Louis Anquetin

The French painter Louis Anquetin worked in the Paris studios of Léon Bonnat and Fernand Cormon from 1882 onwards where he became friends with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Vincent van Gogh, amongst others. In 1887, after early impressionist attempts and influenced by Japanese print graphics, together with his friends, he began to pursue an artistic reduction of his art: his paintings were now increasingly characterised by simplified, strongly outlined shapes of an abstract, expressive colourfulness and two-dimensional space with the aim to merge the artist’s inner experience with the outer appearance of things. In an exhibition review of the works by Anquetin, the French critic and author Edouard Dujardin gives this style the term “Cloisionism”. Although Anquentin’s oeuvre concentrated on motifs of the bohemian world to begin with, it later made room mostly for urban scenes, portraits and horse racing. The encounter with the works of Flemish baroque artists such as Peter Paul Rubens induced a change in the artist’s work as from the 1890s. From then on, he intensively addressed the painting techniques of the old masters and the study of anatomy.