Student of Claude MONET: Léon BROQUET, Large painting 101 cm, 19th century

Student of Claude MONET: Léon BROQUET,
Large painting 101 cm, 19th century

Oil painting on canvas, period canvas in very good condition,

Subject : Country landscape with thistles

Period : 19th century

Size : framed 101 x 80 cm, unframed 92 x 70 cm

Frame: gilded wood frame in good condition.

Léon BROQUET 1869 / 1935
Espérance Léon Cléophas Broquet, known as Léon Broquet, born in Paris on November 1, 1869, and died in Châteauroux on December 29, 1935, was a French painter and engraver who practiced his art mainly in landscape, marine and history painting.
A pupil of Claude Monet, Antoine Guillemet and Alexandre Nozal, he produced many oil paintings, as well as etchings, watercolors and murals.
Renowned as an army painter during the 1914-1918 war, he left around 1929 to join the Concarneau group of painters. He exhibited at the Salon des artistes français in Paris from 1901 to 1931, and was awarded a second-class medal in 1912 for L'hiver au marais, effet de neige, which put him out of the running for the rest of his career. He is the great-great-grandfather of painter and draughtswoman Virginie Broquet.
His career took him mainly to landscapes, genre scenes and seascapes, from Gravelines in the Nord, Marcilly-sur-Seine in the Marne to Martigues on the Mediterranean. In 1901, he lived at 15 rue du Marché in Puteaux, and in 1902 at Villa des Chardons in Garches.
Married to Louise Eugénie Chevalier, he had three children (his watercolor Sur l'eau illustrating the cover of Annales politiques et littéraires, July 2, 1922, depicts them). He painted landscapes of the Paris region, including L'Étang de Ville d'Avray, exhibited at the 1904 Salon.
From 1904, he lived at 12 quai de Seine in Marcilly-sur-Seine, where he remained until 1929, painting numerous canvases of the town and Champagne countryside. He entrusted his brother-in-law, a neighbor and cabinetmaker, with the task of framing some of his works. He created decorations for middle-class houses in the Marcilly area.
During the Great War, at the age of 45, he enlists and is drafted into the 2nd squadron of the 4th Hussars, on the front lines of the action in the trenches of La voie sacrée. He began the war out of a national spirit, above all as a soldier and not as a painter (at the start of the war, only the Musée de l'Armée sent artists to the front.
It wasn't until November 8, 1916, that a decree issued by Albert Dalimier, Under-Secretary of State for Fine Arts, instituted missions by painters to the armies. The First World War established the supremacy of photography and cinema in capturing the "truth" of combat, and marked the end of the great military history painting; the Ministry of War, then the Ministry of Fine Arts, nevertheless organized official missions by painters to the front, who presented their works at salons).
In 1917, he was appointed painter to the army and asked to return to the front. There, throughout the war, he drew and painted works that earned him his reputation, and he was praised and recognized by his fellow soldiers, right up to the head of the army, Marshal Pétain.
Léon Broquet exchanged numerous letters with the Musée de l'Armée from the start of the war until 1930. These letters, as well as those exchanged internally within the museum, shed light on Léon Broquet's private life and life at the front, and are archived at the Musée de l'Armée Hôtel des Invalides.
56 paintings, drawings and watercolors Carnet de route d'un territorial are part of the Henri Leblanc collection donated to the French State on August 4, 1917, and joined the collections of the Franco-American Museum at Château de Blérancourt in the Volunteer Pavilion when it was inaugurated on September 11, 1938, and the Musée de l'Armée (Paris) - Hôtel des Invalides/Musée d'Histoire contemporaine.
Right from the start of the conflict, a Parisian industrial couple, Louise and Henri Leblanc, gathered all possible documentation on the causes of the war and its development, whether official or private, and whatever the medium or language, including trench diaries and works such as those by Léon Broquet. In 1917, the Leblancs donated their collection to the French government, and the Bibliothèque-Musée de la Guerre (now the BDIC) was born.
50 of the drawings are reproduced in Carnet de route d'un territorial, album no 1, batailles de la Marne et de la Champagne, Paris, Éditions d'Art guerrier, A. Le Prince.
On August 8, 1926, while out with friends, he celebrated with a group of painters the Proclamation of the Glénan Free State (Glénan Archipelago south of Concarneau). In the book Le Cercle de mer, which recounts this event, Léon Broquel (for Léon Broquet) proclaims himself Le Roi des États Libres des Glénan.
Now a respected painter, his reputation became international, and several of his toil

Ref: U5T0SX3HOU