Émile friant paintings
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Like many Naturalist artists of the nineteenth century, Émile Friant has been long overlooked, or simply forgotten, despite his overwhelming success and notoriety in his own time. A flurry of recent scholarship on Naturalism however, along with an important monographic exhibition at the Musées des Beaux-Arts de Nancy in 2016, has served to bring this “last naturalist” and his remarkable representations of the everyday social realities of the French Third Republic to the fore.[1]
Friant was born in 1863 in the town of Dieuze, located in Northeast France, and in 1870 his family was forced to flee to nearby Nancy after the incursion of Prussian soldiers and the German annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. There, his artistic ambitions were stoked from a young age and developed in tandem with the rise of the artistic culture of the city itself. Nancy emerged as a major artistic center, second only to Paris in late-nineteenth century France, and built upon the propagation of art of the everyday world in both painting and the applied arts of manufacture.
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BIOGRAPHY - Emile Friant (1863 - 1932)
In the late nineteenth century Nancy emerged from beneath the shadow of Paris to establish itself as the second artistic center of France. One of the Nancéienne artists was Émile Friant, who began his artistic career at an extremely young age and rose to prominence with his version of naturalism which later manifested into a latent symbolism. It was noted that Friant “appears to have the sincerity at least as much as the ability to be a major artist, and we have confidence that he will remain faithful to art in a time when wealthy manufacturers have invaded the temple, giving young people the fatal example of rapid fortunes and superficial studies…” (quoted in L’École de Nancy : Peinture et Art Nouveau, ex. cat., Paris : Éditions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1999, pg. 130) Friant’s public acceptance would reach impressive levels, but despite consistent acclaim, he sought new methods of representation and various uses of media while prom
BiographiesEmile Friant (1863 – 1932) Emile Friant started his studies at the Nancy School of Fine Art, and exhibited his work at the local Salon at the age of fifteen. He continued his studies in Paris in the studio of the artist, , and at the age of twenty, won the second Rome Prize. A naturalist artist, Emile Friant mainly painted portraits and scenes from everyday life. The immediacy of his work was based on the use of photographs. After a very successful Universal Exhibition in 1889, where he was awarded the Gold Medal for his work “La Toussaint”, he was asked to paint the portraits of a number of personalities from Nancy and the USA. A review by G. R. S. Taylor in mentions in connection with virility in French art “Friant’s ghastly display of a graveside, which reeks of everything depressing.” The painting referred to is most likely the one called Doleur in our collection of images. Alexander Cabanel The New Age NA 3.14:277 He was a member of the Board of the Nancy School from 1901, and taught at the National Sc Copyright ©tubglen.pages.dev 2025 |