ARTIST: Alfred Arthur Brunel de Neuville (France, 1851 - 1941)
NAME: Two Kittens
MEDIUM: oil on canvas
CONDITION: Relined. Minor stable craquelure. Few very minor scattered inpaintings/touch ups.
SIGHT SIZE: 8 x 12 inches / 20 x 30 cm
FRAME SIZE: 14 x 18 inches / 35 x 45 cm
SIGNATURE: lower right
NAME VARIANTS: Leon Brun, Bernard Neuville, Brunel de Neuville, Bernard Neville
CATEGORY: antique vintage painting
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SKU#: 120232
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BIOGRAPHY:
Alfred Arthur Brunel de Neuville was born on December 2, 1852 in Paris, France. After his basic education, de Neuville studied fine art with his father, a well-known teacher of landscape and still-life painting in Paris. In 1879, at the age of twenty-seven, he exhibited his first painting at the Salon de Paris, which was a simple and elegant study of apples and raisins. It was definitely within the growing French fascination with the new style of Realism where details, textures, volumes and the sense of objects through acute observation of their appearance became the subject matter of the work of art.His first sentimental painting of playful kittens and domestic pets, another de Neuville trademark, followed in 1880, causing a great popular and commercial success for the painter. With the growth of a large middle class during the rise of the Industrial Revolution in France and the rise of an urban population, de Neuville responded to the desire for paintings that captured the charm and moods of household kittens and cats frolicking in the comfortable and well-appointed interiors of the rising middle class.From 1889 to 1909, de Neuville exhibited at the Salon of the Societe des Artistes Francais. He was made an Associate in 1907.Throughout his career, de Neuville was both a popular painter and a well-respected practitioner of the new academic Realism in France. He became a master at capturing the appearance of things from the texture and shine of metal to the softness of fur.He is listed in numbers of reference books and single subject books on the period including, The Benezit Dictionary of Painters, Sculptors, Draftsmen, and Engravers, French Flower: Painters of the Nineteenth Century: A Dictionary, The Artists Bluebook, and Painters of the Still-Life in France.Alfred Arthur Brunel de Neuville died in Paris in 1941. He is buried in Montmartre Cemetery. His work can be seen in museums throughout Europe, North America and South America. The standard bibliographies on de Neuville contain an important essay on de Neuville in Artes Plasticas by Brazilian art historian, Julio Lozad.