Bustling Paris Cityscape With Horse Cart

Antoine Blanchard was born in France on November 15, 1910, in a small village near the banks of the Loire. He was the eldest of three children, and his father, a carver, managed a small carpentry and furniture shop. Blanchard would watch his father hand carve the furniture, and he began to display an artistic flair early in life — in an effort to promote this talent, his parents sent him to Blois for drawing lessons. He continued his training in Rennes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts where he studied sculpture and drawing. Upon completion of his studies, he was awarded the school’s highest award: Le Prix du Ministre.

By 1932 Blanchard left Rennes and traveled to Paris to study. He enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and after a few years entered the competition for the Prix de Rome. It was in Paris that he developed a love for the city and its street life. In 1939 Blanchard married a young woman he met in Paris, and in September of that year war broke out and he was called up for service. It was not until 1942 that he would return to his art.

Blanchard’s daughter Nicole was born in 1944 — she too would follow in the family tradition and after the birth of her two daughters, she became an artist working under the name A. Champeau. It was also around this time that Blanchard's father passed away, and he was compelled to return to his hometown and run the family business — giving him little time to paint.

The artist’s second daughter, Evelyn, was born in 1947, and by 1948, he had given control of the family business to his younger brother and returned to Paris to paint. Contemporary life in Paris had changed, and Blanchard longed for the bygone days. He began to research the Belle Époque period in Paris — reading and studying all the material on the period he could find.

Many of the subjects and scenes Blanchard portrayed were taken from images he collected of Paris during the 1890s, and he would often work on paintings for days or months before he finally felt they were complete. A.P. Larde comments in his book Antoine Blanchard, His Life His Work that he had always spent much time on his work — this explains why his production has always been rather limited, unlike the hurried and multiple proliferations of some modern artists. Delicate touches of luminous and shimmering tones produce a marvelous impression of harmony, brightness and light. Alternate shadings and lights, sensitive and mellow blending allow the artist to attain a hardly-ever reached degree of grace, of radiant and glimmering freshness.

Larde writes that Blanchard’s works are, first of all, a marvelous invitation to an ideal walk through old Paris, so different from that of today. Although a large number of historical monuments remain, today's Paris has little in common with Paris at the turn of the century; the scenery may be almost the same, but daily life as its characters has totally changed; the customs have been entirely transformed. In his landscape paintings, Blanchard invites us to relive this period by showing us pleasant strolls along embankments, squares and boulevards at a period in Parisian life when time did not count, when one had all one's time to idle, to stroll along the streets, to window-shop, to walk quietly along the boulevards or spend the afternoon in a sidewalk café.

Like his contemporary, Édouard Cortès, Blanchard devoted his artistic career to the depiction of Paris through all its daily and seasonal changes. But he was not an imitator of Cortès, but rather depicted the life of Paris at the turn of the century from his own point of view and with his own unique style. Blanchard always used small strokes, with a delicate, enveloping and mellow treatment; the slight haziness, which is a characteristic of his work, in many ways recalls the great masters of the Impressionist period.

Whether it was l'Arc de Triomphe, la Madeleine, Café de la Paix, Notre Dame or the dozens of other historical monuments and buildings of Paris, Blanchard’s focus was on the daily life of Paris at the turn of the century. His work became highly sought after, and collectors from around the world vied to acquire his new works. Today he is considered one of the leading exponents of the School of Paris painters.

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(Biography provided by Lincoln Glenn)

In the revolutionary wake of Impressionism, artists like Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin advanced the style further while firmly rejecting its limitations. Although the artists now associated with Postimpressionist art did not work as part of a group, they collectively employed an approach to expressing moments in time that was even more abstract than that of the Impressionists, and they shared an interest in moving away from naturalistic depictions to more subjective uses of vivid colors and light in their paintings.

The eighth and final Impressionist exhibition was held in Paris in 1886, and Postimpressionism — also spelled Post-Impressionism — is usually dated between then and 1905. The term “Postimpressionism” was coined by British curator and art critic Roger Fry in 1910 at the “Manet and the Postimpressionists” exhibition in London that connected their practices to the pioneering modernist art of Édouard Manet. Many Postimpressionist artists — most of whom lived in France — utilized thickly applied, vibrant pigments that emphasized the brushstrokes on the canvas.

The Postimpressionist movement’s iconic works of art include van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889) and Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884). Seurat’s approach reflected the experimental spirit of Postimpressionism, as he used Pointillist dots of color that were mixed by the eye of the viewer rather than the hand of the artist. Van Gogh, meanwhile, often based his paintings on observation, yet instilled them with an emotional and personal perspective in which colors and forms did not mirror reality. Alongside Mary Cassatt, Cézanne, Henri Matisse and Gauguin, the Dutch painter was a pupil of Camille Pissarro, the groundbreaking Impressionist artist who boldly organized the first independent painting exhibitions in late-19th-century Paris.

The boundary-expanding work of the Postimpressionist painters, which focused on real-life subject matter and featured a prioritization of geometric forms, would inspire the Nabis, German Expressionism, Cubism and other modern art movements to continue to explore abstraction and challenge expectations for art.

Find a collection of original Postimpressionist paintings, mixed media, prints and other art on 1stDibs.

Figurative art, as opposed to abstract art, retains features from the observable world in its representational depictions of subject matter. Most commonly, figurative paintings reference and explore the human body, but they can also include landscapes, architecture, plants and animals — all portrayed with realism.

While the oldest figurative art dates back tens of thousands of years to cave wall paintings, figurative works made from observation became especially prominent in the early Renaissance. Artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and other Renaissance masters created naturalistic representations of their subjects.

Pablo Picasso is lauded for laying the foundation for modern figurative art in the 1920s. Although abstracted, this work held a strong connection to representing people and other subjects. Other famous figurative artists include Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. Figurative art in the 20th century would span such diverse genres as Expressionism, Pop art and Surrealism.

Today, a number of figural artists — such as Sedrick Huckaby, Daisy Patton and Eileen Cooper — are making art that uses the human body as its subject.

Because figurative art represents subjects from the real world, natural colors are common in these paintings. A piece of figurative art can be an exciting starting point for setting a tone and creating a color palette in a room.

Browse an extensive collection of figurative paintings on 1stDibs.