Léon Germain Pelouse

• Illustration — P.S. Krøyer, Le Déjeuner des artistes à Cernay-la-Ville, 1879. Pelouse is the standing figure at right. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Pelouse enlisted in the national guard. During his service, he spent time in the town of Cernay-la-Ville, near Paris, and experienced a powerful attraction to the surrounding scenery. After the war, in 1871, Pelouse walked on foot from Paris to Cernay, which had been ransacked by the Prussians, and took lodgings at the inn of Léopold Lequesne. In 1876, with his wife and stepson, he rented a small house on the village square. He would eventually have numerous ateliers in the area, including "a barn next to the tiny church that the Rothschilds, those gold powerhouses, had restored." "Poverty made him frugal, handy, and ingenious...he made his own clothes and even his hats and shoes; he wanted to save his money for brushes and paints." It was Pelouse's habit to wear a peasant blouse and sabots, setting out with his easel and paints at daybreak, "often forgetting meals and only returning a long time after sunset." "As Claude Monet did in 1867 with Women in the Garden, Pelouse did not hesitate to set up large-format canvases in the countryside in order to be able to paint them entirely en plein air." He would set up, like a theater set, a whole installation: tent, boards, parasols, easels, in woods, or plains, or along the course of a stream, carrying everywhere with him and without help a genuinely mobile atelier. Once camped like this, the work began, and nothing and no one could tear him away from the study undertaken before he had delivered the final brushstroke. His determination was such that, wishing to complete a study of snow at Cernay in 1872, he spent part of the day without thinking for a moment of the horrible cold that enveloped him; the next day, he learned from the newspapers that the thermometer had dropped to 24 degrees below zero! • Illustration — A portrait of Pelouse from Le Monde Illustré, 1891. Pelouse, known for "his natural bonhomie, his insouciance and his good-natured gaiety," was visited by other artists, including Henri Harpignies, Louis Français, Jules Breton, Émile Breton, Charles Ferdinand Ceramano, Winslow Homer, Theodore Robinson, and Peder Severin Krøyer, and attracted an international coterie of pupils. They socialized in the welcoming inns of Place de Cernay-la-Ville, in particular the establishment of Léopold Lequesne, which became known as Au Rendezvous des Artistes. Lequesne's wife was called "the mother of artists" (la mère des artistes). Pelouse and this colony of colleagues and students became known as the École de Cernay, of which Pelouse was the acknowledged chef de file and "le plus Cernaysien" of landscape painters. Often compared and contrasted to the realist landscape painters of the Barbizon school, for his paintings of Brittany Pelouse was "counted among the artists known as 'Les Barbizon bretons'". Paradoxically, the largely self-taught Pelouse became the mentor and teacher of many painters, who came from as far as Sweden and Canada to study and paint outdoors with him in the fields and woods outside Cernay-la-Ville. These included Madame Annaly, Érnest Baillet, Harriet Backer, Hiram Reynolds Bloomer, Émile Charles Dameron, Nicolas Dracopolis, Allan Edson, Eugène Galien-Laloue, Edouard Gendrot, Léon Joubert, Kitty Lange Kielland, Adolphe-Frédéric Lejeune, Émile Le Marié des Landelles, Flavien-Louis Peslin, Albert Rigolot, Louis Telingue, and Percy Franklin Woodcock. Pelouse welcomed female artists, including Norwegian Kitty Lange Kielland and her compatriot and friend Harriet Backer. They accompanied Pelouse on an excursion to Rochefort-en-Terre, in Brittany. Backer later recalled: Léon Pelouse had proposed to us two women that we spend the summer in his company in a location he had discovered and kept secret: it was a way of getting a jump on new and original subjects, instead of the well-worn themes exhibited at the Salon...Under a discreet disguise, we set out with Pelouse, his wife, and two of his male pupils...Pelouse is the most natural man I've ever met...I'm sure if you were to arrive one evening while we're at the table, you'd be extremely surprised. Pelouse and Érnest Baillet each scream louder than the other to make themselves heard, to the point that one wonders if they'll come to blows—then it all ends with outbursts of laughter, so loud we have to cover our ears. In the spring and summer of 1879, the Danish painter Peder Severin Krøyer stayed at Pelouse's home in Cernay, and painted Le Déjeuner des artistes à Cernay-la-Ville, which captures the social scene at Léopold Lequesne's inn. Pelouse can be seen standing at right, wearing a hat and smoking, framed by the glow of light from the window. Robert Louis Stevenson was another visitor. "Cernay had Pelouse," he later wrote, "the admirable, placid Pelouse, smilingly critical of youth, who, when a full-blown commercial traveller, suddenly threw down his samples, bought a colour-box, and became the master whom we have all admired."

• Illustration — Le Plateau de la Montjoie à Mortain, 1872, Musée d'Orsay • Illustration — La Mare aux hérons (detail), before 1875, private collection • Illustration — Le passage de Lanriec à Concarneau, effet de lune, 1878, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen • Illustration — Un coin de Cernay en janvier, after 1879, by 1887, Metropolitan Museum Renate Treydel in the Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon notes that Pelouse takes his cue from Camille Corot, Henri Joseph Harpignies, Charles-François Daubigny and Camille Bernier, but his main source of inspiration is nature, in which he develops a keen sense of the choice of motifs. At the Salon debut in Paris in 1865, he was attested to a high degree of technical virtuosity and natural talent, as well as praised for his light-handed, loose brushwork. He prefers unspectacular, tranquil views, often just trees, inconspicuous things like earth or moss, lush, wild nature with impenetrable thickets, and lonely villages...Pelouse works intuitively, quickly and exclusively in nature...The sober composition of Banc de rochers à Concarneau (1880, Brest) is considered a bold and early anticipation of the art of Charles Cottet due to its omission of picturesque features and a gloomy coloring. A few years after Pelouse's death, Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson wrote that Pelouse sought to recapture a primal vision of nature: Pelouse...used to say that the gift of the naturalist lay in the power of recreating the eye of childhood. When the child first sees—before he ean walk, before he can what all these coloured spots of various shapes and strengths may mean—he receives from a field of sight an impression of the values of colour and the forces of definition utterly unadulterated by knowledge of distance, depth, shape, utility and the commercial, religious, or sexual importance of objects. Indeed, he is not biased by that chief disturber of impression, the knowledge that any objects exist; in fact, he sees men as trees walking. He sees patterns, and it takes him years to know what these patterns, these changing gradations, these varying smudges signify, and when he has learnt that, in proportion as he has succeeded, so he has ceased to know the original vision, and to perceive mentally the signs by which he originally determined the truth. After the death of Charles-François Daubigny in 1878, Pelouse was considered to have taken Daubigny's place as the foremost landscape painter in France. After Pelouse's death "at his height as an artist," the posthumous exhibit of his work in 1892 received wide attention, including in the United States, where John Preston Beecher in The Collector called Pelouse "one of those geniuses who have had no master in art except nature...a great painter," and "a worthy rival of that magician of the palette and brush, Théodore Rousseau." Celebrated in life and in death, in subsequent decades Pelouse's fame faded as the realist landscape painters of the Barbizon school and the École de Cernay were supplanted by the rapidly evolving modern schools of French art.