Emile Chaumont (1877-1927) Minimalist Landscape

Emile CHAUMONT
(Périgueux 1877 - 1927)
Landscape
Oil on panel
H. 24 cm; L. 35 cm
Signed lower left, countersigned on the back

Provenance: Private collection, Strasbourg

The Saint-Georges district of Périgueux was the cradle and place of life of this poetic painter. After starting his classical studies, he had to leave high school upon the death of his parents to pursue a profitable profession. His older brother and tutor, knowing his pronounced taste for drawing, allowed him to learn lithography at the Dupont printing company. He greatly appreciated this choice and progressed in his hometown until becoming master worker at the Ronteix house. Mobilized for the entire war from 1915, Emile Chaumont distinguished himself by "his remarkable attitude of energy and enthusiasm" when returning from the front with the War Cross. It was on his return that he made the decision to join Bordeaux and the Pech printing house. Certainly a painter before, it was really at this time that he devoted himself to his passion during all his free hours. Student of the Périgord Léon Félix and of Professor Albert Laurens whose inspiration we feel, it was however under his own ideas that Chaumont developed his art. He followed Jean-Louis Daniel in Corrèze, crisscrossed Périgord, but also the Gironde Landes. His always luminous landscapes using a full range of colors had real success and were even crowned with an honorable mention at the Salon des Artistes Français. Apart from these landscapes, Emile Chaumont produced numerous staged portraits and still lifes of remarkable quality. He died at just fifty years old in the Saint-Georges district where he was born, in the home of his brother Léopold Chaumont, director of the newspaper l'Avenir de la Dordogne, after long suffering from an incurable illness. The city of Périgueux dedicated a critically acclaimed posthumous exhibition to him in 1946 and offered his native neighborhood a street in the artist's name.

This little landscape seems like a UFO in the work of Emile Chaumont, and yet it is indeed a work by this talented painter, certainly produced very early in his career. The signature attests to this, different in its spelling from that found from the 1910s. On the back his usual signature appears, most certainly added a few years later. This extremely simple composition can be compared to the work of Auguste Pointelin, a formidable artist adept at simplicity and austerity.