Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli

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Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli (1824 - 1886) was a French painter of the generation preceding the Impressionists.

Monticelli was born in Marseille in humble circumstances. He attended the École Municipale de Dessin in Marseille from 1842 to 1846, followed by study in Paris under Paul Delaroche at the École des Beaux-arts. In Paris he 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 lives, portraits, and Orientalist subjects that owe much to the example of Eugene Delacroix.

After 1870, Monticelli returned to Marseilles, where he would live in poverty despite a prolific output, selling his paintings for small sums. An unworldly man, he dedicated himself singlemindedly to his art.

The young Paul Cézanne befriended Monticelli, and for a period they painted landscapes together, once spending a month roaming the Aix countryside. The influence of the older painter's work can be seen in Cézanne's work of the 1860s. 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. The work of this instinctive painter reached its greatest spontaneity in his final years.

In its painterly freedom Monticelli's work prefigures that of Vincent van Gogh, who greatly admired his work after seeing it in Paris when he arrived there in 1886, the year of Monticelli's death. Van Gogh immediately adopted a brighter palette and a bolder attack, and later remarked, "I sometimes think I am really continuing that man."

Trivia

In 2005 in The Guardian, Sir Timothy Clifford, director general of the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, chose Monticelli's A Garden Fete as the worst painting in Britain, and commented, "We have been bequested eight paintings by Monticelli, each one more hideous than the last. In my 21 years here, none has been hung because I think Monticelli produces screamingly awful art. I call this one a Fete Worse Than Death." [1]

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