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for FELIX ZIEM
FELIX ZIEM
1821 - 1911
(b Beaune, 21 Feb 1821; d Paris, 11 Feb 1911).
French painter. He studied architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Dijon until he was expelled in 1838 for unruly behaviour. I In November 1839 he was noticed by Ferdinand Philippe, Duc d'Orléans, who accepted two watercolours that Ziem presented to him and commissioned a further six. This first success decided Ziem's vocation, and he started a drawing class that was attended by Louis Auguste Laurent Aiguier (1819-65) and Adolphe Monticelli. During this period he also encountered the Provençal artists Emile Loubon (1809-63), Prosper Grésy (1804-74) and Gustave Ricard.
By 1849, when Ziem exhibited at the Salon for the first time, he was already making a comfortable living from his art; he exhibited there regularly until 1868. In 1854 he set off for North Africa and returned the following year to Tunisia. He divided his time between his Paris studio in the Rue Lepic, his travels and, after 1853, frequent visits to Barbizon, where he was an active member of the Barbizon school. His works enjoyed growing success and were much sought after by upper-class collectors. Towards the end of his life he received many official honours, and his paintings were the first by a living artist to enter the Louvre in 1910. The contents of his studio are now housed in the Musée d'Art et d'Archéologie in Martigues.
Ziem was above all the painter of Venice: he visited the city more than 20 times. The commercial success of his views of Venice has often obscured their originality and the diversity of their compositions. Such works as Venice: The Bacino di S Marco with Fishing Boats (c. 1865; London, Wallace) are among his most beautiful achievements. He was also a prolific painter of Orientalist subjects, for example Fantasia at Constantinople (Paris, Petit Pal.). He painted some rare but magnificent canvases of Fontainebleau Forest in the style of the Barbizon school (e.g. Stag in the Forest of Fontainebleau; Paris, Petit Pal.). He was primarily a landscape painter, but he also worked on still-lifes and animal paintings. The vivacity and freshness of his palette, his nervous, vibrant touch, with passages of great virtuosity, his determination to seize fleeting effects of light and his ability to transcribe the iridescence of sunlight on water have often invoked comparisons with Impressionism. In fact the spirit of his work was fundamentally different. Ziem wanted to express the poetic quality of his subject, to transform it into an essentially dream-like vision, rather than to transcribe an immediate reality. He was also a fine draughtsman and left nearly 10,000 sheets, which attest to the variety of his interpretative gifts and the diversity of his technique.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
T. Gautier: Ziem (Paris, 1896)
L. Fournier: Un Grand Peintre: Félix Ziem (Beaune, 1897)
C. Mauclair: L'Art de Ziem (Paris, 1897)
R. Miles: 'Ziem', Figaro Ill., 178 (Jan 1905), pp. 1-24
H. Roujon, ed.: F. Ziem (n.d.), Collection des peintres illustres, 50 (Paris, c. 1900-14)
J. Sauvageot: Les Peintres de paysages bourguignons au XIXe siècle (Dijon, 1966)
E. Hild: Etudes sur l'oeuvre dessinée de Félix Ziem (1821-1911) (MA thesis, Aix-en-Provence, U. Aix-Marseille, 1976)
P. Miquel: Félix Ziem (1821-1911), 2 vols (Maurs-la-Jolie, 1978)
Ziem en marge (exh. cat. by E. Hild, Saint-Tropez, Mus. Annonciade, 1980)
ERIC HILD-ZIEM
© Oxford University Press 2007
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