MORET, Henry

French marine and landscape painter who spent most of his life in Brittany. He preferred to paint coastal scenes capturing the power and violence of the sea against the granite outcrops of the Brittany coast, but also painted rural scenes of landscapes and working people.

He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts with Laurens and Gérôme. He exhibited for the first time in 1880. He soon turned away from the academic style of his teachers, influenced by Monet.

Moret favoured the painting techniques of the Impressionists and was friends with Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard. In 1889 he worked at Le Pouldu with Gauguin's adherents. In 1888-1892 he turned to SynthetismGLOSSARYA term that attained significance in the School of Pont-Aven, used primarily by Paul Gauguin to describe his method of picture development. In this method, the pictorial theme is stored in the mind of the artist in a process of thought synthesis and then applied to the canvas from memory. The result is not necessarily natural colours, but imaginary forms and decorative surface arrangements on the painting. A subject existing in reality thus becomes superfluous. In 1889 the Groupe Synthétists held an exhibition in which Paul Gauguin, Emile Bernard, Charles Laval, and Louis Anquetin took part. and established his own stylistic blend of ImpressionismGLOSSARYA style of painting that became prominent in the last quarter of the 19th century as a reaction to the ossified doctrine of the Academy and the content-oriented atelier, historical, and genre painting. The name is derived from the 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet, and first was used by art critics as a mocking description for a group of artists excluded from the official Salon, but who had their own first group exhibition in 1874 at the salon of the Parisian photographer Nadar. Impressionism, as a new type of naturalism, negated classical pictorial methods; based on contemporary theories of physics, it indicated the natural object in a revolutionary fashion - entirely as a manifestation of colour. Their supreme principle was "plein-air" or open-air painting, through which the painters tried to capture a direct, spontaneous impression of what they saw. in the manner of Guillaumin and the style of the Pont-Aven school.

He used deep colours and vigorous brushstrokes within simple compositions and masterfully blended Synthetism and Impressionist techniques such that his work is considered a unique bridge uniting these two trends of the Pont Aven movement.