Jean-François Raffaëlli
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Jean-François Raffaëlli (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.
He was born in Paris, and showed an interest in music and theatre before becoming a painter in 1870. He exhibited a landscape painting at the Salon that year. In October 1871 he began three months of study under Jean-Léon Gérôme at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris; he had no other formal training.[1]
He produced primarily costume pictures until 1876, when he began to depict the people of his time—particularly peasants, workers, and rag-pickers 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.[2] Degas, who favored expanding the scale of the Impressionist exhibits by including more realists, invited Raffaëlli and others to participate in the group's exhibitions of 1880 and 1881. Raffaëlli's inclusion in the exhibitions bitterly divided the group; not only was he not an Impressionist, but he threatened to dominate the 1880 exhibition with an outsized display of 37 works. Monet did not exhibit, complaining, "The little chapel has become a commonplace school which opens its doors to the first dauber to come along."[3]
After 1890 Raffaëlli shifted his attention from the suburbs of Paris to city itself, painting street scenes that were well received by the public and the critics. In the later years of his life, he concentrated on color printmaking. He died in Paris in 1924.
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[edit] References
- Gordon, Robert; Forge, Andrew (1988). Degas. New York: Harry N. Abrams. ISBN 0-8109-1142-6
- Turner, J. (2000). From Monet to Cézanne: Late 19th-century French Artists. Grove Art. New York: St Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-22971-2
