Men Having a Drink: Honore Daumier
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Pre 1900 item# 1141423 (stock# 2572)
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King Art
414-276-6779
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Honore Daumier was born in Marseilles, France on February 26, 1808. He was the son of a Marseille glazier who wrote a little poetry on the side and who thought so much of his own talent that in 1816 he decided to move himself and his family to Paris. Over the next dozen years, the family lived in eight different apartments in Paris. There was never enough money, and the experience of hard times would mark Daumier for life.
At the age of twelve, Honore became a messenger boy for a process server's office and then a clerk for a bookstore - jobs that opened up to him every corner of Paris. He sketched everything he saw and finally started studying art with an academician whose idea of instruction was to have his pupils copy plaster casts hour after hour. "This is not life," said Daumier, and he struck out on his own.
A year later, the boy enrolled in the Academy Suisse, an informal school where students could draw from the model in the mornings and still hold down jobs. Though Daumier was never a flamboyant bohemian, he was soon part of a group of young artists from the school, some of whom became lifelong friends. If the teenager didn't have the money for oils or canvas (presumably why so little of his student work survives), in studios and cafes he drew the way other people talked. Daumier was on his way to becoming one of the greatest draftsman who ever lived.
The lithograph was a comparatively new art in those days, but it quickly became Daumier's bread and butter. He began turning out political cartoons for an ardently antiroyalist magazine called La Caricature. One cartoon portrayed King Louis Philippe as Gargantua gobbling up every last sou in France. For such indiscretions Daumier spent six months in prison. He was the first French artist to get to the hall of fame because the people liked his little drawings, instead of the aristocracy liking his big salon paintings.
No sooner was he out again than he started producing more cartoons for another magazine. In 1846, at the age of thirty-eight, he married a young seamstress called Didine and settled down in an apartment on the Quai d'Anjou. There, in a bare attic studio, using crayons until they were so worn he could no longer hold them, and whistling the latest music-hall tunes, Daumier turned out lithographs of arrogant aristocrats, greedy landlords, sour-faced men and nagging wives, sinister lawyers and pompous judges. Sometimes his humor was gentle; occasionally it was savage; it was always perceptive.
Daumier made lithographs, 3958 in all, until he went blind at sixty-five. But all along he was painting, though no more than a handful of his canvases were shown in public before the last year of his life. Compared with the more spectacular romantics, he seemed rough and unfinished. Nor did he understand the work of the new impressionists. He was a superlative draftsman whose brush drew spare and strong, and whose preoccupation was people. No matter how ordinary their acts, Daumier gave drama and dignity to their lives. He was ruthless in his candor, but his candor was born of concern.
The painter Daumier was a rotund gentle person who cared far more for others than for himself. There were never any extras for Daumier. A year before he died at seventy, a group of friends, led by Victor Hugo, arranged a show of his paintings. It closed dismally with a deficit of 4000 francs.
Daumier's most celebrated work was a series of 'Robert Macaire' published in the 'Charivari'. His graphic works are unsurpassed for clarity, expressiveness, truth to type and nervously rhythmic life. He did not draw directly from nature, but from human nature, and this he did as fully as any artist who ever lived. But he was thought for years unworthy to occupy a single foot of space at the official Salon's shows. One Saturday night at Theodore Rousseau's barn in the village of Barbizon, a gathering that included Corot, Millet,Daubigny, Diaz and Bayre, along with Daumier himself, voted to form their own anti-Salon Independent Artists' Society.
No one ever represented with greater truth the varied type of Parisian character. He became blind in 1877, then died suddenly in 1879 of a stroke at Valmondois (Seine-et-Oise) in a house given him by Corot, the landscape painter.
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Quatre Femmes: Fernand Leger
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Pre 1940 item# 1107365 (stock# 2536)
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King Art
414-276-6779
Price on request
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Fernand Leger, French,1881-1955.Fernand Léger was born in 1881, the same year both Picasso and Braque were born, in Normandy; his father was a substantial cattle grazer. Fernand was trained as an architectural draughtsman and later worked as a professional retoucher of photographs. He was an abstract painter before the War, in which he had a brilliant record. He had visited the United States twice. In France, he lived in a villa next to some railroad tracks in a Paris suburb, and a farm in Normandy where he raised pigs and made cider.It is often said that Léger was the artist of the machine age, but he was not entirely a man of his time. He knew poverty as a child, was gassed in World War I, had to flee before the invading Nazis in World War II. But there is little of death and destruction in his work. Other men have painted with more passion, few with more exuberance.Léger returned to France at the end of 1945 after spending the war years traveling and lecturing in the United States. There had been three previous visits to America in the 1930s, all entrepreneurial adventures of only modest success. He had resumed his practice of making public appearances to explain his art to a sometimes curious, sometimes bewildered public. In addition, he enjoyed many celebrity encounters, like a holiday with Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, an evening at the theatre with James Joyce and friendships with Ezra Pound and Henry Miller. His paintings sell for up to 37 Million and his paintings are in many museums.
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Deux Femmes (Two Women): Fernand Leger
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Pre 1940 item# 1095873 (stock# 2524)
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King Art
414-276-6779
"Price on Request"
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Fernand Leger, French,1881-1955.Fernand Léger was born in 1881, the same year both Picasso and Braque were born, in Normandy; his father was a substantial cattle grazer. Fernand was trained as an architectural draughtsman and later worked as a professional retoucher of photographs. He was an abstract painter before the War, in which he had a brilliant record. He had visited the United States twice. In France, he lived in a villa next to some railroad tracks in a Paris suburb, and a farm in Normandy where he raised pigs and made cider.It is often said that Léger was the artist of the machine age, but he was not entirely a man of his time. He knew poverty as a child, was gassed in World War I, had to flee before the invading Nazis in World War II. But there is little of death and destruction in his work. Other men have painted with more passion, few with more exuberance.Léger returned to France at the end of 1945 after spending the war years traveling and lecturing in the United States. There had been three previous visits to America in the 1930s, all entrepreneurial adventures of only modest success. He had resumed his practice of making public appearances to explain his art to a sometimes curious, sometimes bewildered public. In addition, he enjoyed many celebrity encounters, like a holiday with Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, an evening at the theatre with James Joyce and friendships with Ezra Pound and Henry Miller. His paintings sell for up to 37 Million and his paintings are in many museums.
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Rysdale Hall from the Wood: John Ruskin
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Pre 1900 item# 968818 (stock# 2410)
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King Art
414-276-6779
"$30,000."
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John Ruskin, British, 1819-1900, Rysdale in Coniston, England. John Ruskin was the hero of Coniston where his works are housed in The Ruskin Museum. He was an artist, radical and seer. He is known for his works on paper using pencil and watercolor, many of which are from his extensive European travels. This beautiful pencil and watercolor piece is a very rare drawing of the Rysdale House from the Wood where he lived in England. It is 29.5 cm (11.5")W by 21 cm (8.25")H in pencil with sepia and sienna ink. It is in good condition and signed lower right J. Ruskin. His watercolors sell for up to $464,491 at auction.
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