Edmond-Édouard Lapeyre

Lapeyre’s early envois to the Salon were eclectic. Alongside paintings of picturesque and Orientalist subjects, such as Avant le bal, a work perfectly in harmony with the canons of the Belle Époque, at the 1912 Salon he exhibited Les femmes de Sparte à Aeglia, an ambitious history painting that revived grand mythological themes. Between these two extremes, Lapeyre exhibited genre scenes depicting the leisure pursuits of Parisian high society – a boxing match in the Salle Wagram, and the Saint-Cloud racetrack. His elegant Portrait d’Anna de Noailles aux courses illustrates his twofold talent as a portraitist and chronicler of society life – qualities shared by other exhibitors such as Jean Béraud and Henri Gervex.

Landscape featured among Edmond-Édouard Lapeyre’s Salon paintings on two occasions: the first time in 1909, with En patrouille, and a second in 1914, with La rentrée des gerbes. Here, rather than the kind of dark Naturalism found in Victor-Ferdinand Bourgeois' paintings, we find a sunny social realism in which farm workers are shown making their way back to the farm, their pitchforks over their shoulders, with the discreet but palpable satisfaction of a task properly done. This essential difference of temperament makes Lapeyre closer to the colourful verism of the Italian Macchiaioli than to that of his fellow French artists, even if the latter had distanced themselves from the austere Naturalism of Zola’s day. The serenity of the weather and generosity of nature in Lapeyre’s work, and that of Gaston Balande and Henri-Alexandre Sollier, are in contrast to the bleakness of his French contemporaries.

After 1906 most of the numerous studies of landscapes and monuments made by the artist between these years and the 1920s are dated and give the location, and it is therefore possible to trace the route that took him to the Ardennes, Biarritz, Ardes-sur-Couze (Auvergne) and, above all, Saint-Georges-de-Didonne (Charente-Maritime), a small coastal town where he first stayed in 1909, and where he painted his first beach scenes, featuring the dunes. From the 1920s tourists began to appear in his compositions, captured on the beach at nearby Royan and then at Vallières.

After Trouville and the coastal resorts of Normandy, the beaches of Charente-Maritime were becoming increasingly popular with French holidaymakers. From 1921 and 1935 it was there, especially on the fine sands of Royan and Vallières, that Lapeyre liked to sketch the rocks and, above all, people with their boats and the elegant young women who posed for him . Dressed in the latest fashions from Paul Poiret or Jeanne Paquin, these élégantes are caught in what are more like the rehearsed poses of professional models than those of casual tourists.

Lapeyre met his models in the studios of the milliners for whom he designed posters and signs in a simplified graphic style typical of French illustration at the time (although also recalling the bold forms of the Beggarstaff Brothers in England). With their lustrous finishes, his portraits of models irresistibly bring to mind the elegant women of the American John Singer Sargent and the Spaniard Joaquín Sorolla. Their portraits of women, perceived as icons of European fashion, also illustrate the development of a society of leisure, for which the beaches of France and Spain provided a fitting playground, but one where elegance was still de rigueur. The work by Sorolla most emblematic of this conquest of the beaches by the international bourgeoisie is without doubt Promenade by the Sea, painted in Biarritz in 1909.

Every year, from July to September, Lapeyre used to escape from his urban, Parisian existence. In 1931, for example, he was at Péréyrol in the Dordogne, and in 1935 in the Vendeix valley near La Bourboule, which inspired many delicate, lush landscapes. In the following decade he painted in Argentan (1941), at Saint Honoré in the Orne (1945), in the Nièvre, and at Vic-sur-Cère in Cantal (1947), returning here with his wife, Madeleine Charlot, in June 1950. Vue depuis notre chambre depicts this holiday. This image from the end of a full career, a window at Vic open onto both the street and the surrounding countryside, seems to encapsulate the artist’s productive and felicitously cultivated duality as a painter of both fashionable women and country folk. Edmond-Édouard Lapeyre died in Paris on 4 February 1960.