19th century French painting - Mediterranean landscape - Oil on canvas signed and dated (LANSYER Emmanuel)

Biography

LANSYER Emmanuel (1835 / 1893)
Born in Vendée, in Bouin before moving a few kilometers to the town of Machecoul.
His father, a doctor, wanted him to pursue a career as a notary, but Emmanuel was not as passionate about his studies as he was about drawing. A passion that manifests itself from his earliest childhood. Indeed, Emmanuel Lansyer sketches the ruins of the castle of Machecoul, and the holidays spent in Pornic, Bernerie and Préfailles left him with a taste for coastal landscapes...Promising, his drawing teacher at St Joseph College encouraged him to paint. His father, resigned, entrusted Emmanuel, then aged 20, to his architect cousin. Then from Châteauroux, Emmanuel left for Paris in 1857 to study with Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. The workshop closes, the master unavailable for his students devotes himself to the numerous projects. Emmanuel remained in Paris and although Viollet-le-Duc offered him a job as an architect in the department, he chose brushes, not abandoning his career as a painter. In 1861, he briefly joined the classes of Gustave Courbet. The year 1863 marked the beginning of his career, when his submissions to the Salon des Refusés aroused interest. He quickly oriented his painting towards the landscape, and "A September morning in Douarnenez" and "Les bords de l'Ellée au Faouêt" earned him his first medals at the Salon of 1865. Brittany inspired him. He likes to stay there. There, he became friends with the poet José Maria de Heredia. He also met Sully Prudhomme, another poet, Hyppolite Moulin, a sculptor, Jules Héreau, architect then painter (like Lansyer). Between his Breton journeys Emmanuel Lansyer resides in Loches and has a pied-à-terre in the capital. He obtained another medal in 1869 thanks to the "Château de Pierrefonds", a painting which had been commissioned from him by Viollet-le-Duc. In 1877, he freed himself from the intermediaries of the art market to sell his works himself during a major sale: a success repeated three other times. Recognized, he responded to commissions from the state and chaired the Salon des Artistes Français as a member of the Jury from 1881. It was around the 1880s that Emmanuel Lansyer produced views of Parthenay. He maintained a friendly relationship with the faencier and painter Henri Amirault, to whom he offered, in 1883, a "view of the Saint Jacques Tower and the old Parthenay bridge". The same year, he exhibited "Tower and walls in ruins of the Citadel of Parthenay" in Rochefort. Emmanuel Lansyer died in Paris in 1893, bequeathing his house, his works, his collections of engravings, objects and Japanese prints to the town of Loches.
Museums: Auxerre, Castres, Dunkirk, Geneva, Lille, Lisieux, Loches, Nantes, Paris (Louvre Museum, Petit Palais Museum), Philadelphia, Tours, Valenciennes.
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