Narcisse Virgilio Diaz was a French painter of Barbizon school. He was a follower of the Realism and Impressionism art movements.
Background
Ethnicity:
Narcisse Virgilio Diaz was the son of Spanish parents.
Diaz was born in Bordeaux, France, on August 20, 1807. His parents fled from Spain and settled in France as political refugees. In 1817, at the age of ten, both of his parents died and the painter became an orphan.
Education
At thirteen, Narcisse Diaz's foot was bitten by a reptile in Meudon wood and ultimately he lost his leg. In 1822 he became an apprentice painter on porcelain at a china factory in Paris, where he met Jules Dupré, who was to become his lifelong friend. Tired of industrial work, in the late 1820s he embarked on a course of independent study. Diaz was briefly taught by the history painter François Souchon. During this time he copied the masters at the Louvre and supported himself selling small pictures of his own creation.
Career
Diaz's early artworks consisted of a mixture of romantic "fancy pictures" - odalisques, bathers, erotic mythologies as well as sentimental idylls. Due to his talent, he managed to enter the Paris Salons of the 1830s and 1840s.
About 1833 he started to discover the forest of Fontainebleau, where he became a frequent summer visitor in the following years. During that time he befriended Théodore Rousseau as well as some other landscape painters. That's how he joined the School of Barbizon. Narcisse Diaz's studies of the forest were created with the same speed and fluency as his romantic idylls. He earned the reputation of factory-like productivity.
In 1849 he organized a sale of sketches and studies of nature. His income was noticeably larger than that of his slower-working and less accommodating fellows at Barbizon. Because of this fact, Narcisse Diaz provided them with financial support. Diaz's paintings were quite expensive, though the critics were reserved in their assessment of his artworks, admiring their colorism and condemning superficiality. He worked with the materials which allowed him to obtain luminous effects and this was how he influenced the Impressionists.
Díaz exhibited many pictures at the Paris Salon. However, after 1859 he ceased to exhibit there. Artists of a new generation, such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley, whom he met in the forest of Fontainebleau in 1864, received his warm encouragement. At Etretat, where he spent his summer in 1869, he painted seascapes accompanied by Gustave Courbet. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, he sought refuge in Brussels. After 1871, his works became trendy and rose gradually in the estimation of collectors.
In 1876, he visited his son's grave and caught a cold. Narcisse Diaz went to Menton in hope to recover his health, but on November 18 of that year he passed away.
Clairiere et Mare aux Viperes, Foret de Fontainebleau
La Clairière en automne
Lady holding parasol
La foret
Wood gatherer (Fagotière)
Les Vieux Chenes Du Dormoir, Mare Et Fagotiere
La Fin d'un beau Jour
Premières Tentations
Children playing with dogs
Young woman with a dog
Forest Landscape
Les Baigneuses
Bouquet of Flowers
Untitled
Cinq femmes au bain
La Mare Dans La Clairiere
Marie, Fille de l`Artiste Avec Son Chien
Les Baigneuses
Venus și Marte
A figure and a dog by a pool in a woodland clearing
Mother and Child
Fête Champetre
Portrait of Marie, the artist's daughter
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Charles Baudelaire: "Diaz de la Pena sets out from the principle that a palette is a picture. As for overall harmony M. Diaz thinks that you will invariably find it. Of draughtmanship - the draughmanship of movement, the draughmanship of the colourists – there is no question; the limbs of all his little figures behave for all the world like bundles of rags, or like arms or legs scattered in a railway accident. I would rather have a kaleidoscope. It is true that M. Diaz is a colourist; but enlarge his frame by a foot, and his strength will fail him, because he does not recognize the necessity for general color. That is why his pictures leave no memory behind them."
Albert Wolff: "In the group of [ Barbizon school-]painters beyond the average, Diaz de la Pena is the great artist of the fantastical. Anything serves him as a pretext for bringing to light his marvelous aptitude as a colorist. He renders the enchantments of the landscape flooded with sunshine or the forest plunged in luminous twilight, with beams filtering through the thick leafage; he dazzles the eye with all the seductions of a grand colorist. He is the grand virtuoso of the palette, making sport of difficulties. With him everything is of the first impulse; his work is thrown off with brio; the enchantment of the color carries it along."
Arthur Hoeber: "The pictures of Diaz are not landscapes, for the land is wanting; they are 'tree-scapes', and their poetry lies in the sunbeams which dance, playing around them. 'Have you seen my last [tree-] stem?' he would inquire of the visitors to his studio."
Interests
Writers
Victor Hugo
Artists
Eugène Delacroix
Connections
Narcisse Díaz's son, Eugène-Émile Diaz, became a famous composer.
Son:
Eugène-Émile Diaz
Friend:
Théodore Rousseau
References
The Barbizon School of Painters: Corot, Rousseau, Diaz, Millet, Daubigny, Etc.
The pictures painted by the group of French artists who lived around Barbizon, have been for many years the admiration of the artistic world. But very little has yet been done to tell their story, and it is the aim of this volume to set forth the biographies of these artists, illustrated with such representations of their works as will give an adequate conception of their methods and achievements.
1890
The Painters of Barbizon: Millet, Rousseau, Diaz
Leopold is delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades.