Léon Germain Pelouse
[1] His work was most often said to descend from that of Corot and Daubigny,[2] but was from the beginning unique in its depiction of an often stark, obsessively detailed nature largely devoid of human figures.
[4] In 1849 his family moved to Paris and, five years later, on the death of his father, Léon-Germain, having to earn a living, at sixteen began working as a traveling salesman for his uncle, a draper.
[5] His professional painting career began at age twenty-seven, with the acceptance and exhibition of his Les Environs de Précy at the Paris Salon of 1865.
"From the beginning," wrote Albert Patin de La Fizelière, Pelouse displayed "the easy grace, brilliance, and suppleness of execution that have since been admired in his canvases.
"[5] Inspired by this success, despite the offer of a partnership with his uncle[6] and against the opposition of his mother, with whom he quarreled, Pelouse left his sales job to become a painter full-time.
[5] In 1876, his Une Coupe de bois à Senlisse received a first-class medal, "a reward which for thirty years had not been given to a landscape painter.
Scribner's Monthly, reviewing the Paris Salon of 1878, wrote that Pelouse's "style is impressive, his pictures rich and daring in color, the execution marked by the greatest breadth and freedom of handling....he shows an imagination equal to that of Daubigny.
"[27] 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.
"[6] "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.
"[28] He wouldset 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.
[8] 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.
Pelouse and Érnest Baillet [fr] 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.
[40]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.
[41][42] While based in Cernay, Pelouse made numerous excursions to paint the scenery at Pont-Aven, Rochefort-en-Terre, Concarneau, Honfleur, Trouville, Marlotte in the Forest of Fontainebleau, and beyond France to Belgium and Holland.
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.
