émile Loubon, The Town Hall Square, Aix En Provence, Circa 1828

"Émile LOUBON, The Town Hall Square, Aix en Provence, circa 1828"

Émile LOUBON (1809 - 1863)
The Town Hall Square, Aix en Provence, circa 1828
Oil on canvas, signed lower left
24 x 20.5 cm

Provenance: Private collection, South of France

Bibliography: Paule Brahic-Guiral, Loubon, his life, his work, La Savoisienne editions, Marseille, 1973, reproduced p.15.

Emile LOUBON (1809 - 1863)

Emile Loubon was born in Aix-en-Provence in 1809.

Noticed by Granet at the Aix drawing school, he left for two years in Rome to perfect his teaching, then he settled in Paris where he frequented the greatest painters of his time. He then returned to the South of France, where he was appointed director of the Marseille School of Drawing in 1845. This is how the Provençal landscape school was born, under the impetus of a demanding master, who nevertheless encouraged the free expression of his students and their individuality. He brought in his wake young painters eager to learn on the spot, in contact with nature, which constituted a great innovation compared to the academic tradition of teaching in the studio that had been in force until then. For the journalist and art critic of the time, Ferdinand Servian, this new way of teaching constituted a small regional revolution: “And his flock of students, moving like a flock of his sheep, would graze, not on the beaten paths of a servum pecus, but among unexplored paths, under the watchful and good-natured eye of this pastor of young souls who made his flock drink from the pure sources of the ideal and gave them the vast fields of art as pasture.” In 1846, Emile Loubon founded the Salon de la Société des Amis des Arts, where the painters he frequented at the time in Paris would exhibit: Delacroix, Corot and other Barbizon painters such as Théodore Rousseau.

On these occasions, Loubon took the opportunity to invite these painters to the school he directed and create an emulation that would benefit his students. Among the young artists who followed this profitable teaching, Raphaël Ponson, Fabius Brest or François Simon each drew in their own way from the master's lessons to evolve in the path that attracted them, however different it might be from the master's inspirations. They would be marine painters, orientalists or animal painters... Until his death in 1863, Loubon would continue to exhibit at the Salon.

Nature was the supreme model for this artist who rarely turned to coastal landscapes, preferring the rusticity of the Provençal lands of the hinterland. His work is marked by the desire to render the contrasting grandeur of the Provençal landscape, its beauty but also its harshness, the harshness of rural life. One thus feels the overwhelming heat of the sun that dries the earth and makes it so powdery that the herds can only move surrounded by an insidious dust.

We are a long way from the humid landscapes observed by the Barbizon painters that Loubon admires so much... However, in his own way, he is keen to paint scenes from everyday peasant life, where man comes to terms with nature and animals to earn his daily bread.