Emile Chaumont (1877-1927) Riverside Dordogne Périgord?

Emile CHAUMONT
(Périgueux 1877 - 1927)
River bank
Oil on panel
H. 33.5 cm; W. 46.5 cm
Signed lower right

Provenance: Private collection, Périgueux

The Saint-Georges district of Périgueux was the birthplace and home of this poetic painter. After beginning his classical studies, he had to leave high school when his parents died to pursue a paid profession. His older brother and tutor, knowing his pronounced taste for drawing, allowed him to learn lithography at the Dupont printing house. He greatly appreciated this choice and evolved in his hometown until he became a master craftsman at the Ronteix company. Mobilized for the entire war from 1915, Emile Chaumont distinguished himself by "his remarkable attitude of energy and enthusiasm" by returning from the front with the war cross. It was on his return that he decided to join Bordeaux and the Pech printing house. Certainly a painter before, it was really at this time that he devoted himself to his passion during all his free hours. A student of the Périgord native Léon Félix and Professor Albert Laurens, whose inspiration can be felt, it was nevertheless under his own ideas that Chaumont developed his art. He followed Jean-Louis Daniel to Corrèze, crisscrossed the Périgord, but also the Landes Gironde. His always luminous landscapes borrowing a full range of colors had a real success and were even crowned with an honorable mention at the Salon des Artistes Français. Apart from these landscapes, Emile Chaumont produced numerous staged portraits and still lifes, of remarkable quality. He died at only fifty years old in the Saint-Georges district where he was born, in the home of his brother Léopold Chaumont, director of the newspaper l'Avenir de la Dordogne, after long suffering from an incurable disease. The city of Périgueux dedicated a posthumous exhibition to him, acclaimed by critics in 1946 and offered his native district a street named after the artist.

This pleasant panel represents a river bank, most certainly in Périgord, although there is no indication to justify it. A pure sketch made on the spot, this work was painted early in the morning, or late in the evening, so as to give this dark aspect to the trees on the banks, like a backlight.