrait

b Etrepagny, nr Gisors, 26 Jan 1861; d Paris, 19 Aug 1932.

 French painter. He came to Paris in 1882 and studied art at the Ateliers of Bonnat and Cormon, where he was a contemporary and friend of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Emile Bernard and Vincent van Gogh. His early work shows the influence of Impressionism and of Edgar Degas. In 1887 Anquetin and Bernard devised an innovative method of painting using strong black contour lines and flat areas of colour; Anquetin aroused much comment when he showed his new paintings, including the striking Avenue de Clichy: Five O’Clock in the Evening (1887; Hartford, CT, Wadsworth Atheneum) at the exhibition of Les XX in Brussels and at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1888. The new style, dubbed Cloisonnisme by the critic Edouard Dujardin (1861–1949), resulted from a study of stained glass, Japanese prints and other so-called ‘primitive’ sources; it was close to the Synthetist experiments of Paul Gauguin and was adopted briefly by van Gogh during his Arles period. Anquetin’s works were shown alongside Gauguin’s and Bernard’s at the Café Volpini exhibition in 1889, where they attracted considerable attention among younger artists.