Frédéric Bazille
(1841-1870), French painter who is generally grouped with the impressionists
(see Impressionism). Bazille was born in Montpellier into a
wealthy family of wine producers. With his family’s encouragement, he began to
study medicine in 1860. But his passion was painting, and in 1862 he moved to
Paris and began to study with Charles Gleyre, a Swiss-born painter of historical
subjects. Bazille had already developed an interest in the work of the most
adventurous French painters of that time—Gustave Courbet,
Eugène Delacroix, and Édouard Manet—and in Gleyre’s
studio he met the future leaders of the impressionist movement: Claude
Monet, Pierre August Renoir, and Alfred Sisley.
With his fellow students he began to paint out-of-doors in the forest of
Fontainebleau.
Most of Bazille’s early works have disappeared, but those
that remain show affinities in their simplification of form with painters from
Provence in southern France. Aside from a few landscapes, Bazille restricted
himself largely to figure painting, especially to painting groups of his
friends. The figures in these group portraits were frequently integrated into a
landscape. He continued to paint with the colleagues from his student days,
Monet and Renoir, and shared his studio in Paris with them. Bazille also took
part in heated debates at the Café Guerbois, where the progressive artistic and
literary figures of Paris gathered.
Bazille died at the age of 29 in one of the early battles
of the Franco-Prussian War. The impressionist movement took shape
after his death, during the mid-1870s. Although Bazille’s subject matter and his
handling of the human figure remained more realistic than that of the
impressionist painters, his method of applying paint—in patches—and his interest
in the effects of light suggest that he would have allied himself with their
movement. |
