CHAIGNEAU Paul ( XIX / XX )
The return of the shepherd and its herd the evening in the plain of Chailly .
Oil on canvas signed lower right .
18,1 / 21,6 in .
Original frame .
Chaigneau was one of the central figures in the second generation of Barbizon painters, Chaigneau combined rural subject matter inspired by his informal mentors Millet and Charles Jacque with the polished skills acquired in many years of academic training.
Chaigneau's ability at figure drawing and pictorial composition gave his Barbizon and Fontainebleau scenes a distinctive originality and recognizability. And his long association with the village of Barbizon (where he maintained a home for 50 years), as well as his efforts to make Barbizon art better known internationally in 1882, with Charles Jacque, Chaigneau founded the "Societe des artistes animaliers" distinguished Chaigneau as the principal representative of Barbizon art during the last quarter of the nineteenth-century.
Chaigneau was born on March 6, 1830 in the shipping center of Bordeaux, where he studied drawing under the successful academic painter Jean-Paul Alaux. In 1847, he moved to Paris to continue
studies with an uncle who was a marine painter; and in 1848 he submitted a landscape to the unjuried Salon (the Revolution of 1848 had suspended the normal Salon restrictions). In 1849, encouraged by
Jacques Brascassat, a family friend and successful animal painter, Chaigneau entered the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He studied in the studio of Picot, one of the most traditional teachers at the
Ecole, and in the studios of Jules Coignet and Brascassat, both more forward-looking and skilled as landscapists.
Chaigneau seems to have focused on a career in landscape painting from the beginning, and he entered the quadrennial competitions for the Prix de Rome in Historical Landscape almost immediately after his acceptance at the Ecole — finishing a noteworthy 6th in 1849 and receiving Honorable Mention (runner-up or second place) in 1854. During these years, alongside his studies in the restrained, classical landscape style favored by the Coignet and others at the Ecole, Chaigneau also honed his skills as a realistic landscape artist, traveling throughout France to study a wide variety
of terrain — the Rhone valley around Lyon, the Normandy coast, the marshes of the southern Landes region, and the mountains of the Auvergne. At the Exposition Universelle of 1855 he exhibited a
landscape in the tradition of Theodore Rousseau, then the most highly acclaimed member of the Realist school of French landscape, entitled Marais dans les Landes. |
