Léon Printemps

Léon Printemps

Portrait of Léon Printemps in 1924
Born Léon Printemps
26 May 1871
Paris, France
Died 9 July 1945 (aged 74)
Paris, France
Nationality  French
Education École des Beaux-Arts de Paris
Known for Portrait painter, Landscape painter

Léon Printemps (26 May 1871 – 9 July 1945) was a French artist known best for his work as a portrait and landscape painter.

Biography

Léon Printemps was born in Paris to a family which originally hailed from Lille. From an early age he was attracted to painting.

His uncle, the sculptor Jules Printemps, a student of François Jouffroy at the École nationale des Beaux-Arts, supported his vocation and prepared him for the entrance examination to this school. He was admitted in 1892, joined the workshop of Gustave Moreau and regularly visited it until Moreau’s death in 1898. He also associated with such artists as Rouault, Matisse, Evenepoel, Albert Marquet, Edgar Maxence and Charles Milcendeau.

Around this period his work was largely part of the Symbolist movement and he experimented with a poetic or mythological vision and with the sensuality of the female nude.

Work

Sully Prudhomme - 1902 - Pastel - 36x45cm

Portrait painter

He soon established his reputation as a portrait artist receiving commissions from such eminent personalities as Sully Prudhomme, the first recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Prince and Princess of Waldeck, Mr and Mrs Commettant, and Prince Yusupov, the assassin of Rasputin.

Léon Printemps married in 1903 and frequently painted his family in an intimate tone, particularly his daughter Lucile whose death at the age of 6 touched him profoundly, as well as his son René.

Landscape painter

Léon Printemps was a landscape painter his entire life. His desire to meet Flemish masters prompted him to travel to Belgium and the Netherlands at the end of the nineteenth century, returning home with various studies. Later in life his attraction to the beaches of Normandy, which were quite fashionable at the time, became more marked. After the First World War he started painting landscapes in Brittany and particularly the islands of the Vendée coast, the island of Noirmoutier, the island of Yeu, where he painted seascapes and portraits of fishermen and old farmers’ wives.

Flemish and Dutch influence

The appeal of the work of Flemish and Dutch masters during Printemps’ visits to the Louvre Museum inspired him to travel to Belgium and the Netherlands on several occasions with a desire to better understand the art of these great Flemish and Dutch masters. Several paintings, which were the outcome of his first visits to Belgium, were presented at the Salon des artistes français (1898 and 1905), the Salon artistique des PTT (1905) and in regional exhibitions, in Lille (1898) and in Nantes (1906).

In 1894 Printemps travelled to Belgium for the first time, presumably in the company of other students of Gustave Moreau, visiting Bruges, Ghent, Mechelen and Antwerp. Two years later he travelled to the Meuse Valley where he painted the Bayard Rock, a remarkable sight in Dinant. In 1897, he spent some time in the Netherlands visiting the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. In 1898, he returned to Bruges and Mechelen. In 1929 and 1933 he also took his son René, who was also studying to become a painter at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, on a trip to explore these two cities.

Léon Printemps died on 9 July 1945, in his studio at 6 rue Furstenberg, where the Musée National Eugène Delacroix[1] is currently located.

Participation in Exhibitions – Awards and Merits

Paintings in public collections

Retrospectives since 2000

Bibliography

Notes and references

  1. Musée National Eugène Delacroix website
  2. Cf. Caroline Mignot, op.cit., p. 119-120.
  3. This painting inspired two exhibitions : (a) Museum of Art and History of Narbonne : July–September 1996 ; (b) Museum of Fine Arts of Nice : 18 October 1996 – 19 January 1997. It is also included on page 52 of a catalogue of the Museum of Fine Arts in Nice, entitled : Vigne, Vins, Vignerons dans la peinture française, Les Presses de l’Imprimerie Escourbiac, Graulhet (Tarn), 1996.
  4. Donated by Jacques Noireau, the painter’s grandson, to the municipality of Laffaux and inauguration of the painting on 27 June 2009 during a conference at the Town Hall which focused on the First World War (CRID14-18).
  5. 5.0 5.1 Léon Printemps was included in a section on five « artists from La Meule » (a port), which was published in the book on the poet Marc-Adolphe Guégan, edited by Jean-François Henry.
  6. 6.0 6.1 6.2 Catalogues still available from the editor.
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External links