Russian School 20th century View of Paris The Moulin Rouge Oil on canvas signed (Léon ZEYTLINE)

Biography

Leon ZEYTLINE ( 1885 / 1962 )
Léon Zeytline was born in 1885 in Paris. With a father from Crimea who emigrated to France in 1870, young Zeytline had to return to Russia for family reasons. There he received his first artistic training from one of the masters of Russian romantic painting Ivan Aïvazovsky (1817-1900). The artist, a marine painter, taught him cutting-edge and rigorous academic techniques. From 1900 Léon Zeytline joined the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where he benefited from the teaching of “ambulants” (1863-1890). It is a group of Russian critical realism painters in reaction against the methods, subjects and teaching of the Academy of Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg. 

Graduating in 1906, Zeytline moved to Paris and was immediately seduced by the color and light of the French impressionists he admired, such as Degas (1834-1917) and Manet (1832-1883). However, Léon Zeytline preserves in his oil paintings the extreme precision and accuracy of the technique characteristic of the Russian School. 

A very prolific and free painter, Léon Zeytline quickly freed himself from the dogmas of Russian realism to make the “City of Lights” his favorite subject and become the great pictorial witness of Paris of the Belle Epoque.
Léon Zeytline, the painter of the City of Lights
In Paris, the young painter Zeytline witnesses the enchanted parenthesis that opened at the end of the 20th century. Enhanced by electricity, the “City of Light” becomes the urban scene where technological advances, scientific progress and artistic creativity are deployed. It is this modern and cheerful effervescence that Zeytline tirelessly draws. Unlike his many contemporaries from the post-impressionist period, Zeytline does not work for commissions but paints freely all his favorite subjects. Léon Zeytline artistically bears witness to the evolution of urban mores, fashionable cafés, smoky cabarets, the grand Haussmannian boulevards where dressed-up couples stroll with pride. The energetic touch and warm light of Léon Zeytline's paintings contribute to the dynamism of his large scenes of outdoor life.
Léon Zeytline, artistic witness of the Belle Époque
Sometimes described as "the encyclopedist of the capital of the arts", Léon Zeytline paints with almost photographic precision and a sense of detail, the great Parisian monuments, thus leaving to history the traces of the memory of the monuments of his time (Panoramic View of the Quays of the Seine, The Pavilion of the Universal Exhibition or The Eiffel Tower and the Palais de l'Electrcité, The Moulin Rouge).

In its large urban panoramas with expanded perspectives, Zeytline bears witness to the constantly evolving modes of transport in the capital: from the horse to the metro (Avenue de l'opéra, Les Champs Élysées) from the carriage to the Schneider bus (Tramway, Calèches and Automobiles on the Boulevard de Strasbourg) or even from the bicycle to the entrances to the Art Nouveau Metro by Hector Guimard (1867-1942).
The painter Léon Zeytline and “the ode to the Parisian”
The woman is a central character in the painted or watercolor works of Léon Zeytline. From the elegant socialite strolling along the grand boulevards to the woman adorned in her finest attire on the terrace of a café (Rêverie), the women of Zeytline embody the eternal feminine (Divinités Devant le Flore). Zeytline has the gift of capturing the spirit and fashion of this crazy era! By turns dreamy, provocative, indifferent (Cabaret), charming (Les Mots Doux) or laughing, it is an ode to femininity that the painter Zeytline embodies in her paintings. 

These exhilarating portraits of amazed or sulky Parisian women recall the treatment of the famous female figures of Toulouse-Lautrec or Degas. If Léon Zeytline devotes part of his work to celebrating Paris and its new way of life, he also paints numerous seascapes, intimate scenes, and jazz club scenes in the United States where he traveled in 1949. Léon Zeytline died in Mulhouse in 1962 where he had resided with his wife Anne-Marie Bisch since 1949.
The value of the works of Léon Zeytline
The vast majority of Léon Zeytline's drawings and watercolors (more than five hundred identified works) still belong to private collectors today. Only the Carnavalet, Hamburg and Mulhouse museums have a few paintings by the painter. The value of Léon Zeytline's works has increased significantly over the past ten years. It is his paintings on panels or canvas which constitute the greatest number of sales (three hundred and sixty-eight paintings sold and fifty-four drawings and watercolors). These drawings sell for between thirty and eighty euros. 

These paintings on canvas are acquired between one hundred and sixty euros and twenty-six thousand euros, the record amount reached by the sale of an oil on canvas Scène de Bal in 2012 in Le Havre. In 2011, a major auction of paintings on canvas by Léon Zeytline was organized. Ten of them sold for between ten thousand two hundred euros and twenty thousand five hundred euros. The values ​​of seascapes painted by Léon Zeytline have also seen a remarkable increase over the last ten years.
(Source : https://www.estimonobjet.fr/artistes/leon-tzeytline)
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