Henri Guinier “bretonne With Charcoal”

Charcoal with chalk. Henri Guinier, born November 20, 1867 in Paris and died October 10, 1927 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, is a French painter. At the insistence of his father, Henri Guinier took courses at the School of Arts and Crafts in Châlons en Champagne from 1883, becoming an engineer in 1889, but was admitted to courses at the Académie Julian and the École des fine arts in Paris in the workshops of Benjamin-Constant (1845-1902) and Jules Lefebvre (1834-1912), he quickly devoted himself to painting, his true passion. In 1896, he won the second Prix de Rome, then a gold medal at the Salon of French Artists in 1898, the year in which he obtained a travel grant which allowed him to travel through Holland, Switzerland and Italy. He won a silver medal at the Universal Exhibition of 1900. In 1904, he married Hélène Glasson with whom he had a son, Michel Guinier. and a daughter Annette, one of his favorite subjects. In 1907, he won the Henner Prize. In Paris, Henri Guinier met Fernand Legout-Gérard who introduced him to Concarneau. There he bought a villa, called Kerdorlett, located in Beuzec-Conq, above the beach, facing west, which became his summer residence. He spends the winter in his house in Neuilly-sur-Seine. He became president of the Artistic Union of Friends of Concarneau, working alongside painters like Alfred Guillou and Thomas Alexander Harrison. François-Alfred Delobbe, Fernand Legout-Gérard, Édouard Henry-Baudot, etc. An excellent pastellist and brilliant colorist, he painted numerous portraits, mainly of women. He also creates landscapes and marine scenes, often inspired by Brittany, whose costumes and landscapes he paints, mainly the Concarneau region and the Pays Bigouden, but also in Faouët, Vannes, Paimpol and the island of Bréhat. . He successfully tackles all types of subjects: allegory, the nude, the genre scene, the portrait, the landscape. He stayed in Italy, Holland, the Alps and the Pyrenees8. “He is one of those bourgeois painters, living comfortably from commissioned paintings, who, once on vacation, paint purely for pleasure, according to walks and favorites,” writes Françoise Gloux, gallery owner. Henri Guinier also benefited from official commissions: in 1909, he participated with other painters in the decoration of the town hall of Neuilly-sur-Seine, painting The Tapestry. He is probably the author of two murals located at ENSAM. He enlisted in 1914 and in 1917, the Ministry of War asked him to paint war scenes in Verdun where he produced numerous pastels. From 1920, now spending the winter in the mountains, he painted landscapes of the Pau and Argelès-Gazost regions and the Chamonix valley. “In the last years of his life, he was very interested in drawing, no longer content with expressing the changing plays of light, but focusing on the precision of the form that he likes to carve” writes Jean Vuillemin. The painter's archives were donated by his family to the Breton departmental museum in Quimper in 2007. The painter was the subject of a temporary exhibition at the Faouët museum (Morbihan) in 2008. He had a workshop at no. 6 avenue Frochot. At the time of his death, he lived at no. 21 rue de l'Hôtel de Ville in Neuilly-sur-Seine.