Pierre Eugène Montézin French, 1874-1946

The son of a lace draftsman, Pierre-Eugène Montézin was introduced to the arts at a young age and was entered by his father into a decorative atelier to learn the art of executing murals. This was a strong decorative aesthetic among modernists of the day. In 1903, Montézin was introduced to the French Impressionist Ernest Quost, who encouraged him to concentrate on drawing and painting and to study the theories of Impressionism. Following in the footsteps of his Impressionist forebears, Montézin began to paint landscapes, applying the ideals of painting ‘en plein air’. Montezin exhibited his first work at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1903 and was awarded medals at the 1907 and 1910 salon. Montézin began to win honours as early as 1920 when he received the Rosa Bonheur Prize, a special award for animal painting named after the famous female animal painter of the 19th century. A seminal moment in his career came three years later, when he became the recipient of the Légion d’Honneur for a landscape painting at the Salon des Artistes Français, the first landscape artist to do so since 1897. Critical reaction to this nomination was explosive. For thirty years no landscape had received the Medal of Honor which had been awarded only to figure painters and painters of historic or classical subjects. For three decades landscapes had been considered a minor form of painting, a fact which made Montézin’s triumph all the more exceptional.

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.