Leon Detroy

Sea side
Oil on canvas
signed lower right
Dimensions: 65 x 81 cm
With frame: 105 x 88 cm
Price: €38,000

Léon Détroy gives us here a Breton seaside that can be located on the Emerald Coast in the Côtes d’Armor department. It is probably a landscape close to Cap d’Erquy-Cap Frehel.

This site known for the particular blue color of the sea and its pink sandstone rocks seduced the painter who, thanks to the use of a lively and contrasting palette and a touch of comma material, was able to transmit to us the freshness, the dynamism and the liveliness of the place.

Born into a cultured bourgeois family, Léon Detroy entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris at the age of 21 in the studio of Jean Paul Laurens. This sensitive artist was very early attracted by landscapes.

He settled as soon as he left the Parisian Beaux-Arts in the Creuse valley, where landscape painters were already flourishing, including Monet, who became his friend. He shares with Armand Guillaumin the title of master of Crozant.

A little younger than the great Impressionists, he benefited from the path opened up by Monet, Pissaro, Sisley. Nevertheless, Léon Detroy is freed from all influences, he forges an uncompromising personal painting and his greatest successes owe their power to his audacious and singular technique. An explosive mixture of divided touches and monochrome flat areas.

He was always faithful to the Creuse valley with its changing landscapes of rich nuances. This anchorage serves as a refuge for him between his many trips from Northern Europe to Northern Africa via Italy, and in France, from the South to Brittany.

He was highly appreciated by critics but also by his fellow painters and friends, E. Vuillard, P. Bonnard, EO Friez, L. Anquetin.

Having as little need for glory as for money, L. Détroy always kept away from the commercial circuit and too few shipments to Salons and personal exhibitions resulted in a poor representation of the painter in museums. .

A catalog raisonné as well as a book is currently being prepared on the artist.

Museum : Chateauroux

Bibliography :

-Bénézit, Dictionary of the little masters of painting by Gérald Schurr and Pierre Cabanne –

The school of Crozant the painters of La Creuse and Gargilesse by Christophe Ramex. Leon Detroy