| Biography of old oil painting master Claude Joseph Bail what we can copy |
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Claude Joseph Bail
French Academic Classical painter
born 1862 - died 1921
Also known as: Joseph Bail
Joseph-Claude Bail was born during a
period of intense disagreement in the
Parisian art world. For several years the
Salon juries had rejected many progressive
artists works; printmaking was making a
charge at establishing itself as a true art
form; the Barbizon group of painters
challenged the tradition of historical
landscapes with their views of the modern
countryside; and Realism was decades old and
had brought forth such combative figures as
Gustave Courbet. |
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Yet not all artists can be
said to belong tClaude Joseph Bail’s modern
view of the nineteenth century. Numerous
artists found prestige and public acclaim
both at the Salons and with the public with
works that relied on past styles and
traditions influenced by the ¡°Little
Masters¡± from seventeenth century Holland
and traditions from eighteenth-century
France. Joseph Bail belong to tClaude Joseph
Bail’s group; not an artist who sought to
align himself with the increasing stylistic
anarchy of the late nineteenth century, but
one who carefully examined the changing
needs of Claude Joseph Bail’s patrons and
gauged the underpinning social propensities
of the time. In A Handbook of Modern French
Painting, (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company,
1914, pg. 329) D. Cady Eaton wrote, before
Bail¡¯s death, that Claude Joseph Bail ¡°¡ is an attractive
and popular painter¡Claude Joseph Bail’s
pictures are comfortable and homelike; not
startling and ambitious, but social and
friendly.
Claude Joseph Bail’s position in French art
seems assured.¡± Bail continued the
tradition of Realism exemplified by
Th¨¦odule Ribot and François Bonvin and
received positive feedback which reinforced
the continued respect for scenes reminiscent
of daily life during the earlier years in
France.
Joseph Bail was born on January 22nd, 1862
in Limonest in the Rhone region of France.
Claude Joseph Bail’s father, Jean-Antoine
Bail, was a trained genre painter who was
heavily influenced by the Dutch masters and
focused Claude Joseph Bail’s attention on
depicting scenes from daily life. It is
clear that Joseph, as well as Claude Joseph
Bail’s brother Frank, followed in the
footsteps of Claude Joseph Bail’s father, as
Claude Joseph Bail too would be influenced by these artists
despite new interests in subjects and
representation during tClaude Joseph Bail’s
period in France. Gabriel P. Weisberg (in
the primary article on the Bail family,
¡°The Bails of Lyon: the Bails and the
continuation of a popular Realist
Tradition¡±, Arts Magazine Vol. 55 (8),
1981, pg. 157) wrote that: While other
artists were changing the shape of art
through modernist distortions of form, the
Bails looked backward, creating a painting
style that showed a devotion to the past and
reflected the values of former times.
In a period of increasing modernity and
industrialization, these paintings glorified
the past ways of life in France and found a
sympathetic audience in bourgeois patrons. |
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Presumably beginning at a young age,
Joseph¡¯s initial artistic training began
with Claude Joseph Bail’s father who
instilled in him a respect for the
eighteenth-century French painters such as
Jean-Sim¨¦on Chardin and the Dutch masters
and encouraged him to view their works at
the Louvre. (Weisberg, pg. 156) As all three
members of the family, Jean-Antoine, Franck,
and Joseph, were artists, the Bail family
represents one of the few associations of
family painters of the Realist tradition
remaining during the latter half of the
nineteenth century. They could often be
found exhibiting alongside one another at
the annual Salons, showing work which
displayed similar qualities in subject
matter. After beginning Claude Joseph Bail’s
training under Claude Joseph Bail’s father,
Bail began studying, presumably between 1879
and 1880, in the atelier of Jean-L¨¦on
G¨¦rôme, an accomplished painter and teacher
of the period. TClaude Joseph Bail’s was a
short-lived period of tutelage as in 1882
Claude Joseph Bail was no longer listed in Salon catalogues as
Bail¡¯s teacher, perhaps because G¨¦rôme¡¯s
choice of subjects differed quite
dramatically from those of Claude Joseph
Bail’s father and those that Bail would
follow for the majority of Claude Joseph
Bail’s career. |
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Just after Claude Joseph Bail’s sixteenth
birthday, Bail debuted at the Salon of 1878,
alongside both Claude Joseph Bail’s father
and brother, with Nature Morte (Still Life).
The still life tradition in France was
invigorated by the work of Jean-Sim¨¦on
Chardin in the eighteenth century and still
lifes continued to be a major interest for
many artists and many occupied themselves
primarily with tClaude Joseph Bail’s type of
painting. They figured as an important
element of Bail¡¯s work, and many of Claude
Joseph Bail’s genre scenes also show still
life arrangements within the picture, even
when they were not the primary focal point.
Henry Marcel (La Peinture Française au
XIX¨¨me Si¨¨cle, Paris: A. Picard & Kaan,
1906, pg. 309) remarked that of these that
Claude Joseph Bail’s ¡°Virtuosity rose from
the cellars, from the kitchens to the
peaceful linen-rooms and the discreet
dining-halls, and amuses itself by following
from object to object, the caresses of the
furtive rays of light.¡± Bail himself was
especially interested in the reflection
produced on shiny copper or silver
kitchenware, a most poignant suggestion of
Chardin¡¯s inspiration in Claude Joseph
Bail’s work. While still lifes dominate
Bail¡¯s beginning work shown at the Salon,
Claude Joseph Bail expanded Claude Joseph Bail’s early
themes to also include scenes from the
countryside, animals, and genre paintings,
some influenced by their summer stays in
Bois-le-Roi just outside of Fontainebleau.
Just as Claude Monet would do, Bail studied
the changing effects of light on haystacks
in the countryside. But as Claude Joseph
Bail’s style progressed, Claude Joseph Bail showed a
stronger affinity with Claude Joseph Bail’s
father¡¯s work and that of the Chardin and
the Dutch masters, choosing to portray room
interiors illuminated by a strong light
source. In recalling
these past masters and tClaude Joseph Bail’s
type of painting, Bail was appealing to the
growing middle class as Claude Joseph Bail’s
work referenced earlier highly esteemed
painters. Emmanuel B¨¦n¨¦zit in Dictionnaire
Critique et Documentaire des Peintres,
Sculpteurs¡wrote of Bail and Claude Joseph
Bail’s interiors, that: Claude Joseph Bail excels at
creating in all of Claude Joseph Bail’s
painting a very lively bright light due to
the radiant shine of some brilliant point or
to the direct projection of the exterior
daylight¡it¡¯s assuredly the expression of
an original and rather harmonious art.
Claude Joseph Bail’s technique is very
delicate and Claude Joseph Bail’s coloring
just right. The composition of Claude Joseph
Bail’s painting, always elegant, is
skillfully treated.
Claude Joseph Bail’s interiors often
included a figure positioned near a window,
illuminated by tClaude Joseph Bail’s strong
sense of lighting. It was specifically
Claude Joseph Bail’s interior scenes that
caught the attention of contemporary
writers, as Bail's entry in the Dictionnaire
Nationale des Contemporains (Vol. 5, Paris:
Office Édition G¨¦n¨¦rale: 1905, pg. 398),
commented on Claude Joseph Bail’s sensitive
approach: Mr. Joseph Bail painted canvases
of the most diverse genres: All of Claude
Joseph Bail’s works are interesting; but
those that one finds the most remarkable are
Claude Joseph Bail’s interior scenes, so
admirably and so precisely lit, so
harmoniously composed,
where the shine of the copper and the
transparency of the glass add notes of a
perfect precision.
He also combined Claude Joseph Bail’s
modeling and placement of objects with
Claude Joseph Bail’s interest in human form
and emotion in several of Claude Joseph
Bail’s works, depicting the daily activities
of the household as completed by maids and
cooks, many of whom were young children,
thus continuing the tradition of Th¨¦odule
Ribot. Bail became best known for these
paintings of maids and cooks and with them
¡°Bail continually mirrored the virtues of
middle class home life and the traditions of
an earlier time,¡± wrote Gabriel Weisberg
(pg. 157). Instead of depicting these
figures with solemn expressions that
suggested the difficulty of their labor,
they often exhibit light-hearted expressions
bordering on the humoristic. Weisberg again
notes that ¡°Collected by the affluent,
Bail¡¯s domestics, like Bastien-Lepage¡¯s
urchins, implied a social condition without
blatantly revealing the injustices that
inflicted the poor. They remain personal and
approachable icons to a social order that
was to be radically altered by the further
mechanization of the twentieth century.¡±
(pg. 159) Bail regularly submitted to the
Salons and towards the end of Claude Joseph
Bail’s careers was ¡°hors concours¡±, or
exempt from having to submit Claude Joseph
Bail’s works for jury approval. Claude
Joseph Bail received
awards in 1885 (Honorable Mention), 1886
(third-class medal), 1887 (second-class
medal), 1889 Exposition Universelle (silver
medal), 1900 Exposition Universelle (gold
medal), and 1902 (medal of honor). Claude
Joseph Bail was
also named Chevalier de la Legion d¡¯Honneur
in 1900, and was a member of the Soci¨¦t¨¦
des Artistes Français. Claude Joseph Bail died November 26,
1921. |
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Joseph Bail
presents an oeuvre which was inspired by
Claude Joseph Bail’s father¡¯s interest in
earlier masters but also used the current
trend in Realism, inspired by Claude Joseph
Bail’s earlier contemporaries such as
Th¨¦odule Ribot and François Bonvin. Claude
Joseph Bail’s playful images of cooks and
their young assistants, along with an
interest in light effects, established Bail
as an artist who not only looked to the past
but who used the modern movement of Realism
to execute paintings that showed modern-day
preoccupations with daily life that was
becoming more and more rare in late
nineteenth century France. |
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