Jean-baptiste Olive, Still Life With Pomegranates

Jean-Baptiste OLIVE (1848-1936)
Still life with pomegranates
Oil on panel, signed lower right
27.5 x 41.5 cm

Provenance :
Private collection South of France

Jean-Baptiste Olive is one of the best-known and most appreciated names among lovers and collectors of Provençal painting.

Born in 1848, into a family of modest wine merchants in the Panier district, where painting was not considered a profession, they nevertheless agreed that the young man should undertake to be a building painter and join the workshop of a decorative painter.
Etienne Cornellier (1838-1902), who employed him, encouraged him to enroll at the Marseille School of Fine Arts. Together, the two artists then left the Phocaean city for Paris and from the end of the 19th century, the painter encountered in the capital the artistic upheavals of his time, those of impressionism, fauvism, cubism and abstraction in particular. Jean-Baptiste Olive, however, seems to be completely impervious to it.

Throughout his career, his painting expresses the warmth and sensuality of the Mediterranean coasts. In Paris, Olive painted Marseille and the South of France. Far from the extravagances of Fauvism and Cubism, he devoted himself more readily to the observation and assured expression of the effects of light on water. It is his “library”, a documentation made of sketches taken from life and on different supports, notably small wooden panels, which allows the artist to produce numerous Mediterranean views from his Parisian studio. In reality, he never leaves his hometown where he keeps a foothold for regular stays.

During his lifetime, the painter was entrusted with prestigious commissions, notably the decor of the restaurant Le Train Bleu and the ticket hall of the Gare de Lyon. Its customers are loyal and the account books are full. Olive won the Léon Bonnat prize in 1930.

A major retrospective of nearly eighty-two works was organized at the Cantini Museum in Marseille in 1948, then another at the Regards de Provence Museum in 2008. Works by the painter can be found today in the collections of MuMa in Le Havre, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Marseille, the Musée d'Orsay, the Fondation Regards de Provence and the Cantini Museum in Marseille.