Maurice Martin French, 1894-1978

Maurice Martin (1894-1978) was a French landscape painter of the Loing valley at Moret-sur-Loing and of the Loir valley around Montoire, who carried the motifs of the Impressionists into the middle of the twentieth century. He won the gold medal of the Salon des Artistes Français in 1946 and served on its committee from 1959 until his death. Born at Mormant, in the Seine-et-Marne, on 19 July 1894, Martin came to painting through a trade. He worked in his father's business in Paris from 1910, was wounded at Verdun in 1916 and painted his first canvases while convalescing at Lisieux. His training ran alongside his working life: the Académie de la Grande Chaumière from 1920 to 1930, then the studio of the painter Pierre-Gaston Rigaud from 1928 to 1936, whose classes left the studio in fine weather for Montmartre and the banks of the Seine. He did not exhibit until 1932. Four years later the Salon des Artistes Français awarded him a prize for Le Quai des lave uses à Moret, and the valley of the Loing became his country. At Moret and Saint- Mammès, wrote Georges Poisson, Conservateur Général du Patrimoine, he met the shadow of Alfred Sisley, and along the Orvanne and the Lunain he found his motifs without needing to look for them. There he came to know the painter Pierre Eugène Montézin, and the two shared the river in what the auctioneers of his 1996 studio sale called a dialogue between equals. The gold medal, the Prix Corot and the Prix Rosa Bonheur followed in 1946. Maurice Martin painted before the subject, in all weathers. Arnaud d'Hauterives, curator of the Musée Marmottan, compared him to a standing stone, planted before his easel whether it blew or rained, and the painter Jean Rigaud, who knew him in his father's studio, wrote that his brushstrokes make the light vibrate. Prizes later took him to Morocco in 1951, Madagascar in 1961 and Tunisia in 1970, and his work was shown in London, Tokyo, New York and Vienna, and in 1975 at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage in Leningrad. He died in Paris on 1 July 1978. The year before, his Le Loing à Moret had entered the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims. A Prix Maurice Martin is awarded each year at the Salon de Moret, and in 2024 the town's museum marked its centenary with the exhibition Maurice Martin, Les Yeux du Loing. D'Hauterives placed the artist, for his steady attention to nature and his indifference to fashion, in the line of the great French landscape painters.