Emile Chaumont (1877-1927) Summer Landscape In Périgord Dordogne

Emile CHAUMONT
(Périgueux 1877 - 1927)
Summer landscape in Périgord
Oil on panel
H. 32 cm; L. 41 cm
Signed lower left, dated 1912

Provenance: Private collection, central France

The Saint-Georges district of Périgueux was the cradle and place of life of this poetic painter. After the beginnings of classical studies, he had to leave high school on the death of his parents to pursue a remunerative profession. His eldest brother and tutor, knowing his pronounced taste for drawing allowed him to learn lithography within the Dupont printing house. He greatly appreciated this choice and evolved in his hometown until becoming master worker of the Ronteix house. Mobilized for the entirety of the war from 1915, Emile Chaumont distinguished himself by "his remarkable attitude of energy and enthusiasm" by returning from the front with the Croix de Guerre. It was on his return that he made the decision to join Bordeaux and the Pech printing press. Certainly a painter before, it was really at this time that he devoted himself to his passion during all his free hours. A pupil of Léon Félix from Périgord and Professor Albert Laurens, whose inspiration we feel, it was however under his own ideas that Chaumont developed his art. He followed Jean-Louis Daniel in Corrèze, crisscrossed Périgord, but also the Landes Gironde. His always luminous landscapes borrowing a complete 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 critically acclaimed posthumous exhibition to him in 1946 and offered his native district a street in the artist's name.

This charming panel was made in the summer of 1912, most certainly in Périgord, in a meadow dotted with oak trees. In the foreground, we think we recognize fresh plowing on which the sunlight is reflected by yellow flashes. This very successful landscape shows us the strong impressionist capacities of Chaumont which in 1912 was only at the beginning of its talents.