ARTISTS 1800-2000

Claude Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. His youth was spent in Le Havre, where he first excelled as a caricaturist but was then converted to landscape painting by his early mentor Boudin, from whom he derived his firm predilection for painting out of doors. In 1859 he studied in Paris at the Atelier Suisse and formed a friendship with Pissarro. After two years' military service in Algiers, he returned to Le Havre and met Jongkind, to whom he said he owed `the definitive education of my eye'. He then, in 1862, entered the studio of Gleyre in Paris and there met Renoir, Sisley, and Bazille, with whom he was to form the nucleus of the Impressionist group. Monet's devotion to painting out of doors is illustrated by the famous story concerning one of his most ambitious early works, Women in the Garden (Musée d'Orsay, Paris; 1866-67). The picture is about 2.5 meters high and to enable him to paint all of it outside he had a trench dug in the garden so that the canvas could be raised or lowered by pulleys to the height he required. Courbet visited him when he was working on it and said Monet would not paint even the leaves in the background unless the lighting conditions were exactly right. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) he took refuge in England with Pissarro: he studied the work of Constable and Turner, painted the Thames and London parks, and met the dealer Durand-Ruel, who was to become one of the great champions of the Impressionists. From 1871 to 1878 Monet lived at Argenteuil, a village on the Seine near Paris, and here were painted some of the most joyous and famous works of the Impressionist movement, not only by Monet, but by his visitors Manet, Renoir and Sisley. In 1878 he moved to Vétheuil and in 1883 he settled at Giverny, also on the Seine, but about 40 miles from Paris. After having experienced extreme poverty, Monet began to prosper. By 1890 he was successful enough to buy the house at Giverny he had previously rented and in 1892 he married his mistress, with whom he had begun an affair in 1876, three years before the death of his first wife. From 1890 he concentrated on series of pictures in which he painted the same subject at different times of the day in different lights---Haystacks or Grainstacks (1890-91) and Rouen Cathedral (1891-95) are the best known. He continued to travel widely, visiting London and Venice several times (and also Norway as a guest of Queen Christiana), but increasingly his attention was focused on the celebrated water-garden he created at Giverny, which served as the theme for the series of paintings on Water-lilies that began in 1899 and grew to dominate his work completely (in 1914 he had a special studio built in the grounds of his house so he could work on the huge canvases). In his final years he was troubled by failing eyesight, but he painted until the end. He was enormously prolific and many major galleries have examples of his work.

He powerfully influenced the current of Expressionism in modern art. His work, all of it produced during a period of only 10 years, hauntingly conveys through its striking colour, coarse brushwork, and contoured forms the anguish of a mental illness that eventually resulted in suicide. His uncle was a partner in the international firm of picture dealers Goupil and Co. and in 1869 van Gogh went to work in the branch at The Hague. In 1873 he was sent to the London branch and fell unsuccessfully in love with the daughter of the landlady. This was the first of several disastrous attempts to find happiness with a woman, and his unrequited passion affected him so badly that he was dismissed from his job. He returned to England in 1876 as an unpaid assistant at a school, and his experience of urban squalor awakened a religious zeal and a longing to serve his fellow men. His father was a Protestant pastor, and van Gogh first trained for the ministry, but he abandoned his studies in 1878 and went to work as a lay preacher among the impoverished miners of the grim Borinage district in Belgium. In his zeal he gave away his own worldly goods to the poor and was dismissed for his literal interpretation of Christ's teaching. He remained in the Borinage, suffering acute poverty and a spiritual crisis, until 1880, when he found that art was his vocation and the means by which he could bring consolation to humanity. From this time he worked at his new `mission' with single-minded frenzy, and although he often suffered from extreme poverty and undernourishment, his output in the ten remaining years of his life was prodigious: about 800 paintings and a similar number of drawings. From 1881 to 1885 van Gogh lived in the Netherlands, sometimes in lodgings, supported by his devoted brother Theo, who regularly sent him money from his own small salary. In keeping with his humanitarian outlook he painted peasants and workers, the most famous picture from this period being The Potato Eaters (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; 1885). Of this he wrote to Theo: `I have tried to emphasize that those people, eating their potatoes in the lamp-light have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labour, and how they have honestly earned their food'. In 1885 van Gogh moved to Antwerp on the advice of Antoine Mauve (a cousin by marriage), and studied for some months at the Academy there. Academic instruction had little to offer such an individualist, however, and in February 1886 he moved to Paris, where he met Pissarro, Degas, Gauguin, Seurat, and Toulouse-Lautrec. At this time his painting underwent a violent metamorphosis under the combined influence of Impressionism and Japanese woodcuts, losing its moralistic flavour of social realism. Van Gogh became obsessed by the symbolic and expressive values of colors and began to use them for this purpose rather than, as did the Impressionists, for the reproduction of visual appearances, atmosphere, and light. `Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes,' he wrote, `I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself more forcibly'.

February 3, 1894 marked the birth of one of America's most beloved artists, Norman Percevel Rockwell. Norman Rockwell was born in his parent's Upper West Side Manhattan apartment. The second son of businessman Jarvis Waring and Ann Mary (Hill) Rockwell, young Norman showed talent from the beginning. In fact, Rockwell remembered his first sketches as drawings of warships from the Spanish-American war. Jarvis Waring enjoyed reading various literary masterpieces aloud to his family, especially the works of classic author Charles Dickens. Young Norman would attentively listen as he sketched the characters while his father read the story aloud. Creative talent is a hard thing to repress; some say that art "flows" out of artists. Rockwell was no different. During his high school years, he studied at the Chase School of Fine and Applied Art, every Saturday and most Wednesdays. Rockwell's love for art was steadily growing at this point and, during his sophomore year, he left high school to attend the National Academy of Design. He described the school as "stiff and scholarly," opting to transfer to the Art Students League in 1910. Rockwell's years at the Art Students League proved fruitful for the young painter/illustrator. At the tender age of sixteen, and still a student at the Art Students League, he painted his first commission of four Christmas cards. The following year he accepted his first real job as an artist illustrating the "Tell me Why Stories," a series of children's books. Shortly after that he was hired as the art director of "Boys' Life" magazine, the official publication of the Boy Scouts of America. Rockwell continued his work with the Scouts, illustrating the official Boy Scout calendar for fifty years. Following his success with the "Tell Me Why Series," Rockwell moved to New Rochelle, New York and set up a studio with cartoonist Clyde Forsythe. He began freelancing his services to magazines such as "Life," "Literary Digest" and "County Gentleman." As his portfolio grew, so did his confidence in his artwork. In 1916 the 22 year-old Rockwell mustered up some courage and sold his first cover to "The Saturday Evening Post," perhaps the most prestigious magazine of that era. The picture was of an uncomfortable, young boy wearing a bowler hat, dressed somewhat maturely for his age and diligently pushing a baby carriage past a group of sneering boys in baseball uniforms. The artwork, entitled "Mother's Day Off," ran on the cover of the May 20, 1916 issue; that same year he married his first wife, teacher Irene O'Connor. Their marriage ended in 1928.

Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972) is one of the world's most famous graphic artists. Maurits Cornelis, or "Mauk" as he came to be nicknamed, was born in Leeuwarden, The Netherlands. He was the youngest son of civil engineer George Arnold Escher and his second wife, Sara Gleichman. He was a sickly child, and was placed in a special school at the age of seven and failed the second grade. In 1903, the family moved to Arnhem where he took carpentry and piano lessons until he was thirteen years old. From 1903 until 1918 he attended primary school and secondary school. Though he excelled at drawing, his grades were generally poor. In 1919, Escher attended the Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts. He briefly studied architecture, but he failed a number of subjects (partly due to a persistent skin infection) and switched to decorative arts. Here he studied under Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, with whom he would remain friends for years. In 1922 Escher left the school, having gained experience in drawing and making woodcuts. In 1922, an important year of his life, Escher traveled through Italy (Florence, San Gimignano, Volterra, Siena) and Spain (Madrid, Toledo, Granada). He was impressed by the Italian countryside and by the Alhambra, a fourteenth-century Moorish castle in Granada, Spain. He came back to Italy regularly in the following years. In Italy he met Jetta Umiker, whom he married in 1924. The young couple settled down in Rome and stayed there until 1935, when the political climate under Mussolini became unbearable. Their son, Giorgio Arnaldo Escher, named after his grandfather, was born in Rome. The family next moved to Château-d'Œx, Switzerland where they remained for two years. Escher, who had been very fond of and inspired by the landscapes in Italy, was decidedly unhappy in Switzerland, so in 1937, the family moved again, to Ukkel, a small town near Brussels, Belgium. World War II forced them to move in January 1941, this time to Baarn, the Netherlands, where Escher lived until 1970. Most of Escher's better-known pictures date from this period. The sometimes cloudy, cold, wet weather of the Netherlands allowed him to focus intently on his works, and only during 1962, when he underwent surgery, was there a time when no new images were created. Escher moved to the Rosa-Spier house in Laren in 1970, a retirement home for artists where he had his own studio. He died at the home on 27 March 1972, at 73 years of age.

Andy Warhol was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became famous worldwide for his work as a painter, avant-garde filmmaker, record producer, author, and public figure known for his membership in wildly diverse social circles that included bohemian street people, distinguished intellectuals, Hollywood celebrities and wealthy aristocrats. Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books, and feature and documentary films. He coined the expression "15 minutes of fame."