Armand Point 1860-1932

Armand Point began his career painting in a naturalist style, before being drawn to North Africa, where he produced orientalist genre scenes. Over time, however, his inspiration shifted toward a more idealist approach. Joséphin Péladan invited him to exhibit at the Salon de la Rose+Croix, an aesthetic salon, for which Point, together with Léonard Sarluis, created the poster in March 1896.

In May 1893, a trip to Italy with his companion Hélène Linder profoundly influenced the artist. Immersed in the work of the early Italian masters, he embraced an art guided by tradition. He reconstructed an egg tempera painting technique, combining this refined method with his symbolist vision. Continuing to draw inspiration from the old masters, he established an artist colony in the Forest of Fontainebleau, where painters, sculptors, gilders, enamelers, and goldsmiths worked together to produce tapestries, jewelry, and precious objects using revived techniques. This intellectual circle, called Haute-Claire, became a symbolic hub visited by notable figures such as Odilon Redon, Oscar Wilde, Élémir Bourges, Stéphane Mallarmé, Stuart Merrill, and the diplomat Philippe Berthelot, in an atmosphere Paul Fort would later describe as a “court of love.”

Although his work received limited critical recognition and was often dismissed as outdated or derivative, Point admired the Middle Ages and the Renaissance with the same passion as Edward Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelites. For him, the path to achieving the Ideal lay in the revival of ancestral values.