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Filiger [Filliger], Charles
(b Thann, Alsace, 28 Nov 1863; d Brest, 11 Jan 1928). French painter and engraver. He studied in Paris at the Académie Colarossi. He settled in Brittany in 1889, where he was associated with Gauguin and his circle at Pont-Aven, but he remained a mystic and a recluse. The Breton setting, with its stark landscape and devout peasant inhabitants, provided fertile ground for the development of Filiger’s mystical imagery and deliberate archaisms. Filiger’s friend, the painter Emile Bernard, characterized Filiger’s style as an amalgam of Byzantine and Breton popular art forms. The hieratic, geometric quality and the expressionless faces in his gouaches of sacred subjects such as Virgin and Child (1892; New York, A. G. Altschul priv. col., see 1979–80 exh. cat., p. 71) reveal Filiger’s love of early Italian painting and the Byzantine tradition. Evident too in the heavy outlines and flat colours of his work are the cloisonnism of the Pont-Aven school and the influence of Breton and Epinal popular prints. Filiger’s landscapes, such as Breton Shore (1893; New York, A. G. Altschul priv. col.), share with Gauguin’s paintings an abstract, decorative quality and rigorous simplification.
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