Ernest Pierre Guerin Paintings

Biography

Painter (gouache), watercolourist, draughtsman. Local figures, local scenes, landscapes.

Ernest Pierre Guérin was a pupil of Lafont and Ronsin. He was a member-exhibitor with the Salon des Artistes Français in Paris, and joined the New South Wales Society of Artists, based in Sydney. He also exhibited with the Royal Cambrian Academy. He was invited by the French state to present his work at the Pavillon Marsan, in the Louvre. At the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, he was awarded a silver-gilt medal in 1905, the Prix du Ministre in 1906, and the Medaille d’Excellence in 1907. The state acquired one of his works for the Musée du Luxembourg in 1931. In 2001, the Musée Départemental Breton in Quimper held a retrospective: Ernest Guérin: Images of Brittany ( Ernest Guérin: imagier breton).

Guérin was both a painter and manuscript illuminator whose works record the people, coastline, landscapes and legends of Brittany. The commentator Gustave Geoffroy has compared his mystical, craftsmanlike paintings to the work of the Italian Primitives, while at the same citing the ‘sensitive, visionary realism and expressivity’ of his landscapes, skies and figures. Anatole Braz describes the nostalgic quality of Guérin’s Breton scenes, ‘suffused with the poetry of times past’.

Museum and Gallery Holdings

Paris (former Mus. du Luxembourg)