Pierre Eugène Montézin French, 1874-1946
Description
One of the most distinguishable Post-Impressionist painters, Pierre-Eugène Montézin was profoundly influenced by the great masterpieces of the Impressionists, most notably the work of Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley. Throughout his career, Montézin maintained an Impressionistic style but sought a greater freedom of expression in his use of colour and application of paint, marking him out among the most influential Post-Impressionist artists of his generation. Montézin’s landscapes are identifiable through their rich surface, composed using spontaneous brushstrokes of pure colour layered upon the canvas. The artists technique reveals the artists experimental nature and exemplifies Montézin’s instinctive use of both Impressionist and Post-Impressionist techniques in his quest to capture nature as he experienced it.
Inspired by the popular subjects of haymakers and peasant workers, which had graced the Salon walls since the times of Jean-François Millet and Gustave Courbet in the mid nineteeth-century, Montézin delighted in capturing the natural landscape as he experienced it and figures, either working the land or at leisure are common themes throughout his oeuvre. Montézin’s naturalistic depictions of haymaking were highly lauded at the Paris Salon and in 1939 Montézin was commissioned to paint a vast fresco inside the Law Court of Chambéry.