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In addition to being the leading painter of the Barbizon landscape school, Diaz is also noted for the impressive body of flower pieces which he created and which evoke the brilliant lyricism also to be encountered in his landscapes and which were extensively praised by Vincent van Gogh because of their rich symphonic palette. Diaz painted a lot of small painterly flower pieces in which the flowers are cleverly indicated with deft, uncontrolled brushwork. The present sumptuous bouquet is of a more elaborate type using a decorative formula that has been used by many of Diaz’s predecessors. Also, the petals of the flowers are rendered in more detail. The simple, grayish background brings out this splashing arrangement of flowers even more prominently. Narcisse Diaz’s parents were Spanish political refugees. After Diaz was orphaned at the age of ten, he entered the household of a pastor in Bellevue, near Paris. In 1825 he was apprenticed as a colorist in Arsene Gillet’s porcelain factory. There he met Gillet’s nephew and painter Jules Dupre. He also befriended the artists Auguste Raffet, Louis Cabat and Constant Troyon. Around 1827 he was studying with Francois Souchon and copied both old masters and the contemporary Neo-classicists in the Louvre. The sixteenth-century Italian master Correggio attracted his attention above all. He developed friendships with Honore Daumier, Theodore Rousseau and Paul Huet. From 1835 onwards Diaz spent much time in the woods of Fontainbleau. He exhibited at the Salon from 1831 to 1844 and was acclaimed throughout, receiving numerous honorary medals. Diaz’s output comprises various subjects and ranges from simple flower still lifes to classical mythology as well as themes set in the Near East as popularized by Eugene Delacroiz. In his later years he lived in Barbizon and concentrated on dramatically charged and realistically rendered landscapes that influenced the Impressionists-to-be, most of whom he met in 1863. Biography courtesy of Frances Aronson Fine Art, LLC
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Narcisse Virgilio Diaz de la Peña was born in 1807 in Bordeaux, France of Spanish parents who had fled the Peninsular Wars, after their early deaths, he grew up in foster care at Meudon. At thirteen, an infection caused by an insect sting or snake bite, necessitated the amputation of his left leg. In 1823 he began an apprenticeship in painting on porcelain at a china factory in Paris, where he met Jules Dupré (1811-1889), who was to become his lifelong friend. Tired of industrial work, Diaz embarked in the late 1820s on a course of independent study, was briefly tutored by the history painter François Souchon (1787-1857), copied the masters at the Louvre and supported himself by the sale of small pictures of his own creation. The poetry of Victor Hugo and the painting of Delacroix roused him to enthusiastic emulation. His own early work consisted of pastiches of romantic "fancy pictures"--odalisques, bathers, erotic mythologies, sentimental idylls. Gifted with an abundant and dangerously effortless ability, he supplied the art market with agreeable subjects in styles variously indebted to Correggio, Watteau, and Prud'hon, and had no difficulty in entering his paintings in the Paris Salons of the 1830s and 1840s.
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From about 1833 he began to explore the forest of Fontainebleau, where he became a regular summer visitor in the following years, forming a close association with Théodore Rousseau (1812-1867) and the other landscape painters of what came to be known as the School of Barbizon. His studies of the forest were painted with the same speed and fluency as his romantic idylls, giving him the reputation of factory-like productivity--and an income vastly larger than that of his slower-working and less accommodating fellows at Barbizon, for whom he generously provided financial support. Awarded a first-class medal at the Salon of 1848, he was appointed chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1851. His paintings commanded higher prices than those of Corot, Rousseau, or Millet, but the critics were reserved in their judgment of his work, admiring its colourism while deploring what they considered its superficiality. After 1859 Diaz ceased to exhibit at the Salon. Painters of a new generation, Claude Monet (1840-1926), Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), and Alfred Sisley (1839-1899), encountered in the forest of Fontainebleau in 1864, received his warm encouragement. At Etretat, where he summered in 1869, he painted seascapes in the company of Gustave Courbet. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, he sought refuge in Brussels. He died in 1876, aged sixty-eight, at the Mediterranean resort of Mentone. Biography Coutesy of Cambridge Art Gallery
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