Jacques Meugnier French, 1951

Some painters find their calling in front of a landscape. Jacques Meugnier found his in front of a painting. Standing before the Impressionist masterpieces of the Musée du Jeu de Paume as a young man in Paris, he felt the pull not of the countryside itself but of what Monet, Sisley and Pissarro had made of it, and that encounter set the course of his work ever since. Born in Paris on 31 December 1951, Meugnier is a French Impressionist landscape painter known for his richly textured, warm-hued treatments of the French countryside. Working in oil on canvas, he carries the plein-air language of the nineteenth-century Impressionists into the contemporary period, and counts the museums of Paris, rather than any single teacher, as his real education. While studying in the mid-1970s he secured permission from the national museums to copy his favourite masters directly from the originals, spending hours at a time within arm's reach of a Monet or a Sisley. He has described those hours as the moment his vocation was sealed. That close study still underpins his painting. For Meugnier, the ease with which an Impressionist canvas meets its viewer conceals how demanding it is to make: the technique turns on an acute feeling for colour and, above all, for how colours are set against one another, a matter of intuition and long perseverance before sensibility can take over. He works in a state of heightened receptivity in front of his subject, waiting, as he puts it, for a small corner of nature to begin to speak. In 1983, one of Meugnier's paintings was acquired by the curator of the Musée Renoir at Cagnes-sur-Mer. His work has since travelled far beyond France, held in galleries and private collections around the world.