Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli

Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli studied at Lycée Thiers and École des beaux-arts de Marseille. The recorded working language is French. Eugène Delacroix is recorded as an influence. Works named in the authority record are Christ Blessing the Children, Kustgebergte and Aan het altaar. Work by Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli is recorded in the collections of Städel Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Finnish National Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria and Nationalmuseum.

• Name — Adolphe Monticelli • Birth Name — Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli • Born — 14 October 1824 • Birthplace — Marseille, France • Died — 29 June 1886 • Place of death — Marseille, France • Training — École Municipale de Dessin, Marseille (1842-1846); École des Beaux-Arts, Paris • Movement — Orientalist; Romanticism

• Illustration — Still life with Sardines and Sea Urchins, 1880–1882, Dallas Museum of Art Monticelli was born in Marseille in humble circumstances. He attended the École Municipale de Dessin in Marseille from 1842 to 1846 and continued his artistic training in Paris, where he studied under Paul Delaroche at the École des Beaux-Arts. In Paris, he made copies after the Old Masters in the Louvre and admired the oil sketches of Eugène Delacroix. In 1855 he met Narcisse Diaz, a member of the Barbizon school, and the two often painted together in the Fontainebleau Forest. Monticelli frequently adopted Diaz's practice of introducing nudes or elegantly costumed figures into his landscapes. Monticelli developed a highly individual Romantic style of painting in which richly colored, dappled, textured and glazed surfaces produce a scintillating effect. He painted courtly subjects inspired by Antoine Watteau; he also painted still lifes, portraits, and Orientalist subjects that owe much to the example of Delacroix. After 1870, Monticelli returned to Marseille, where he lived in poverty despite a prolific output, selling his paintings for small sums. An unworldly man, he dedicated himself single-mindedly to his art. The young Paul Cézanne befriended Monticelli in the 1860s, and the influence of the older painter's work can be seen in Cézanne's work of that decade. Between 1878 and 1884, the two artists often painted landscapes together, once spending a month roaming the Aix countryside. Although Monticelli experimented briefly around 1870 with a treatment of light reflecting the discoveries of the Impressionists, he found the objectivity of this approach uncongenial. Confronted with criticism of his style of painting, Monticelli himself remarked, "I paint for thirty years from now". His work reached its greatest spontaneity in the decade before his death in 1886.

From September 2008 until January 2009, an exhibition entitled "Van Gogh and Monticelli" took place in Marseille's Centre de la Vieille Charité, highlighting Monticelli's influence on Van Gogh's work. From 25 April until 27 September 2015, an exhibition entitled "Van Gogh and Co. Criss-crossing the collection" at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, The Netherlands, displayed paintings by Van Gogh and his predecessors, contemporaries and followers, among them François Bonvin, Charley Toorop, Henri Fantin-Latour, Jean-Baptiste Corot, Paul Cézanne, Bart van der Leck and Adolphe Monticelli.

• Illustration — Portrait de Madame Pascal, 1871 • Illustration — Ladies in a Garden, 1870 • Illustration — Flowers in a Blue Vase, c. 1875. Clark Art Institute • Illustration — As You Like It • Illustration — Fete Champetre • Illustration — Flower Still Life, 1875 • Illustration — Seascape Near Marseille, 1880, São Paulo Museum of Art • Illustration — Scène de parc, femmes, enfants et chiens