There are many important anniversaries to celebrate in paintings this year: here are some tasters.
Degas
Moreau’s extraordinary paintings have been described as Symbolist, Decadent, even Surrealist. They are notoriously difficult to read – here is some help.
He built his career from scratch three times, but today is known for his paintings of fashionable women. There is more to his art than that.
In his later works, he turned to biting satire of the courts, artists, and even their dealers. His was a very different form of Impression.
An Impressionist, whose incisive drawings and paintings were often controversial – and now almost forgotten.
Some of the Impressionists did paint (possibly) narrative works. But they didn’t always work out.
Conclusions: did he paint Impressions, and was he a member of the Impressionist group?
The final four and a half years of De Nittis’s career were busy, productive, and successful.
Almost forgotten today, he was technically brilliant, and a full-bore Impressionist. Here is his life and paintings to 1879.
A painter in enamel, three assorted landscape painters, and probably the most gifted artist of the whole group.
The Eclectic Light Company 