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: with frame 101 x 80 cm, without frame 92 x 70 cm

Frame: felt frame, gilded wood, in good condition.

Léon BROQUET 1869 / 1935
Espérance Léon Cléophas Broquet, known as Léon Broquet, born in Paris on November 1, 1869 and died on December 29, 1935 in Châteauroux, was a French painter and printmaker, who practiced his art primarily in landscape, marine, and history painting.

A student of Claude Monet, Antoine Guillemet, and Alexandre Nozal, he produced many oils on canvas, as well as etchings, watercolors, and murals. Recognized as a painter in the army 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 until 1931, and received a second-class medal in 1912 for Winter in the Marsh, Snow Effect, which placed him outside the competition for the rest of his career. He is the great-grandfather of the painter and draftsman Virginie Broquet.
He pursued a career primarily as a painter of landscapes, genre scenes, and seascapes, spanning France from Gravelines in the North, 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 was the father of three children (his watercolor "On the Water" depicting the cover of the Annales politiques et littéraires dated July 2, 1922, depicts them). He painted landscapes of the Paris region, including "L'Étang de Ville d'Avray" (The Pond at Ville d'Avray), exhibited at the 1904 Salon.
From 1904, he lived at 12 Quai de Seine in Marcilly-sur-Seine, a place he cherished until 1929. There, he painted numerous canvases depicting the city and the Champagne countryside. He entrusted the task of framing some of his works to his neighboring brother-in-law, a cabinetmaker. He created decors for bourgeois houses around Marcilly.
During the Great War, at the age of 45, he enlisted and was incorporated into the 2nd Squadron of the 4th Hussars, on the front lines of the trenches of La Voie Sacrée. He began the war out of national spirit, primarily as a soldier and not as a painter (at the beginning of the war, only the Army Museum sent artists on missions to the front.
It was not until November 8, 1916, that an order from the Undersecretary of State for Fine Arts, Albert Dalimier, established missions for painters to the armed forces. The First World War had established the supremacy of photography and cinema in capturing the "truth" of combat, and marked the end of great military history painting; the Ministry of War, and later the Ministry of Fine Arts, however, organized official missions for painters to the front, who presented their works in salons).
In 1917, he was appointed painter to the armed forces and requested to return to the front. Throughout the war, he drew and painted works that would earn him fame. He was praised and recognized from his fellow troops to the head of the armed forces, Marshal Pétain. Léon Broquet exchanged numerous letters with the Army Museum from the beginning of the conflict until 1930. These letters, as well as those exchanged internally within the museum, shed light on Léon Broquet's life, both his private life and his life at the front. They are archived at the Army Museum, Hôtel des Invalides.
56 paintings, drawings, and watercolors from the Travel Journal of a Territorial are part of the Henri Leblanc collection, donated to the State on August 4, 1917, and joined the collections of the Franco-American Museum at the Château de Blérancourt in the Volunteer Pavilion upon its inauguration on September 11, 1938, and the Army Museum (Paris) - Hôtel des Invalides/Museum of Contemporary History. From the beginning of the conflict, a Parisian industrialist couple, Louise and Henri Leblanc, gathered all possible documentation on the causes of the war and its development, whether official or private, and regardless of the medium or language, including trench newspapers and works such as those of Léon Broquet. In 1917, the Leblancs donated their collection to the French government, and the War Library-Museum was born, now the BDIC.
Fifty of the drawings are reproduced in the edition "Carnet de route d’un territorial, album no. 1, batailles de la Marne et de la Champagne" (Travel Journal of a Territorial, Album No. 1, Battles of the Marne and Champagne), Paris, Éditions d’Art guerrier, A. Le Prince. On August 8, 1926, during a trip with friends, he and a group of painters celebrated the Proclamation of the Free State of the Glénan Islands (Glénan Archipelago south of Concarneau). In the book Le Cercle de mer (The Sea Circle), which recounts this event, Léon Broquel (for Léon Broquet) proclaims himself King of the Free States of the Glénan Islands.
Becoming a respected painter, his reputation grew international, and several of his paintings were acquired by French and foreign museums.