DETROY Léon Crozant school Oil on canvas signed Certificat

Biography

DETROY Léon (1857 / 1955)
Born in Chinon (Indre et Loire) in 1859, son of a doctor father who did not hinder his artistic vocation, Léon Detroy was a student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the 1980s in the studio of a famous master, the painter Jean-Paul Laurens.

Very quickly influenced by the landscape painters of the 19th century who wanted to practice his art in Nature and not in the studio, he left for Gargilesse to follow in the footsteps of George Sand and his novel “Promenades around a village”.

Friend of the poet Maurice Rollinat, he met Claude Monet in Fresselines. Renting a house in Gargilesse which he bought in 1912 and lived in until his death, he nevertheless never stopped traveling to North Africa and Normandy.
But Léon Detroy is essentially the painter of the Creuse. Classified among the post-impressionist painters, he was always faithful to the Creuse valley with its changing landscapes with rich nuances. These enchanting places inspired his best paintings. His work in a very diverse style is recognized but undoubtedly deserves greater fame equal to that of Armand Guillaumin.

He never dated his landscapes with their raw tones, melancholy lights, and strange framing. Taste of eternity in this bear with the long hermit beard?

Neither impressionist nor Fauvist, enemy of society and artistic salons, Léon Detroy remains as little known as his work, both classic and modern. Born into a cultivated bourgeois family, this “Ravel of painting” settled as soon as he graduated from Parisian Fine Arts in the Creuse valley, where landscape artists were already flourishing, including Monet, who became his friend.
Although he likes to travel, from the Côte d'Azur to North Africa, Detroy is haunted by the sad and serious horizons of Lower Berry. Views of the Creuse always started again, trees and fields, houses and villages: the artist settled in Gargilesse, where George Sand had his "house of the fields" Detroy died at 97, continuing to paint flowers and fruits when he could no longer work outdoors in this wizarding country which loved him so much. He died almost a hundred years old in 1955, he is buried in Grgaille.

Museums: Châteauroux. Literature: Bénézit, Dictionary of the little masters of painting by Gérald Schurr and Pierre Cabanne, The school of Crozant the painters of La Creuse and Gargilesse by Christophe Ramex. Léon Detroy Major works, Gargilesse.

PS: The price of this painting can only be given to the gallery.
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