François-Louis Français (French, 1814-1897). Étude d'hiver, Vallée de Münster, 1857. Oil on canvas. 40 x 53-3/4 inches (...

Description

François-Louis Français (French, 1814-1897)
Étude d'hiver, Vallée de Münster, 1857
Oil on canvas
40 x 53-3/4 inches (101.6 x 136.5 cm)
Signed and partially dated lower left: Français. 57.

PROVENANCE:
Massol, Paris, September 26, 2003, lot 49 (as Paysage hivernal);
Private collection.

EXHIBITION:
Musée Louis Français, Plombières, France, "Centenaire de Louis Français," 1997, no. 69.

LITERATURE:
A. Gros, François-Louis Français: causeries et souvenirs par un de ses élèves, Paris, 1902, p. 284 (as Vallée de Munster. Hiver.).

François-Louis Français, most often called simply Louis Français, began his career as a lithographer and engraver, a discipline requiring an acute attention to detail that the artist retained for the rest of his life.

He went on to become one of the most commercially successful landscape painters of the 19th century, most closely associated with the Barbizon School, which celebrated Realism in landscape amid the Romantic movement dominant at the time.

Following his studies at the École des Beaux Arts under Jean Gigoux, Français went to live at Barbizon in 1834, where two years later he met Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, with whom he formed a strong personal and professional bond. Corot's loose, soft brushwork and rich tonal colors heavily influenced Français' early landscapes, and the older artist's advice in commercial matters proved enormously beneficial and included introducing Français to many of his own patrons and colleagues.

Despite Corot's guidance, Français was, in true Barbizon fashion, a realist: he was never fully able to replicate Corot's delicate rendering of the human form, and so focused on his development as a landscapist, notably expressing a higher degree of formalism in his work not seen in Corot's oeuvre, a precision of execution likely retained from his training with Gigoux.

A sojourn to Italy in the late 1840s informed another development in his practice, the adoption of a more luminous palette and the use of closely set brushstrokes, affording an exactness of detail that would become a hallmark of his later works.

Français traveled extensively across France throughout the 1850s, including regular visits to his native Plombières-les-Bains and the larger Vosges region, where the valley depicted in the present work, near Münster, is located. Although the first number of the two-digit date has been somewhat abraded, Étude d'hiver, Vallée de Münster, certainly dates to this period. The painting was reproduced as a lithograph by Eugène Leroux and published in 1858, and the canvas itself bears a variant of the colorman's mark of Bertrand Deforge that was in use from 1841 to 1857.

The work itself bears all the features of Français' mature style: the precision of the paint application and technical mastery of light, both strikingly apparent in the luminosity of the ice surrounding the lock, and the soft, atmospheric perspective. In contradiction with the earlier criticism of his figural work, the cluster of figures in the foreground at right is notably robust, particularly the young man to the right of the fire, who turns to look over his shoulder directly at the painter, at us.

A highly respected and decorated artist by this time, Français' career continued to be marked by success well into the final decade of his life. In 1890, he won the Médaille d'honneur at the Société des Artistes Français, where two of his landscapes were exhibited and, most significantly, was elected to the Chair of the Académie Française, the first landscapist to be accorded this honor. The Musée Louis Français now occupies his former studio in his hometown of Plombières-les-Bains.


More information about François Louis Francais Artist.



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