Harvests In The Salt Marshes Of Guérande By Miche-auguste Colle - Brittany

Oil on cardboard, signed lower right. Dimensions without frame 35.5 x 55 cm, with frame 45 x 64 cm.

Michel-Auguste Colle (1872-1949) is a neo-impressionist painter who mainly painted landscapes of his native Lorraine and the Guérandaise peninsula. Orphaned at 13, he became an apprentice at the Cristalleries de Baccarat, his birthplace, as a gilder, then an engraver of plates for chemical engraving. He developed a taste for drawing and painting, encouraged by Charles Pecatte, a painter from Lorraine. A discerning art lover, Eugène Corbin, having noticed his talent, introduced him to the great Lorraine painters Charles de Meixmoron de Dombasle, Émile Friant and Victor Prouvé. Corbin ended up taking him on a contract until 1911, where he painted nearly 500 canvases or watercolors, most of them inspired by the landscapes of his region of origin. From 1903 to 1911, he exhibited at the Société nationale des beaux-arts, at the Salon des Tuileries and at the Salon des indépendants then, from 1911 at the Salon des artistes français where he obtained an honorable mention in 1920 and then a silver medal. the next year. The Parisian Salons were an opportunity for him to meet Jules Adler, Jean-Paul Laurens and Charles Cottet. After numerous trips between France and North Africa, it was finally on the Guérande Peninsula that the Colle family settled in 1920 to spend the summer. First near Mesquer, before buying a small house in Kervalet in 1926. This house will become his main residence from 1940. The Batz-sur-Mer Museum has dedicated an exhibition to him from June 14 to November 16 2014. Michel Colle is in many museums including Rennes, Nantes, Guérande, Batz-sur-Mer, Baccarat, Nancy, at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, in the collections of the Senate, the Town Hall of Paris and the Collège de France, but also in Brussels and Pittsburgh.