Portrait Of A Young Breton Woman In Pastel

Magnificent portrait of a young Breton woman. Pastel signed lower right.
Dimensions 21.5 X 17.5
Gilded wooden frame Dim 41 X 36

 Léon DUVAL-GOZLAN (1853-1941) Parisian painter, Léon Duval-Gozlan discovered and was won over by southern Brittany in 1910. A close friend of Maxime Maufra, known in Montmartre, he was seduced by the images, sketches and paintings that the latter exhibited at the Durand-Ruel gallery and chose the Quiberon peninsula as his home port. Léon Duval was born in Paris, 29 rue Saulnier in the 9th arrondissement. He is the son of the architect Charles Duval and the grandson of the novelist Léon Gozlan, whose first name he bears and whose surname he will add, not without pride, to that of Duval which he had from the civil registry. He will therefore henceforth be called Duval-Gozlan! He discovered painting in Ville-d'Avray where the architect, his father, had built a second home not far from the house where another very famous artist of that time lived: Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796-1875). They lived alongside this great artist and it is doubtless from these contacts with him that Léon Duval-Gozlan will owe his vocation. He accompanied the painter Corot to places which, for him, were great motifs: the forest paths or the banks of the pond of this town. In 1870, after completing his studies in Rouen, Léon entered the Ecole nationale des Beaux-Arts and, not without support, the studio of the illustrious Alexandre Cabanel (1823-1889) where he remained for three years. This exceptional designer, it seems, corrected the work of his students with consummate art. It was in 1878 that Duval-Gozlan sent for the first time, to the Salon des Artistes, a painting that was particularly noted. He had now officially become the painter Léon Duval-Gozlan. He would also exhibit there consecutively for ten years. After these ten years of exhibiting works at the Salon des Artistes, he would leave the Société des Artistes Français and join, in 1890, the newly founded Société des Artistes Indépendants. There, truly, he would experience success, a situation that would only abandon him at the end of his retirement spent in Kerhostin (Morbihan). In 1910, the year he exhibited for the last time in Paris, he already guessed that the men of his generation would soon give way to younger ones. He was no longer in agreement, aesthetically speaking, with the newcomers who, Fauves and Cubists, were going to revolutionize French painting still dependent on the Impressionist conquests. The landscapes that Duval-Gozlan had painted in Normandy in his youth were sometimes quite heavy with paste, those that he had painted later in the Channel, in particular near Saint-Vaast, were on the contrary a little frail. His art would become more precise when he found himself in the south of France where he would paint for many years. It is certain that the works of Brittany, as the artist ages, will be more and more free in execution and when it comes to paintings, they will be more and more energetically colored and loaded with material. The paste will be dense and creamy, the shine certain, the luminosity truly impressive. (Extract from the conference "A friend of Maufra: Léon Duval-Gozlan", by Jean-Michel Kervadec - 2014).