Loir luigi biography for kids

Antoine Blanchard Authentications & Appraisals

Separating Blanchard Forgeries and Imitations from Authentic Works

By Jeffrey Morseburg

My family began dealing in the works of the French painter Antoine Blanchard (born as Marcel Masson) more than forty years ago, and because of our long association with the artist, I am asked to authenticate and appraise his paintings for dealers, collectors and galleries.   There are few other 20-century painters whose market is as obscured by copies, imitations and forgeries as that of the Antoine Blanchard.   While it is good news that forgeries are less of a problem in the art market than the layman may believe, the bad news is that Antoine Blanchard’s works were copied early and often, and now even auction houses seem to be unable to discern the good paintings from those that are clearly fakes – if they even care to look at them with a critical eye.  (Sometimes, when a dealer is able to buy a Blanchard for a price that is well under market value, they should be – but are not always – suspicious as to its origins; more often, dealers and auctioneers can be as unsure of what characterizes a “good” painting as collectors are.) Blanchard forgeries are so common that they make up a significant part of the market for his work, a situation that clearly needs to be rectified so that collectors can regain confidence in what they are buying. I hope that this modest essay will shed some light on the problem of Blanchard forgeries and serve as a helpful guide in separating the authentic paintings from the imitations.

 An Inauthentic Antoine Blanchard

Antoine Blanchard Forgeries Began Early

In most circumstances artists only begin to copy or fake the work of other better-known painters decades or even centuries after the authentic works were done. This gives the researcher or expert an advantage, because a forgery pops up on the market long after the authentic works, which naturally attracts sc

The artist I am looking at today is George Hendrik Breitner, the nineteenth century Dutch painter, who was best known for his realistic depiction of Amsterdam street and harbour scenes.   He was also of great importance in what was later termed Amsterdam Impressionism.

George Hendrik Breitner was born in Rotterdam on September 12, 1857.  He and his younger brother, Godfridus, were the children of Johan Wilhelm Heinrich Breitner and Marie Anne Henriette Gortmans.  His father worked in the grain business and George, after finishing primary school, joined the Palthe & Haentjes, grain company, as a clerk.  At the age of seventeen George went to the Delft Polytechnic School for vocational training.  George showed a great talent for drawing and in January 1876, aged eighteen, partly because of the intercession of the artist Charles Rochussen, his father agreed to have him enrolled on a four-year course at the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten (Royal Academy of Art) in The Hague.  He was an exemplary student and won a number of awards including a second prize for composition and two years later took the first prize in a live model competition.  In October 1877 he obtained his teaching certificate and during 1878 and 1879 he taught art at the Leiden Art Society (Ars Aemula Naturae), originally the Leiden Guild of St. Luke.

In 1880 Breitner was expelled from the Art Academy for misconduct, his misdemeanour said to have been that he had destroyed the regulations-board.  Around that time, he shared lodgings of the Dutch landscape painter of the Hague School, Willem Marisat, at the Oud Rozenburg house in The Hague.  Marisat became Breitner’s friend and tutor. It was through Marisat that Breitner was accepted as a member of the Pulchri Studio, an important artist’s society in that city. 

It was here that he met fellow member Hendrik Mesdag, a one-time banker but later an accomplished artist, whose forte was his maritime paintings,

French painter (1882–1969)

Edouard Léon Cortès (1882–1969) was a French painter of French and Spanish ancestry. He is known as "Le Poète Parisien de la Peinture" or "the Parisian Poet of Painting" because of his diverse Paris cityscapes in a variety of weather and night settings.

Personal life

Cortes was born on August 6, 1882, in Lagny-sur-Marne, about twenty miles east of Paris. His father, Antonio Cortés, had been a painter for the Spanish Royal Court.

In 1914 Cortès married Fernande Joyeuse, with whom he had a daughter, Jacqueline Simone, in 1916. The depiction of a woman with a child is repeated throughout his work, a possible reference to Joyeuse and Jacqueline.

Although Cortès was a pacifist, when war came close to his native village he was compelled to enlist in a French Infantry Regiment at the age of 32. Sent to the front lines, Cortès was wounded by a bayonet, evacuated to a military hospital, and awarded the Croix de Guerre. After recovery he was reassigned to use his artistic talent to sketch enemy positions. Later in life his convictions led him to refuse the Légion d'Honneur from the French Government. In 1919 he was demobilized.

His wife died in 1918, and the following year he married his sister-in-law, Lucienne Joyeuse.

Cortès lived a simple life amid a close circle of friends. He died on November 26, 1969, in Lagny, and has a street named in his honour.

Painting history

At the age of 17, Cortès began his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His first exhibition in 1901 brought him immediate recognition. Cortès stressed his independence. Once, in responding to a journalist who asked if he was a student of Luigi Loir, he replied in pun: "Non, seul élève de moi-même." ("No, a student of myself only.")

His works were first exhibited in North America in 1945 and he subsequently achieved even greater success. In his last year of life he was awarded the prestigious Prix Antoine-

La Belle Époque, which literally means “Beautiful Age” is a name given in France to the period from the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and the start of World War I in 1914. So why was this termed a beautiful age?   Probably the reason for naming this period thus was because, for the middle and upper classes in France, the standards of living and security increased in comparison with the dark days that went before.  The devastation and death toll of the Franco-Prussian War and the short-lived but bloody battles of the Paris Commune were over.  Napoleon III’s period of power had ended and a Third Republic was declared.  It was a period free of wars affecting France.  It was a period of economic affluence and an era of many new innovations both cultural and technological.  For many it was a good time which needed to be savoured.  My artist today is one who lived and painted during this time and his Parisian street scenes of the time depicted an opulence which many, but the poorer classes, could enjoy. Let me introduce you to the French painter Eugène Galien-Laloue.  He was a consummate draughtsman.  His depictions of fin-de-siècle Paris architecture was of an amazing standard and yet he was not just a cityscape painter as he was equally adept with his landscape work in which he brought to life the rural French countryside.

In his tiny gouaches Galien-Laloue rendered every detail of fin-de-siècle Parisian architecture with absolute precision, but in his landscape works he was more attuned to the painterly tradition of the Barbizon School and the Impressionists, recording life in the rural French countryside in light-filled canvasses.  Galien-Laloue painted with great delicacy a wide variety of subjects.    Eugene

Eugène Galien-Laloue was born in Montmartre, Paris, on December 11 1854, almost a year after his father, Charles Laloue, an artist and set designer, married Eugène’s mother, Endoxi Lambert in December 1853.  Eugène was the eld