He clearly had innate talent, winning first prize for drawing at his primary school; but having gained his certificat d’études, he was forced to start work rather than continuing with his studies.

Balande's artistic training gained new impetus with the intervention of Alfred Goutureaud, abbot of Royan and an amateur painter, who in 1900 introduced him to his former teacher, Henri-Joseph Harpignies, arranging a meeting in Paris, at the Exposition Universelle.

His first lessons were not enough to gain him access to the École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs; so, pending the next session, in March 1901, Balande went back to his hand-to-mouth jobs, working in a sign painting workshop for two francs a day.

And before I left, he poured me a good glass of vintage wine and put a louis d’or in my hand, saying “I don’t like poverty.” This encouragement and generosity bore fruit: a few weeks later, Balande was admitted to the École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs, having come fifth in the entrance examination.

Then he was transferred to La Rochelle, where he met the painter Furcy de Lavaux, who was also the curator of the city's fine arts museum, and who invited him to take evening courses in drawing.

After the war, Balande returned to Paris and went back to his evening courses at the École des Arts Décoratifs and frequented the atelier of Jean-Paul Laurens and Australian artist Rupert Bunny.

Influenced originally by Puvis de Chavannes, Bunny was essentially a decorative artist and he communicated to Balande skills in working on architectural scale, which were to stand him in good stead throughout a career punctuated by important public commissions.

Thanks to the teaching of Laurens and Bunny, Balande made a successful appearance at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1905 with an ambitious painting titled Quai d’Orsay, en hiver, manifesting a technical mastery which showed how far he had come since the failure of 1902.

The painting's merits were recognized by the Académie des Beaux-Arts; the Institut awarded Balande the Edouard Lemaître prize, designated for a landscape artist aged under twenty-five.

In the meantime, at the advice of his friend Rupert Bunny, Balande had moved to Étaples, a fishing port in the Pas-de-Calais, home since the 1880s to a veritable international colony of artists, including the French painters: Henri Le Sidaner, Eugène Chigot, Jules Adler, Francis Tattegrain and Victor-Ferdinand Bourgeois.

Before his departure for Belgium and the Netherlands, Cormon recommended that he study the Flemish Primitives and, above all, repeated his exhortation to stop ‘painting in black’ like Gustave Courbet.

He cycled through the Pays d’Aunis countryside surrounding La Rochelle, much appreciating the unspoilt scenery and character of its people, whom he depicted in everyday scenes.

His stature was confirmed by two invitations to the Venice Biennale as well as numerous solo and group shows abroad – in Brazil, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy and the United States, where he was shown in Pittsburgh alongside Georges Braque, Picasso and Vlaminck.

Otherwise, he recharged his creative batteries at his holiday home in Lauzières-sur-Mer, where the surrounding countryside and nearby harbour at La Rochelle became his open-air studio at Easter and in the summer months.

Critics compared the work to Manet, likening the composition of the bathers sitting by the waterside to that of the leisurely figures in Le déjeuner sur l’herbe.

Of course, the work's innovative quality was not due to this connection, to which one could easily add a link to Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, but to its novel synthesis between the classical landscape tradition and the modernity of Paul Cézanne.

Balande had spent the preceding months in Greece, painting in the studio provided for him by the director of the art school in Athens, the sculptor Constantinos Dimitriadis.

Bruised but not vanquished, Balande now set about producing ambitious work that he hoped would position him favourably on the lucrative market of national reconstruction.

His last contributions to the Salon des Artistes Français were once more landscapes from Saintonge, showing that his words of 1926 were as true as ever as he entered the twilight of his days: ‘It is the place I love most of all’, he said.

It gives its whitewashed houses a brightness that is almost Oriental.’ Comparing these landscapes to those of Brittany, near Saint-Malo, whose splendour he readily acknowledged, he confessed to preferring ‘the simplicity of its Aunisian coast’, where he found ‘all the finesse and distinction’ he needed for his art.