ANQUETIN. Louis

French painter. He settled in Paris in 1882, his apartment on the Avenue de Clichy and his parents’ house at Étrépagny became the rendezvous for international artists. He studied art at the Ateliers of Bonnat and Cormon, where he was a contemporary and friend of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Émile Bernard and Vincent van Gogh. His early work shows the influence of Impressionism and of Edgar Degas. In 1887 Anquetin and Bernard devised an innovative method of painting using strong black contour lines and flat areas of colour; Anquetin aroused much comment when he showed his new paintings, including the striking Avenue de Clichy: Five O’Clock in the Evening at the exhibition of Les XX in Brussels and at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1888. The new style, dubbed Cloisonnisme by the critic Edouard Dujardin (1861-1949), resulted from a study of stained glass, Japanese prints and other so-called ‘primitive’ sources; it was close to the Synthetist experiments of Paul Gauguin and was adopted briefly by van Gogh during his Arles period. Anquetin’s works were shown alongside Gauguin’s and Bernard’s at the Café Volpini exhibition in 1889, where they attracted considerable attention among younger artists.

In 1894 Anquetin traveled with Toulouse-Lautrec through Holland and Belgium. In the 1890s he confronted the realistic techniques of Courbet and Daumier. From 1896, under the influence of Rubens and Delacroix, he developed large figural compositions on ceilings, walls and wall-hangings.