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I ran across this from last May's trip to England. Don't know why, but it amuses me somehow.

From: www.artic.edu/artexplorer/search.php?tab=2&resource=468

By the end of his life Paul Cézanne was recognized as one of the great masters of his era. His treatment of color and form as inseparable descriptors of the physical world was nothing short of revolutionary.

Cézanne was born in Aix, where his schoolmate was Emile Zola. The friendship ended in 1886 with the publication of Zola's L'Oeuvre, a novel containing an unflattering portrayal of the painter. Cézanne prepared to be a lawyer, worked as a banker, and then studied painting in Paris. His canvases from 1861 to 1871, mostly portraits, are characterized by dark tones, thick paint, and strong lighting.

Camille Pissarro convinced Cézanne to adopt the broken brushwork and light palette of the impressionists. He exhibited at the first and third impressionist group shows, but soon lost faith in the goals of the movement. He claimed that his ambition was to "make of impressionism something solid and durable like the art of museums." By 1883 the artist was conveying mass and volume through a series of hatched strokes.

A meticulous and deliberate painter, Cézanne often worked on his canvases for several months. A substantial inheritance from his father in 1886 allowed him to live comfortably in Provence. He was a shy man who adopted a deliberately crude, rustic manner to keep people away. His art had a profound impact on early twentieth-century artists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who recognized Cézanne's post-impressionism as an essential precursor of cubism.

From www.artic.edu/artexplorer/search.php?tab=2&resource=209:

A look at Monet's still life painting and his ability to both animate the scene and anchor it with a sense of stability.

Claude Monet took up still-life painting for a time around 1880. This traditional genre may seem an unlikely arena in which to stage a career shift, but Monet hoped to expand his market during a period of economic recession. He renewed his attempts to gain access to the Salon and tried to form associations with dealers other than Paul Durand-Ruel. In addition to being easier to sell than landscapes, still lifes allowed the artist to continue his experimentation with the textures and colors of nature during periods when bad weather prohibited him from painting outdoors.

Here, Monet depicted an assortment of two different kinds of apples, together with green and red grapes, and introduced an element of animation, even suspense. This still life is anything but still: the smaller apples at the lower right seem ready to roll off the steeply angled table, and the folds of the cloth appear to ripple like waves. Yet the artist's control over the objects is evident, giving the composition a sense of stability and vitality. Not only did Monet adopt a magisterial view from above, but he also anchored the fruits and basket with palpable, grayish-green shadows. Exploring the possibilities of materials at hand—one of the central challenges of still-life painting—Monet found several ways to use the same dabs of white pigment: on the grapes, they represent translucent fragility; on the large apples, matte solidity; and on the little apples, glossy sheen.

Still life never became central to Monet's repertory, but it is tempting to look from this brief experiment to those of his colleagues—most notably Paul Cézanne, who would bring the genre to new heights of complexity and beauty.

I ran across this in the archives from my trip to England last May - I think we're all looking forward to springtime about now.....

From the museum label: The setting of "Near the Lake" has not been identified, although it could perhaps be the tourist destination of Lac Enghien, about fifty minutes by train from Paris via Argenteuil. Renoir used his friends as models to celebrate the pleasures of leisure and companionship away from the city center. Along with earlier scenes of waterside conviviality, such as "Lunch at the Restaurant Fournaise", this painting looks forward to Renoir's most celebrated masterpiece, "The Luncheon of the Boating Party" (1880-81 - Phillips Collection, Washington, DC).

From www.artic.edu/artexplorer/search.php?tab=2&resource=490:

With Claude Monet, Renoir is known for his contributions to impressionism as the style developed in the late 1860s and early 1870s. In order to capture light and movement, their technique made use of broken brushstrokes and bold combinations of colors.

Like that of his contemporaries, much of Renoir's work depicted pleasurable occasions. He apparently once shocked his teacher by saying, "if painting were not a pleasure to me I should certainly not do it."

Renoir was born in Limoges in southwest France, where as a teenager he was apprenticed to a porcelain painter. In the early 1860s he attended Charles Gleyre's studio, where he met Monet, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille. In 1869 Renoir and Monet worked together at La Grenouillère, where they created the style that was eventually labeled impressionism.

Renoir participated in several of the group's shows. He began to move toward a classicizing phase in 1879; this development was indebted in part to the work of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, which emphasized pure, clear line. It was also reinforced by a visit to Algeria in 1881, followed by a trip to Italy. Renoir's family and circle of acquaintances, as well as landscapes and still lifes, were his chief subjects from the late 1890s until his death. His late style combined the classicism of the 1880s with softer, almost diaphanous glazes of paint.