Adolphe Monticelli, pursuing his version of Romanticism in isolation, paints Maldorme Cove (1874, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, France).

Born in Marseille in humble circumstances, Monticelli had attended the École Municipale de Dessin in Marseille from 1842 to 1846, and had continued his artistic training in Paris, where he had studied under Paul Delaroche at the École des Beaux-Arts.

In Paris, he had made copies after the Old Masters in the Louvre, and had admired the oil sketches of Eugène Delacroix.

In 1855, he had met Narcisse Diaz, a member of the Barbizon school, and the two had often painted together in the Fontainebleau Forest.

Monticelli frequently adopts Diaz's practice of introducing nudes or elegantly costumed figures into his landscapes.

Monticelli has developed a highly individual Romantic style of painting, in which richly colored, dappled, textured and glazed surfaces produce a scintillating effect.

He paints courtly subjects inspired by Antoine Watteau; he also paints still lives, portraits, and Orientalist subjects that owe much to the example of Delacroix.

After 1870, Monticelli had returned to Marseille, where he will live in poverty despite a prolific output, selling his paintings for small sums.

An unworldly man, he dedicates himself single-mindedly to his art.

Adolphe Monticelli's richly colored paintings of courtly revels, with their Watteau-inspired quality of Romantic fantasy, attract imitators but his art is generally unappreciated.

Applying thick daubs of paint to achieve a swirling effect, he creates a poetic, visionary expression with radiant lights and deep shadows.

In 1875, he paints Serenade, reputedly one of the best examples of his work.

Paul Cézanne, after a phase of uneasy dissension among the Impressionists, withdraws from the movement in 1878 in order “to make of Impressionism something solid and durable like the art of the museums.”

In contrast to the passing show depicted by the Impressionists, his approach imbues landscape and still life with a monumental permanence and coherence.

He abandons the Impressionists' virtuoso depiction of evanescent light effects in his preoccupation with the underlying structures of natural forms and the problem of unifying surface patterns with spatial depth.

Again rejected by the Salon, Cézanne moves in 1878 to Aix-en-Provence, where he has to endure the insults of his tyrannical father, whose financial help he needs to survive since his canvases are still not finding buyers.

He works in Aix and ...

...with Adolphe Monticelli in L'Estaque.