Cluny Cafe

Cindy Shaoul was born in 1987 in New York. She is a visual listed American artist and formally trained. Shaoul has developed a passion for Impressionist street scenes and portraits. With a Hungarian-Persian background that comes from a lineage of artists, Shaoul has matured unique expressions with her voice and story to tell. After completing her professional education at the Emerson College in Boston, she later moved to Israel and Hungary to study culture and science while absorbing the energy of these new cities. In Budapest, she attended the Budai Art Institute from 2007–09, later returning to New York City to continue her artistic education at the Art Students League, where she worked under the tutelage of Joseph Peller, Gregg Kreutz and Thomas Torak. In 2010, she met renowned street artist LA II (Angel Ortiz), who previously worked with Keith Allen Haring in the late 1980s. LA II strongly influenced her style with the powerful impact of 1980s hip-hop and graffiti. They began collaborating on a collection of exciting street art which was later exhibited in Europe. Having built a diverse body of work since her early career ranging from portraits to colorful abstract paintings, Shaoul is constantly reinventing her style working on a range of collections from Pop Culture to City Street Scenes. Shaoul is active in New York and abroad, working diligently on expanding her technique and adding new and exciting elements to her work.

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.

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.