Saint Malo, beached !

Beached in St.Malo.

On the beach in St. Malo in before posting it was inevitable meeting some more foreign artists who stayed and painted the walled city and its fashionable beaches. I suppose James Wilson Morrice (1865-1924) actually had to be included in before posting. Being a greater God of Modern painting he is considered one of the great Canadian painters. 

Friend of American Maurice Brazil Prendergast (1858-1924) at the Académie Julian where they arrived and met as students around 1890 discovering Brittany's coast and St. Malo shortly after. Morrice' paintings were created from around that time but Prendergasts career as an impressionist (which he wasn't) wasn't very successful in the beginning. His very characteristic style for which he today is much loved had yet to be developed and mature. He returned in 1907 to paint his St.Malo (before posting).   

And friend of Australian Charles Conder (1868-1909) who like Morrice choose for a long stay in France, lived and painted in England and was already a celebrated painter in Australia before leaving for Europe.

Originally the Académie Julian, started as a private entreprise in 1868 preparing male students for the Ecole des Beaux Arts located in the bustling Rue de Montmartre. But eventually it drew thousands of students from all over the world working in many locations all over Paris paying for services and courses and who were taught by the best French artists. It also accommodated women students completing a study in the art of painting and sculpture while the official “Ecole des beaux Arts” was still refusing them.

In the Académie they met the Nabis (“Prophets”) painters. It was probably Morrice, who had arrived first, inviting Prendergast to St.Malo. From Morrice he also learned painting “pochades”, the small (pocketsize) studies on panel which Prendergast eventually back in the US lead to the recognizable style he is most known and famous for: mundanely dressed people and beach scenery in strong coloured and flat (Nabis) strokes of paint. He was a true watercolor artist painting later also in oil.

Morrice also painted in the seaside village of Dieppe and created some strong and colorful work here like this study and the actual painting below. I'ld settle for the study. Dieppe was made famous and immortal by Monet, Boudin and Whistler.

In St. Malo (and at the Académie) we also meet Emanuel Phillip Fox (1865-1915) and his artist wife Ethel Carrick Fox (1872-1952). They returned and became very famous in Australia. Read here* about this interesting artistic couple. 

Above Emanuel and Ethel Fox.

Maurice Prendergast's (unfinished) sketch. Same place, same tide ! But I think Ethel Fox stretched and bended the perspective a little to the advantage of the composition.

Writing this posting I noticed a peculiar fact about Prendergast and Morrice. Both artists, learning, experimenting, painting, working and growing into fame and glory, influenced by and meeting all these creative artists and writers of the time, Matisse, Degas, Somerset Maugham, Marquet, Boudin, Whistler and many more, left this world in the same last week of January 1924. 

Prendergast (65) in New York and Morrice (59) in Tunis. Prendergast was in frail health, Morrice died of alcohol abuse, Fox (50) of chain-smoking and Conder (41) of syphilis contracted from his landlady not being able to pay the rent with money or paintings. 

Enough considerations to end my ambitions to be a famous painter and stick to blogwriting and collecting prints. For the moment. Ethel Fox lived to be 80.

  

All pictures borrowed freely from the Internet for friendly, educational and non commercial use only. 

Selecting pictures for this posting from the many great examples available has been an extremely difficult and debatable task. All pictures are mouse-clickable to embiggen. 

Next, even some more surprising painters of St. Malo.

Saint Malo and some great painters (I)

St. Malo:

  Maurice Brazil Prendergast,  Sir Willam Russel Flint, Paul Lecomte and N. Kerber

Yes, I know, this is not a woodblock print. It's a drawing in ink. But one cannot live by prints alone. I can't, so I asked the publisher, writer and editor of this Blog to bother you today with this recent fleemarket find. It's signed N.(I think)  Kerber, 1954. I have no idea and or any clue to who he (or she) might be. This posting one day maybe helping to identify this artist. This is how St.Malo looked liked in 1954 (right in the middle of it's reconstruction 1948-1960) being the year my mother dropped me on our planet and having walked about the city in the 80's. I just couldn't leave it and had to bag it. 

Visiting St.Malo was rewarded with discovering delicious "Far Breton", one of Brittany's specialities and it's stunningly simple receipe  you'll find here* 




Saint Malo on Brittany’s NW-coast, I discovered excavating the Internet, attracted some great painters. Some famous, some less, but all trying to capture the combination of the unique walled medieval port and city, the sea and the Atlantic light.  Above around 1905, below today.

Shy American (post) impressionist Maurice Brazil Prendergast (1858-1924) was here. He visited and stayed around 1907. He met Vuillard and Bonnard and studied at the Acadamie Julian in Paris. He did many paintings of the great city and most of all of the beach and beach life in his happy, colorful and mosiac way. Many of them are described as sketches, but in fact are so good I doubt these expert qualifications. His works in oil were created later in life being    by heart a watercolor artist. 

Above: Studying these works I was amazed to discover how the artist changed his view (and witnessed the changes of the tide) from the same spot in these paintings. (High tide, Low tide, in between) A 100 years later and from my desktop ! 

And touring the Internet I discovered yet another of my favorite artists was here, William Russel Flint (1880-1964), a Scott and later knighted Sir Flint. He was definitely one of the finest masters of watercolor painting the world ever saw and he was here a few years before British and allied bombing in august 1944, freeing the French from German occupation destroyed the city almost completely in three nights of bombing.

Here Sir Flint could combine his skill's and love for the landscape with his amazing talent creating many Eves from Eden, most of them bathing with just a few hairs on brush, a dash of water and some dried pigments. He must have known St. Malo and its surrounding beaches well. Because he obviously had another great talent of being in the right place in the right time witnessing all these beached objects. And carrying a painting box around at the same time. He must have loved St.Malo because like Prendergast he made dozens of paintings of the place. His creating of water is just incredible: like Turner created skies and God created Eve. 

Paul Lecomte (1842-1920) is last in this posting on the greater gods (but who am I to judge) of (post)-impressionist painting seeing St.Malo. A contemporary of Claude Monet (1840-1926) Lecomte is considered the last painter of the Barbizon school of painting (1830-1870) freeing landscape painting from romanticism and leading it into Impressionism. Monet considered the greatest of Impressionists. Lecomte viewed St.Malo from opposite the Rance estuary  sister city Dinard (try googling: Dinard + Google Earth)  

Next: St.Malo seen by some lesser gods (but who am I to judge) of (post)-impressionist painting. 

All pictures (mouse clickable to embiggen) borrowed freely from the Internet for friendly, educational and non commercial use only.

Fernand Lantoine, traveler painter.

Fernand Lantoine

(1876 - 1955)

French painter and lithographic printmaker.
Appointed Marine painter 1922.

There's more to Life then printmaking alone and I've warned readers in advance: I've met some very nice and interesting artists along the quais of Paris this summer worth sharing. 

With Fernand Lantoine I've met a painter who not only saw and painted the little steam crane on Quai de la Tournelle (left) but who also painted the Paris washer boats (bateaux lavoirs, below) both subject of discussion in recent postings. He did it in a  wonderful impressionist way using a combination of   suggestive warm and golden summer colors probably originally invented by Vincent van Gogh in these two glorious paintings  below dated 1889/90.

Besides I discovered Fernand Lantoine had a most interesting life and career and left us some very, to me at least, appealing paintings in some very different genres. When you know I perticularly like nice beach paintings, and besides I'm always in for 

works of art showing interiors with grand piano's, but also seascapes with nostalgic  steamer boats, 

and paintings showing exotic places, in exotic colors, with exotic people in  impressive and impressing perspectives, you'll understand why.  

Lantoine was born in Maretz in the North of France and went to live and work in Bruxelles as a (very) young man in 1891, joined the army, faught and sketched in the battle fields of Flanders and after 4 years as a POW was again send to the trenches now on the Russian front. He survivid, worked, organised and held his first exhibition in 1920. How he was trained or he was a self-taught artist I haven't been able to find out, yet.

In 1922 he was appointed "Peintre de la Marine", and now officially appointed as Navy painter enabled him to travel and paint extensively. He first adapted and followed Theo van Rijsselberghe (1862-1926) and George Seurat's (1859-1891) scientifique Pointilisme. In later life he created a much more simplistic but always colorfull and consistent approach and way of painting. 

After he visited Belgian Congo he stayed and lived there for some time and much in the way of Paul Gauquin (1848-1903) before him fell in love with the land and its colorfull people. He created his most intimate and most colorful work here. 

He also seems to have decorated with his painting the Paquebots, the iconic steamer boats, umbellical connectors of motherlands, colonies and far away Oriëntal destinations. 

His painterly style was over the years called, Avantgarde, Oriëntalist, Africanist, Simplistic even. He was named a Post-impressionist painter, a painter-traveller and a Fauvist. All of wich no doubt are or were true to some extent and at some point.  

In WW2 he fled to the free South of France were he kept painting, the Mediteranean shores and its villages 

His Marine employement enabled him to keep travelling and painting. From the Arctic Sea and the Fjords of Norway to Oceania, Madagascar and Somalia unill the day he died in 1955 in the town where he was born: Maretz.

Since there are only a few galeries and auction houses occasionally showing a picture I decided on a rainy day it would be fun to award this artist a posting with some biography scratched together from different sources and a couple of hands full of selected and favorite paintings in the humblest of Weblogs.

The friends Fernand Lantoine made and met abroad and in the Congo are a colorful and and interesting lot too: Jean Baptiste Olive (1848-1936), August Mambour (1896-1968), Fernand Allard l'Olivier (1883-1933)  and last but not least: Pierre Vaucleroy (1892-1980) who was a printmaker too and who shall have a posting of his own. 

Next: more Bateaux Lavoir inspired paintings by various famous but also some lesser known painters.