Biography

French painter, son of a country school teacher. He was trained at the Académie de Peinture et de Dessin in Rouen, where he won prizes. Although he failed to gain entry to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Angrand began to win a controversial local reputation for canvases in a loosely Impressionist manner. In 1882 he secured a post as a schoolteacher at the Collège Chaptal in Paris. With this security he was able to make contacts in progressive artistic circles, and in 1884 he became a founder-member of the Salon des Indépendants. His paintings of this period depict rural interiors and kitchen gardens, combining the broken brushwork of Monet and Camille Pissarro with the tonal structure of Bastien-Lepage (e.g. In the Garden, 1884; private collection).

He exhibited in the first Salon des Indépendants in 1884, and made his name known after the group exhibition in 1886. During his lifetime, he exhibited not only paintings but also pastels. Angrand adopted Seurat's divisionism, a systematic, scientific method using the technique of pointillism, i.e., application of unmixed pigments juxtaposed in dots. In order to obtain the utmost luminosity and brilliance of colour, small dots of unmixed pigments, applied to the canvas blend optically in the spectator's eye. Developing a highly personal approach to divisionism, Angrand began using larger brush-strokes around 1904. The result was similar to that achieved by dots, but the optical blending was less smooth. He tried to compensate for this by greater intensity of colour.

Up to 1900 his painting of form became increasingly pointillist, thereafter he returned to an almost traditional technique with simple forms.