Pierre Blanc moved to Paris in October 1925. Though still a young man, he had already been part of the team working on the sculpted decor in the Federal Supreme Court in Lausanne. In Paris,…

Louis Soutter studied fine art in Geneva and Paris before setting out for New York, where he planned to set up an art and interior design studio. He eventually settled in Colorado Springs and married…

François Sablet, older brother of the better-known Jacques, travelled to Paris in 1768 to complete his studies in the studio of Joseph-Marie Vien. He built a financially successful career in the circle round the artist…

While Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso left Cubism behind and moved on to a “new synthesis”, André Derain turned increasingly to a restrictive form of archaism. The prosaic subjects, lack of imagination in the composition,…

Ernest Biéler moved from his native Switzerland to Paris in 1880 to study at the Atelier suisse, the Académie Colarossi and the Académie Julian. In 1884, he visited an exhibition in memory of Édouard…

Horace Vernet first travelled to Algeria following the French army on its conquest of North Africa. His first of many visits to the country came in 1833. Vernet was a devout Catholic in the pay…

Auguste Renoir called on friends and family to sit for him throughout his career. In the early years, this was a purely economic decision, avoiding the cost of a professional sitter; later, he continued the…

In 1911, Jean-Louis Forain introduced Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen to Masséida, a young woman of Bambara ethnicity well known in art circles. She regularly posed for artists, including Félix Vallotton, who depicted her facial scarifications in Négresse…

Back in Paris in 1838 after a lengthy absence, Charles Gleyre set about rebuilding his professional network. To do so, he called on longstanding friends, including the painter Sébastien Cornu and his wife Hortense, who…

In 1921, Giovanni Giacometti painted four portraits of his beloved son Alberto, later to become one of the twentieth century’s greatest sculptors. He may have chosen to pay particular attention to his son as he…