Léon Benoît, The Marsh In Spring (1895)

LÉON-MARIE-NICOLAS BENOÎT (Bains-les-Bains 1853 - Tassin-la-Demi-Lune 1916)
The marsh in spring
1895
Oil on canvas
70 x 100 cm
Salon de Lyon 1895, no. 54
Provenance: M. Buffaud

Large, almost panoramic, painting of a landscape in the Dombes, the region of a thousand ponds between Lyon and Bresse. Léon Benoît began his career, like many Lyon artists, as a flower painter for which he had a great mastery. Gradually however his vocation as an outdoor landscape painter revealed itself and by the mid-1890s he was one of the most famous landscape painters in Lyon. This painting, exhibited at the Salon de Lyon in 1895, is a perfect example of his craft: at the same time a true landscape, concieved on the spot, and also a machine for the public Salon and the walls of the Lyon bourgeoisie. A Monsieur Buffaud bought the painting at the 1895 Salon.