Further Images
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Signed | Signed lower right |
| Size | 24.00" × 32.00" (61.0cm × 81.3cm) |
| Framed Size | 32.00" × 40.00" (81.3cm × 101.6cm) |
| Dated | c. 1925 |
| Condition | Very good condition |
| Provenance | Private collection - France |
| About this Painting | A quiet stretch of river in summer, a screen of tall trees along the left bank throwing their reflections into still green water, a village roof or two glimpsed through the trunks, and beyond, the bank opening out to meadows under a high sky of cream and pale blue. Montézin has built the whole picture from short, loaded, separate touches — flecks of sky-blue dropped into the dark foliage to let the light through, the water worked in horizontal dashes of green, violet and white, a scatter of pink and orange across the shallows at the lower right. The paint is dry and dragged, laid one stroke beside another rather than blended, so that the surface holds the light and the eye assembles the scene at a distance. The subject is almost certainly the Loing at Moret, where Montézin settled for a year after the Great War and to which he returned throughout his career. It is the same slow, tree-hung water that had drawn Sisley for the last twenty years of his life, and the Île-de-France rivers remained Montézin's central subject to the end: quiet banks, curtains of poplar and willow, and the light of the region moving on the surface. Montézin trained under Ernest Quost and was otherwise self-taught, exhibiting at the Salon from 1903. He received the Rosa Bonheur Prize in 1920, was made Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 1923, and in 1932 took the Medal of Honour at the Salon des Artistes Français — the first landscape painter to do so since Harpignies in 1897. He was elected president of the Salon jury, showed 237 canvases at the Galerie Charpentier that same year, exhibited at Durand-Ruel in 1938, and in 1941 was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in the seat of Édouard Vuillard. He died in 1946 at Moëlan-sur-Mer, having cycled out to paint from nature with his canvases and paintbox on his back. His work is in the Petit Palais, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and the museums of Dijon, Lille and Roubaix. |
£13,950.00
GBP
