Edgar Degas | Sculpture

Degas’ sculpture stands outside the mainstream of nineteenth-century French sculpture. He was never interested in creating public monuments, and, with one exception, neither did he display his sculpture publicly. The exception was "The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer".

It was shown in the sixth Impressionist exhibition held in Paris in 1881, but the work has little to do with Impressionism. Modeled in wax and wearing a real bodice, stockings, shoes, tulle skirt, and horsehair wig with a satin ribbon, the figure astonished Degas’ contemporaries, not only for its unorthodox use of materials, but also and above all for its realism, judged brutish by some. The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer was not seen again publicly until April 1920.

Grand Prix de Rome (1663-1968) | Art history

Dea Roma, Viale Trinità dei Monti, Villa Medici, Roma

Prix de Rome, in full Grand Prix de Rome, any of a group of scholarships awarded🎨 by the French government between 1663-1968 to enable young French artists🎨 to study in Rome.

It was so named because the students who won the grand, or first, prize in each artistic category went to study at the Académie de France in Rome.

Louise Abbéma | Belle Époque painter

Louise Abbéma was a French painter (1853-1927), sculptor and designer of the Belle Époque.

Abbéma was born in Étampes, Essonne. She was born into a wealthy Parisian family, who were well connected in the local artistic community.

She began painting in her early teens, and studied under such notables of the period as Charles Joshua Chaplin, Jean-Jacques Henner and Carolus-Duran.

She first received recognition for her work at age 23 when she painted a portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, her lifelong friend and possibly her lover.

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret | The petit Savoyard eating in front of an entrance to a house, 1877

Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret (January 7, 1852 - July 3, 1929), was one of the leading French artists🎨 of the Naturalist school.

He was born in Paris, the son of a tailor, and was raised by his grandfather after his father emigrated to Brazil. Later he added his grandfather's name, Bouveret, to his own.

From 1869 he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under Alexandre Cabanel🎨 and Jean-Léon Gérôme. In 1873 he opened his own studio with a fellow student Gustave-Claude-Etienne Courtois.

Berthe Morisot | "Ho peccato, ho sofferto, ho espiato"!

"Amo solo le novità estreme o le cose del passato!"

"Fissare qualcosa di ciò che passa…"

"Con mio grande stupore e felicità ho raccolto i più grandi elogi".

"Il ricordo è vero e imperituro, ciò che è sprofondato, che è cancellato, non valeva la pena di essere vissuto; dunque non c’è stato".

John Poppleton | Bodyscapes ‎painter

John Poppleton was born and raised in the suburbs of Sacramento, CA. He was introduced to photography during his junior year of high school in 1988.

He pursued all areas of photography very passionately as a hobby until becoming a professional portrait photographer in 1993, after several friends convinced him to photograph their weddings.

It has always been John’s goal to create something original and different but fantasy portraits were never part of the plan.

Charles Joshua Chaplin | Academic painter

Charles Joshua Chaplin (1825-1891) was a French painter and engraver.

His father was British and his mother french, and he only became a naturalized Frenchman in 1886, although he worked in France all his life.

He was a pupil at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1840, and he regularly visited the studio of Michel-Martin Drolling, whose pupils included Paul Baudry, Jean-Jacques Henner and Jules Breton.

Grigory Gluckmann | The Ballet dancers

Russian-born American painter Gluckmann (Glickman) Grigory Efimovich / Глюкман (Гликман) Григорий Ефимович (1898-1973) was born in Vitebsk, Russia, and studied for three years at the Art Academy in Moscow.

Because of the Revolution, in 1920 escaped to Germany, where he continued his art studies, and then went on to Florence, where he spent a year studying and familiarizing himself with the masters of the Renaissance.

After his Italian sojourn, he settled in Paris in 1924 to work and to launch his professional career as an artist.