Landscapes
Watercolors by Paul Duverney (1866-1925)
Paul Duverney was a French painter active in Europe in the 19th and early 20th century. Duverney created luminous watercolor landscapes, specializing in coastal scenes and vignettes of maritime activity along the Mediterranean coast. Duverney traveled widely throughout Europe, and created paintings in Cannes, Saint-Tropez, Antibes, Villefranche, the Pyrenees, Venice, Athens, Paris and Rotterdam.
Duverney’s travels reveal a search for subjects for the brush; his paintings are, at once, vignettes into coastal landscapes across Europe, illustrations of the possibilities and potentials of transportation amid the industrial revolution, and portraits of Duverney’s own mobility.
French Drawings & Monotypes by Henri Marchal (1878-1942)
Henri-Joseph Marchal was a French landscape artist known for his monotypes and pastels. Marchal was raised in Nancy, a riverfront village in the northeastern frontier region of Grand-Est, France. Marchal’s formal training commenced in his early adolescence; he studied under the tutelage of Jules Larcher at the École des Beaux-Arts in Nancy and later trained with Léon Bonnat at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. By age eighteen, Marchal was admitted to the Salon des Artistes Français. He returned to Nancy to serve as a professor and later director of the Nancy École des Beaux-Arts.
Marchal exhibited regularly at the Salon des Artistes Français: he won a third-prize medal in 1906 for La Grand'Mère; presented Fin de journée in 1908; was awarded a gold medal for Portrait de Jeune Fille in 1926. In 1929, he presented Portrait d'Homme. By the end of his career, Marchal was made a Chevalier of
the Légion d’Honneur.
Active in Nancy in 1917, Marchal produced some of these landscapes while living adjacent to the Alsace-Lorraine front lines of World War I.
French Pastels by Lucien Ott (1870-1927)
Lucien Ott was a French artist active in Paris and Brittany at the turn of the 20th century. Formally trained in drawing, Ott worked in his early career as a designer at the Parisian furniture manufacturer Maison Krieger. He later went on to train in the art of engraving with renowned Parisian printmaker Loys Delteil. As a fine artist, Ott was self taught, but deeply exposed to the artists of his time; Ott’s affinity for Paul Gaugin likely drew him to new landscapes.
Ott spent several summers in Brittany early in his artistic career, in 1889 and again from 1898-1900, following Gaugin and the Pont-Aven school’s activity in Brittany. While in Brittany, Ott met and developed a lifelong friendship with Henri Rivière, a printmaker known for his silhouette cutouts for the shadow theater at the Parisian cabaret Le Chat Noir. Upon returning to Paris at the turn of the century, Ott’s subjects were frequently scenes of the city, the Seine, the surrounding Ile de France, and his Breton landscapes.
After serving in the French army during World War I, Ott dedicated his late career practice to watercolors, depicting the pastoral landscapes surrounding his home outside of Paris in Villeneuve Saint-Georges. Ott’s work was featured in a retrospective at the premier gallery for modern art, Le Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in 1929.
French Landscapes by Henri-Louis Foreau (1866, Paris-1938)
Louis-Henri Foreau was a French artist known for his views of Parisian gardens and rural landscapes. He trained under the tutelage of Henri Harpignies, Jules Lefebvre, Luc-Olivier Merson and Henri Lévy. Foreau lived and worked in Paris, where he exhibited in many salons in the late 19th and early 20th century, and was a member of the Société des Artistes Français.
Italian Watercolors by Edmond Calzaroni (c. 1885-1964)
Edmond Calzaroni was an Italian artist active in the early 20th century in Venice and Nice. Calzaroni’s Nice is a vertical landscape featuring the coastline of the Cote d’Azur. Calzaroni painted this scene from the eastern end of the Niçoise promenade as he was looking west during the golden hour. A landscape in subject matter, the subject of this portrait is Calzaroni’s finely detailed depiction of the Jetée-Promenade Palais of Nice.
Calzaroni painted another watercolor, Nice of the Niçoise coastline in which the immense domed cupola of the Jetée-Promenade appears as a faint silhouette in the distance. The Jetée-Promenade of Nice was built on stilts over the sea in 1882 as modeled after the Brighton Pier in the United Kingdom. It served as a concert hall, casino, hotel and center of culture in Nice for many years.
