André Barbier French, 1883-1970

A painter of the Seine, the Normandy coast and the changing light of the French landscape, André Barbier moved within the inner circle of late Impressionism. He counted Claude Monet, the critic Gustave Geffroy and the composer Claude Debussy among his friends, and was a familiar visitor to Monet's garden at Giverny. André Georges Barbier was born in Arras in 1883, into a well-established family. He showed early gifts that ran in two directions at once: he won a first prize for piano as a boy of eight, and he developed lifelong fascinations with astronomy and photography. These interests in light, optics and observation would later inform the way he saw and recorded the world as a painter. In 1903, at the age of twenty, Barbier settled in Paris and began exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants, showing landscapes and still lifes. He soon entered the artistic life of the capital, forming friendships not only with Monet and Geffroy but with painters such as Albert Marquet, Maurice Denis and Georges d'Espagnat. Over a long career he showed at the principal Paris salons, including the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Tuileries, and held solo exhibitions with the celebrated dealer Galerie Durand-Ruel. Barbier worked in the Impressionist tradition while keeping a manner that is recognisably his own. He built his compositions in fine, layered touches of paint, often giving the forms a soft, flickering edge and wrapping the whole scene in a delicate veil of light. The debt to Monet is clear, particularly in his interest in the same motif seen at different hours and in different weather, yet his pictures have their own temperature and tone. Due to his wealth, much of Barbier's work has remained with his family, but today his paintings are collected extensively in America and Europe and have recently been bought by members of the Monaco and Belgian Royal families.