"Maurice Moy (1883-1945) Watercolor "around Penmarch" Brittany"
Watercolor located on the back around Penmarch, signed by Maurice Moy and dated 1923. Dimensions of the sheet 17x13cm, 49x45cm with the frame. Maurice Moy is a painter from Rennes, a former student of the École des Beaux-Arts de Rennes, who worked with the old houses and streets of his native town as motifs for his paintings but also all of Brittany, notably with the characters of the country bigouden, with numerous seascapes, apart from his paintings on southern Algeria and Tunisia where he stayed for a few years. Mobilized in 1914, he was sent to the front and received the Cross of the Legion of Honor for his courage. Between two attacks, he draws sketches describing the butchery. At the end of the war, he returned to Brittany, traveling his province of origin in search of subjects for his works, he painted in gouache, mixing realism and stylization, using a cloisonné technique and flat areas of muted colors. Blinded in one eye following the action of an unbalanced person who shot him in the head in Lille in 1926, he moved to Nantes where he lived until 1940. That same year, Moy took refuge in his cellar. during a bombing, his house was completely destroyed and with it a large part of his work. He settled in Allier where he remained until his death. A contemporary of Mathurin Méheut[1], but having achieved neither the proliferation nor the fame of the latter, he had a comparable vigor of line. . He had exhibited in 1923 at the Salon des Indépendants. "He presented us with an implausibly varied collection of paintings, gouaches, temperas, watercolors, tinted sketches, woodcuts, a whole charming madness of pretty things which reveal a mastery that is now undisputed. Perhaps we said it all when we said that and the praise of Maurice Moy is no longer to be given in Rennes, any more than in Paris and Versailles. But we can talk about him without getting tired [...] And leave me the joy of "to admire without a second thought the watercolorist above all, and the painter of skies which have nothing conventional"