Jean Bouchaud (1891-1977), Portrait Of A Woman, Oil On Panel

Jean Bouchaud (1891-1977)
Portrait of a woman
Oil on panel
Signed “J Bouchaud” lower right
Dimensions of the work without frame: 23.5 x 18.5 cm

Originally from Loire-Atlantique, Jean Bouchaud is the small- son of Léon Bouchaud, painter from Nantes close to Camille Corot and Henri Harpignies. He trained at the Académie Julian before teaching there in his turn. He is one of the artists that historian Louis Hautecoeur calls “the painters of French Africa”.

In the aftermath of the First World War, Jean Bouchaud traveled through the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa and then Indochina. Laureate in Algiers of the Abd-el-Tif prize in 1921, he became a resident of the eponymous villa. He also exhibits regularly at Parisian salons and receives several official orders for large-scale decorative projects which will strengthen his reputation. The Georges Petit gallery devoted an exhibition to him in 1929.

Jean Bouchaud's painting testifies to a political geography that has disappeared, that of the French colonial empire of the 1920s and 1940s. For more than ten years, like an ethnologist, he delivers the essence of distant cultures that he observes with attention. He documents the daily life of many ethnic groups that he captures from life with a great sense of composition. The faces of the populations he represents are very expressive.

The portrait of a woman that we offer reveals a more intimate part of her work.

© AB / AC marchand d'art

Public collections
Paris, Center Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art - Paris, Quai Branly Museum - Nantes, Fine Arts Museum - Boulogne-Billancourt, - Thirties Museum - Quimper, Museum of Fine Arts - Rennes, Museum of Fine Arts - Saint-Quentin, Antoine Lécuyer Museum - Algiers, National Museum of Fine Arts