French painter
Jean-Francois Raffaelli
(April 20, 1850 ? February 11, 1924) was a French
realist
painter, sculptor, and
printmaker
who exhibited with the
Impressionists
. He was also active as an actor and writer.
Biography
[
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]
Born in Paris, he was of
Tuscan
descent through his paternal grandparents.
[1]
He showed an interest in music and theatre before becoming a painter in 1870. One of his landscape paintings was accepted for exhibition at the
Salon
in that same year. In October 1871 he began three months of study under
Jean-Leon Gerome
at the
Ecole des Beaux-Arts
in Paris; he had no other formal training.
[2]
Raffaelli produced primarily costume pictures until 1876, when he began to depict the people of his time?particularly
peasants
, workers, and
ragpickers
seen in the suburbs of Paris?in a realistic style. His new work was championed by influential critics such as
J.-K. Huysmans
, as well as by
Edgar Degas
.
The ragpicker became for Raffaelli a symbol of the alienation of the individual in modern society. Art historian Barbara S. Fields has written of Raffaelli's interest in the
positivist
philosophy of
Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine
, which:
led him to articulate a theory of realism that he christened
caracterisme
. He hoped to set himself apart from those unthinking, so-called realist artists whose art provided the viewer with only a literal depiction of nature. His careful observation of man in his milieu paralleled the anti-aesthetic, anti-romantic approach of the literary
Naturalists
, such as
Zola
and Huysmans.
[2]
Degas invited Raffaelli to participate in the Impressionist exhibitions of 1880 and 1881, an action that bitterly divided the group; not only was Raffaelli not an Impressionist, but he threatened to dominate the 1880 exhibition with his outsized display of 37 works.
Monet
, resentful of Degas's insistence on expanding the Impressionist exhibitions by including several realists, chose not to exhibit, complaining, "The little chapel has become a commonplace school which opens its doors to the first dauber to come along."
[3]
An example of Raffaelli's work from this period is
Les buveurs d'absinthe
(1881, in the California Palace of Legion of Honor Art Museum in San Francisco). Originally titled
Les declasses,
the painting was widely praised at the 1881 exhibit.
[4]
After winning the Legion d'honneur in 1889, Raffaelli shifted his attention from the suburbs of Paris to city itself, and the street scenes that resulted were well received by the public and the critics. He made a number of sculptures, but these are known today only through photographs.
[2]
His work was also part of the
painting event
in the
art competition
at the
1912 Summer Olympics
.
[5]
In the later years of his life, he concentrated on color printmaking. Raffaelli died in Paris on February 11, 1924.
Notes
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]
References
[
edit
]
- Gordon, Robert; Forge, Andrew (1988).
Degas
. New York: Harry N. Abrams.
ISBN
0-8109-1142-6
- Turner, J. (2000).
From Monet to Cezanne: Late 19th-century French Artists
. Grove Art. New York: St Martin's Press.
ISBN
0-312-22971-2
- Young, Marnin. "Heroic Indolence: Realism and The Politics of Time in Raffaelli's
Absinthe Drinkers
,"
The Art Bulletin
90, no. 2 (June 2008): 235-259.
External links
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