Frédéric Bazille

Frédéric Bazille (1841-1870), French painter who is generally grouped with the impressionists (see Impressionism). Bazille was born in Montpellier into a wealthy family of wine producers. With his family’s encouragement, he began to study medicine in 1860. But his passion was painting, and in 1862 he moved to Paris and began to study with Charles Gleyre, a Swiss-born painter of historical subjects. Bazille had already developed an interest in the work of the most adventurous French painters of that time—Gustave Courbet, Eugène Delacroix, and Édouard Manet—and in Gleyre’s studio he met the future leaders of the impressionist movement: Claude Monet, Pierre August Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. With his fellow students he began to paint out-of-doors in the forest of Fontainebleau.

Most of Bazille’s early works have disappeared, but those that remain show affinities in their simplification of form with painters from Provence in southern France. Aside from a few landscapes, Bazille restricted himself largely to figure painting, especially to painting groups of his friends. The figures in these group portraits were frequently integrated into a landscape. He continued to paint with the colleagues from his student days, Monet and Renoir, and shared his studio in Paris with them. Bazille also took part in heated debates at the Café Guerbois, where the progressive artistic and literary figures of Paris gathered.

Bazille died at the age of 29 in one of the early battles of the Franco-Prussian War. The impressionist movement took shape after his death, during the mid-1870s. Although Bazille’s subject matter and his handling of the human figure remained more realistic than that of the impressionist painters, his method of applying paint—in patches—and his interest in the effects of light suggest that he would have allied himself with their movement.