Jacques Villon

Jacques Villon (July 31, 1875 – June 9, 1963) was a French Cubist painter and printmaker.

Born Emile Méry Frédéric Gaston Duchamp in Damville, Eure, in the Haute-Normandie region of France, he came from a prosperous and artistically inclined family. While he was a young man, his maternal grandfather Emile Nicolle, successful businessman and artist, taught him and his siblings.

Gaston Duchamp was the elder brother of:

In 1894, he and his brother Raymond moved to Montmartre in Paris. There, he studied law at the University of Paris, but received his father's permission to study art on the condition that he must continue studying law.

To distinguish himself from his siblings, Gaston Duchamp adopted the pseudonym of Jacques Villon as a tribute to the French medieval poet François Villon. In Montmartre, home to an expanding art community, Villon lost interest in the pursuit of a legal career, and for the next 10 years he worked in graphic media, contributing cartoons and illustrations to Parisian newspapers as well as drawing color posters. His work appeared in the satirical weekly Le Courrier français.

In 1903 he helped organize the drawing section of the first Salon d'Automne in Paris. In 1904-1905 he studied art at the Académie Julian.

During the First World War, Villon worked as a cartographer for the army.

At first, he was influenced by Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, but later he participated in the fauvist, Cubist, and abstract impressionist movements.

By 1906, Montmartre was a bustling community and Jacques Villon moved to Puteaux in the quiet outskirts of Paris. There, he began to devote more of his time to working in drypoint, an intaglio technique that creates dark, velvety lines that stand out against the white of the paper. During this time he worked closely to develop his technique with other important printmakers such as Manuel Robbe.

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