André Barbier French, 1883-1970

André Barbier (1883-1970) was born in Arras, France into a family of lawyers. At the age of twenty, Barbier settled in Paris at the Quai aux Fleurs, and in the same year, 1903, he began exhibiting landscapes and still lifes at the Paris Salons. Inspired by his Impressionist forbears, Gustave Courbet, Claude Monet and Camille Corot, Barbier delighted in depicting verdant forests and luminous seascapes at different times of the day and in a variety of atmospheric conditions. Like many of his contemporaries in early nineteenth-century Paris, Barbier travelled extensively in pursuit of subjects for his landscapes. Barbier chose to capture scenes of the Normandy coast and the French Riviera and also travelled further afield to Italy.

Although a follower of the Impressionists, Barbier’s style is wholeheartedly distinct. Barbier built up compositions using delicate layers of paint in a post-impressionist manner, often using a flickering outline to the forms within the landscape and imbuing his compositions with a delicate haze of light. 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.