Paul Edmond Joseph Deltombe (born 6 April 1878 in Catillon-sur-Sambre, died 8 August 1971 in Nantes), was a French painter and illustrator .
Deltombe rubbed shoulders with Matisse at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and through the older painter found himself in the thick of it when the Fauves created a stir at the 1905 Salon d’Automne, where he was also showing.
A token of this voyage of discovery and rite of passage is his Nature Morte au Buste de Donatello, which remains a composition without equal in his career.
The quality of her output, however, quickly drew commissions from other artists, and not insignificant ones, since major figures like Maurice Denis, Pierre Laprade, Félix Vallotton and Louis Valtat turned to the Deltombe studios a number of times to have their paintings transferred to a textile support.
He embraced this life to get back in touch with the foundations of his vocation as a painter, which were built on a love of nature, as Vrinat reminds us in the opening pages of the monograph he devoted to the artist in 1965.
During the two decades that followed, Deltombe painted the subtle bends of the Loire, the sunny verdant hillsides of Champtoceaux, and the neighbouring areas of Oudon, Drain and La Patache.
The contact with the gentle beauty and life of the Anjou region caused Deltombe's style to evolve towards a subtler poetry which gradually shifted it away from the fullness and restraint of his landscapes depicting northern France.
In the surrounding countryside, he painted churches and rectories of the Loire-Atlantique region, whose Gothic steeples stand out against the azure of the sky.
The fullness and softness of the brushstrokes in this group portrait recall Renoir's work; the picture offers a striking contrast with the Jeune homme au violoncelle, shown at the same salon three years earlier.
This latter work, which wears its modernism on its sleeve, rivals a contemporary portrait by André Derain called Le noir à la mandoline, hanging in Paris’ Musée de l’Orangerie.
A year before the artist's death in Nantes on 8 August 1971, the city's Musée des Beaux-Arts paid homage one last time to its illustrious professor by putting together a vast retrospective of his major works.39 And three years later the Parisian public had the chance to discover, or rediscover, the artist thanks to a retrospective mounted by the Galerie Yves Jaubert.