Henri Pontoy - Tea Time - Morocco - Oil On Canvas

Renowned orientalist painter, Henri PONTOY represented here a Moroccan woman in traditional dress, at tea time. Bright and colorful painting, certainly among the most beautiful portraits of Pontoy !

BIOGRAPHY :
Henri Pontoy enters the School of Fine Arts in Paris, in the studio of Luc-Olivier Merson, and exhibits his engravings at the Salon of French artists, and his paintings at the Salon of the National Society of Fine Arts, at the Salon d'Automne, as well as at the Salon of Algerian Orientalist Artists.
In 1926, he received a travel grant from the Colonial Society of French Artists which enabled him to travel to North Africa, particularly to Tunisia where he became a member of the Tunisian Salon the same year, then to Morocco and and French West Africa. He lived for several years around 1930 in Ouarzazate where he met the painter Jacques Majorelle. He became a professor of arts and letters at the Moulay Idriss high school in Fez.
He won the 1933 grand prize of the city of Algiers. He left after the Second World War, in 1947, with Majorelle, in Guinea, Ivory Coast and Cameroon. He won the Cameroon Prize in 1951.
His fresh, airy and warm color palette, both in oils and watercolours, has always met with great success. He is one of the last French representatives of Orientalism which reached its peak in the interwar period.

Oil on canvas 44 x 59 cms (sold without frame - the original frame, badly repainted and damaged, beared the mention in pencil "woman of Fez")

Signed lower left "Pontoy"

Very good general condition, some pinholes and light repaints on the edge of the canvas

Note that the reverse of the canvas had been painted initially (we can see characters in front of a fortified door), Pontoy covered his paint and used again the canvas to favor this portrait

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