Emile Chaumont (1877 -1927) Spring In Branne In Gironde

Emile CHAUMONT
(Périgueux 1877 - 1927)
Printemps à Branne en Gironde
Oil on panel
H. 46 cm; L. 61 cm
Signed lower right, dated March 1924

The Saint-Georges district of Périgueux was the cradle and the living space of this poetic painter. After beginning of classical studies, he had to leave high school on the death of his parents to go to a remunerative profession. His older brother and tutor, knowing his taste for drawing, allowed him to learn lithography at the Dupont printing house. He strongly appreciated this choice and evolved in his hometown until becoming a master worker of the Ronteix house.

Mobilized for the whole of the war from 1915, Emile Chaumont distinguished himself by "his remarkable attitude of energy and enthusiasm" by returning from the front with the Croix de Guerre. It was on his return that he made the decision to join Bordeaux and the Pech printing press. Certainly a painter before, it was really at this time that he devoted himself to his passion during all his free hours. A pupil of Périgord Léon Félix and Professor Albert Laurens whose inspiration we feel, it is however under his own ideas that Chaumont made his art evolve.

He followed Jean-Louis Daniel in Corrèze, crisscrossed the Périgord, but also the Gironde Landes. His always luminous landscapes, borrowing a full range of colors, were a real success and were even crowned with an honorable mention at the Salon des Artistes Français. Apart from these landscapes, Emile Chaumont produced many staged portraits and still lifes, of remarkable quality.

He died at only fifty years old in the Saint-Georges district where he was born, in the home of his brother Léopold Chaumont, director of the newspaper l'Avenir de la Dordogne, after long suffering from an incurable disease. The city of Périgueux devoted a posthumous exhibition to him, which was acclaimed by critics in 1946, and offered his native quarter a street in the name of the artist.

In this month of March 1924, Emile Chaumont depicts the Gironde countryside with his lively touch of custom. Some old poplars do not yet show buds and block the cloudy or even stormy sky. A farmhouse with orange-tiled roofs emerges behind vines that seem to encircle it. We are on a wine-growing region located on the banks of the Dordogne, it should not be forgotten ...