Jean Peské - Mont-saint-michel And Its Bay - Signed Watercolor, Post-impressionnism

PESKÉ Jean (1870 – 1949)
Mont-Saint-Michel and its bay, important watercolor drawing signed by the artist lower left
Watercolor and grease pencil on paper

Dimensions: 31 x 23 cm at sight (dimensions at width 'interior of the Marie-Louise), framed: 43.5 x 36 cm

Important watercolor by Jean Peské, depicting Mont-Saint-Michel and its bay. A rare work in the corpus of Peské, a naturalized French post-impressionist painter, born in Ukraine, who particularly frequented the south of France – the Var landscapes in particular, then Collioure – but also the Vendée. Peské painted some landscapes in Brittany, and notably produced watercolors on the wild coast near Quiberon, but more rarely in Normandy (unlike Boudin, Monet and so many others). In 1891, Peské joined France, which he never left. Appreciated by wealthy collectors, this landscape painter paints on the motif; landscapes both typical and transfigured, influenced by pointillism and the Nabis group, with a remnant of Impressionism. Peské will count Georges Clémenceau among his admirers. Our watercolor is rare, due to the subject addressed, the quality of the place, its mythical aura but is also unique in its manner, this “atmospheric” touch that Peské chooses, surrounded by an impressionist sfumato, a tribute to the great masters who painted it. will have preceded. It also refers to Paul Signac's pointillist masterpiece, “Mont-Saint-Michel. Setting Sun", today in the collections of the Dallas Museum, and dated 1897. Paul Signac, whose friend Peské was, made several pencil drawings of Mont-Saint-Michel, in the mist that same year (collections of the Musée d'Orsay), or its ramparts. This pictorial specialist in trees, to the point that Apollinaire called him the “forester of painting”, chose to treat here a subject which does not number a single one; just a boat as if planted in the middle of the bay at low tide, a means of access when the sea rises to the sculptural Mount which rises on the horizon and occupies the entire upper third of its composition. A living spectacle, the bay is streaked with the marks of the tide on the sand. A mystical blue mist seems to envelop and structure the medieval Mont, under a dappled sky where the clouds are only outlined. A sacred, maritime place, where the light is diluted in the Peské palette, in a monochrome of blues, ocher browns and grays just colored by the mother-of-pearl of dawn. We are far from his Mediterranean, almost tawny work, where the pines languish on the seaside on a canvas full of color and light. Because the point is different. An interior work against a backdrop of sea spray and sacredness. A soothing invitation to refocus on the essentials. Possible reminiscence of the work that his friend Signac produced in 1897, Peské signs here a powerful watercolor, refined like its subject, which invites contemplation and meditation. A tribute, finally, to Claude Monet to whom he had a true admiration, particularly evident in his late works. A marvel of sensitivity