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Description: | Signed: yes Description: Jean-Louis Forain began his career as a caricaturist providing illustrations for journals such as La Vie Parisienne. With a few lines he was able to express a characteristic attitude, gesture or quality of disposition. His drawings of social satire were praised by the critics. As a painter Forain was most influenced by Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet, but like his friend Honore Daumier he worked with a limited, usually subdued palette. He exhibited with the Impressionists from 1879 to 1886, producing humorous or poignant works of broad realism with a strong sense of narrative satire. In his works, which were particularly admired by his friends Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, he treated varied subjects including the theatre, the court and landscape. The Southampton painting of The Fisherman, made in 1884, is a fine example of Forain's work. It reveals both the artist's distance from the main concerns of Impressionist technique and his gift for humorous subject matter. The stocky figure of the fisherman (once identified as Degas' friend Diego Martelli) has been made the object of gentle humour by being precariously positioned with his rod and dog at the end of a long plank that over-hangs the still waters of a river. The painting is unusual however for its evocative description of the failing light at dusk. The bold, almost geometric simplicity of the composition may owe some debt to Paul Cézanne who was friends with Forain. | Subjects: | landscape; figure; animal dog | Source: | Vads | Creator: | Artist: Forain, Jean Louis (French painter, lithographer, and caricaturist, 1852-1931) Æ | Identifier: | http://www.vads.ac.uk/large.php?uid=8403... | Go to resource |
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