Celine Poster

Manuel Robbe lived in Paris all his life, creating images that echoed the polished splendor of the Belle Epoque. He exhibited often at the Salons, first at the Société des Artistes Français (winning a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1900) and after 1905 at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. As the turn of the century, critic Gabriel Moury noted, Robbe's favorite subject was the "modern woman," her costumes, and activities and the visual elegance of her world. Absorbing the influence of Impressionism, particularly Renoir, Robbe applied a sensitive painterly touch to techniques that fit with the new paradigm of mass production. He designed and printed posters for corsets and bicycles, seeing, like Toulouse-Lautrec, the artistic potential of the new commercial era. Robbe also created illustrations for humorous magazines and made colored etchings of the works of contemporary artists. He was a favorite artist of the celebrated Parisian print publisher Edmond Sagot, who promoted his work. Robbe was a pioneer of the à la poupée process, enabling an artist to print multiple colors from a single plate. He invented his engraving technique known as “sugar-life,” using a mixture of sugar, India ink and gum Arabic on Zinc plates. The plates were heated, intricately worked and color was applied with brushes made of rags; Robbe then used his fingers to perfect the tones. Such technical mastery allowed Robbe to make each image unique, imbued with a lushness and immediacy befitting of the era in which he lived.

Emerging in 19th-century France, Impressionist art embraced loose brushwork and plein-air painting to respond to the movement of daily life. Although the pioneers of the Impressionist movement — Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir — are now household names, their work was a radical break with an art scene led and shaped by academic traditions for around two centuries. These academies had oversight of a curriculum that emphasized formal drawing, painting and sculpting techniques and historical themes.

The French Impressionists were influenced by a group of artists known as the Barbizon School, who painted what they witnessed in nature. The rejection of pieces by these artists and the later Impressionists from the salons culminated in a watershed 1874 exhibition in Paris that was staged outside of the juried systems. After a work of Monet’s was derided by a critic as an unfinished “impression,” the term was taken as a celebration of their shared interest in capturing fleeting moments as subject matter, whether the shifting weather on rural landscapes or the frenzy of an urban crowd. Rather than the exacting realism of the academic tradition, Impressionist paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings represented how an artist saw a world in motion.

Many Impressionist painters were inspired by the perspectives in imported Japanese prints alongside these shifts in European painting — Édouard Manet drew on ukiyo-e woodblock prints and depicted Japanese design in his Portrait of Émile Zola, for example. American artists such as Mary Cassatt and William Merritt Chase, who studied abroad, were impacted by the work of the French artists, and by the late 19th century American Impressionism had its own distinct aesthetics with painters responding to the rapid modernization of cities through quickly created works that were vivid with color and light.

Find a collection of authentic Impressionist art on 1stDibs.

Bring energy and an array of welcome colors and textures into your space by decorating with figurative fine-art prints and works on paper.

Figurative art stands in contrast to abstract art, which is more expressive than representational. The oldest-known work of figurative art is a figurative painting — specifically, a rock painting of an animal made over 40,000 years ago in Borneo. This remnant of a remote past has long faded, but its depiction of a cattle-like creature in elegant ocher markings endures.

Since then, figurative art has evolved significantly as it continues to represent the world, including a breadth of works on paper, including printmaking. This includes woodcuts, which are a type of relief print with perennial popularity among collectors. The artist carves into a block and applies ink to the raised surface, which is then pressed onto paper. There are also planographic prints, which use metal plates, stones or other flat surfaces as their base. The artist will often draw on the surface with grease crayon and then apply ink to those markings. Lithographs are a common version of planographic prints.

Figurative art printmaking was especially popular during the height of the Pop art movement, and this kind of work can be seen in artist Andy Warhol’s extensive use of photographic silkscreen printing. Everyday objects, logos and scenes were given a unique twist, whether in the style of a comic strip or in the use of neon colors.

Explore an impressive collection of figurative art prints for sale on 1stDibs and read about how to arrange your wall art.