Jean Francois Raffaëlli Biography | Oil Paintings

Jean-Francois Raffaëlli became a painter in 1870 at the age of twenty, when one of his landscape paintings was accepted for exhibition at the Pairs Salon that same year. In 1871 he studied for only three months with Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, his only formal training.

Jean-François Raffaëlli up until 1876, painted primarily costume pictures, then he began to depict in a realistic style, peasants, workers, and rag pickers seen in the suburbs of Paris. His new work was championed by Edgar Degas. The rag-picker became for Raffaëlli a symbol of the alienation and the dependency between individuals in modern society.

Degas invited Jean-François Raffaëlli to participate in the Impressionist exhibitions of 1880 and 1881, and his large display of 37 works threatened to dominate the 1880 exhibition, an action that bitterly divided the group. Oscar Claude Monet, angry at Degas's insistence on expanding the Impressionist exhibitions by including several realists, did not exhibit in protest. After receiving much critical attention and praise, at the shows, both Paul Eugene-Henri Gauguin and Armand Guillaumin issued a public declaration that if Raffaelli were included in the 1882 exhibition, they would not show their work.

After winning the Legion d'Honneur in 1889, Jean-François Raffaëlli shifted his attention from the suburbs of Paris to the city itself, and the street scenes that resulted were well received by the public and the critics. In the later years of his life, he concentrated on color printmaking. In the 1890s he had co-founded the French Society of Color Etching with Mary Cassatt and Camille Pissarro. His painting The Absinthe Drinkers was recently sold at auction for US$ 3,000,0000.

Art Movement: Impressionism, Realism.
Artists Influencing Jean-Francois Raffaëlli: Jean-Léon Gérome. 
Artist Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.