Jean Francois Rafaelli (1850-1924) French, Drypoint in Colors. Title: "La Chaumrere." 1914. Numbered 147 and signed in pencil bottom right. Tag on back indicates previous owners and dates. Depicts a quaint farmhouse with a gate and well on a hillside.

Overall size: 13 3/4 X 17 3/4 in.

Sight size: 7 1/2 X 11 in.

#1550 .

Jean Francois Rafaelli was born in Paris, France in 1850. He began his Salon career in 1870 when one of his landscape paintings was accepted despite any formal training. In 1871 he enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and entered the studio of Jean Leon Gerome, but left after only three months and frequented the galleries of the Louvre and Luxembourg Museums where the works of Corot and Fortuny became his masters. Through Degas’ insistence, Rafaelli became a member of the Impressionist group, exhibiting with them in 1880 and 1881, though eventually he played a leading role in the dissolution of it. In the late 1870s and 80s he concentrated on depictions of the newly expanding suburbs of Paris, working from a studio in Asniere where he painted the poor and ragged underclass who were pushed out of the main area during reconstruction of the city. His works display a segment of humanity hidden from public view and largely overlooked by other artists. Rafaelli’s theories of art conceived of the artist not as an impulsive, romantic, creative spirit, but rather as a rational being duty-bound to reveal the essential character of mankind. In 1892 he relocated to a studio on the Rue de Courcelles and began to paint colorful views of the streets, squares and parks of Paris. He continued to show regularly at the Salon until his death in 1924, and by then his fame and humanist notions had spread across the Atlantic, where he held exhibitions in New York, Boston and Philadelphia as early as 1895.

Location Box 2