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Beatrice Duval Paintings
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Béatrice Duval was born into a well-off family, and travelled extensively around the world with them – particularly with her father, of whom she was especially fond. During a trip to St-Cloud she met Émile Verhaeren and Camille Pissarro, and also Paul Signac, whom she got to know well: he gave her advice and influenced her in the direction of Neo-Impressionism. She formed long-lasting friendships with all three men, as she did with Matisse, Maximilien Luce, Lucie Cousturier and the critic Félix Fénéon. During the early years of the 20th century, she painted her Parisian friends with passion – Lucie Cousturier in particular – and took her works to be exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Indépendants and the Druet and Bernheim Jeune galleries. Her travels with her father continued, interspersed with trips to St Tropez, where she would stay with Signac. In 1913 she spent a few months near Quimperlé, in Brittany, which was an obligatory rite of passage for the painters of the day. She and her father were forced to return to Switzerland when World War I broke out. After the war they moved to San Remo, where her father died in 1929. The shock of his death put an end to her career: she stopped painting permanently after that, and dedicated the rest of her long life to protecting birds. Her entire output was forgotten, and only rediscovered in 1985.
Not all of her paintings are entirely Neo-Impressionist: she was born much later than the other artists, so her interpretation of Neo-Impressionism was bound to be different from theirs (Seurat lived from 1859 to 1891). Among her landscapes, those that are most Neo-Impressionist in style bear the mark of Paul Signac: a bright palette, big dots of colour and a loose form of Divisionism. There are other landscapes which do not bear the influence of Neo-Impressionist theory, and probably predate her encounter with Signac: these are painted with an energetic, free technique. She was a highly gifted artist. Although she did not quite achieve the transposition of colours normally associated with the Divisionist technique – whereby every colour is recreated by juxtaposing the pure colours that constitute it – in her Realist interpretation of landscape, she was surprisingly bold in the colours she used. For example, behind the green and green-yellow leafy mass of an umbrella pine in the foreground, she would indicate the leaves in the background with broad streaks of pure ultramarine.
A retrospective exhibition of her works was held in Lyons in 1991.
Bibliography
Delamarre-Tindy, Françoise/Selz, Jean: Béatrice Duval, Éd. Vincent Buisson, Thonon, 1991.
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