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Léon Pourtau
PAYSANNES ALIMENTANT LE FEU
LOT SOLD.
778,000 USD
Details & Cataloguing
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Léon Pourtau
1872 - 1898
PAYSANNES ALIMENTANT LE FEU
Stamped L. Pourtau (lower right, on the reverse & on the stretcher)
Oil on canvas
45 3/4 by 31 7/8 in.
116.2 by 81.1 cm
Painted in 1893.
Read Condition Report
Read Condition Report
Oil on canvas
45 3/4 by 31 7/8 in.
116.2 by 81.1 cm
Painted in 1893.
Provenance
Gabriel Vallad (the artist's grandson until 1988)
Acquired in 1988
Acquired in 1988
Literature
Gilles Caillaud, Hélène Bailly-Marcilhac & Charles Bailly, Léon Pourtau: vie et oeuvre d'un pionnier du pointillisme: essai de catalogue raisonné, Milan, 2014, no. 14, illustrated p. 85
Catalogue Note
Léon Pourtau was born circa 1872. His primary source of income was his work as a musician, and as a young man he traveled across France as a member of a circus troupe before enrolling at the Conservatoire de Paris. A professor at the Conservatoire de Lyon at a very young age—some have said as young as 22—not to mention already a husband and father, Pourtau then embarked on a two-year tour of the United States where he was a guest member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Unbeknownst to the artist, he would never again return to his native France, as his transatlantic ship the SS La Bourgogone collided with a passing vessel in the Atlantic and sank off the coast of Nova Scotia. Pourtau, along with over five-hundred others including members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the American painter De Scott Evans, drowned tragically.
A friend and admirer of Seurat's during his brief but remarkable life, Pourtau adopted and applied the principles of Pointillism in his own painting (see figs. 1 & 2). In his obituary an unnamed source is quoted: "So as to prove to me that he wasn't forgetting painting [while on his American tour] he sent me from Boston, two years ago, an exquisite visiting card, a tiny picture representing a riverside scene. Pourteau [sic] was a truly distinguished Pointillist. Without letting the procedure overwhelm him, he knew how to give his canvas intense light and vibration" (quoted in Phillip Dennis Cate, ed., Toulouse-Lautrec and La Vie Moderne, Paris 1880-1910 (exhibition catalogue), Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus; Foothills Art Center, Golden, Colorado; Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton; Society of the Four Arts, Palm Beach & Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, 2014-15, p. 41).
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