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20th-century French male artists

  • Joseph-Noël Sylvestre4 minJoseph-Noël Sylvestre was born on the 24th of June 1847 in Béziers, a city in the South-West of France that would send him on a long journey toward the grand stages of Paris and Rome. His name is not the most familiar in the history of…
  • Edgar Degas15 minEdgar Degas was born on the 19th of July 1834 in Paris, under the full name Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas. He later adopted the simpler spelling himself, a quiet act of self-invention that suited a man who spent his life reshaping how art…
  • Claude Monet10 minClaude Monet was born on the 14th of November 1840, on the fifth floor of 45 rue Laffitte in Paris, and died on the 5th of December 1926, having spent the final two decades of his life painting the same lily pond in his garden at Giverny.…
  • Paul Cézanne10 minPaul Cézanne was born on the 19th of January 1839 at 28 rue de l'Opéra in Aix-en-Provence, a city he would never truly leave behind. He died on the 22nd of October 1906, and within a year of his death, some of the most consequential…
  • Henri Matisse11 minHenri Émile Benoît Matisse did not pick up a paintbrush until he was nineteen years old. He had been trained as a lawyer, and was working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis in northern France when his mother brought him art…
  • Pierre-Auguste Renoir9 minPierre-Auguste Renoir painted the portrait of the composer Richard Wagner in just thirty-five minutes. It was the 15th of January 1882, and Wagner received the young Frenchman at his home in Palermo, Sicily. That speed was not…
  • Marcel Duchamp13 minMarcel Duchamp walked into a New York exhibition hall in 1917 and submitted a urinal for display. He had signed it with a pseudonym, "R. Mutt", and titled it Fountain. The show committee declared it was not art and turned it away. Duchamp…
  • Paul Gauguin14 minPaul Gauguin was born in Paris on the 7th of June 1848, in the middle of a year when revolutions were sweeping across Europe. His father was a liberal journalist whose newspaper was shut down by French authorities, forcing the family to…
  • Marc Chagall15 minMarc Chagall spent nearly a century alive on earth, and almost every one of those years was spent either fleeing something or painting it. Born Moishe Shagal in 1887 in a Jewish family near Vitebsk, in what is now Belarus, he died in 1985…
  • Jean Cocteau11 minJean Cocteau called himself a poet, and only a poet, even after he had written novels, staged plays, drawn erotica, and directed films that critics still study. He divided his entire output into kinds of poetry: poésie de roman, poésie de…
  • Édouard Detaille4 minJean-Baptiste Édouard Detaille entered the world on the 5th of October 1848 in Paris. He grew up in Picardy within a prosperous military family. His grandfather had supplied arms to Napoleon during his campaigns. This background placed him…
  • Wassily Kandinsky13 minWassily Kandinsky stood in his studio one day and stared at a painting on the wall for a long moment before realising it was his own work, hanging upside down. That disorienting pause, according to some art historians, cracked something…
  • Jean-Léon Gérôme12 minJean-Léon Gérôme was born on the 11th of May 1824 in Vesoul, a small town in the Haute-Saône region of France, and by 1880 he had become arguably the most famous living artist in the world. That rise was not built on one triumphant canvas…

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