(Neuchâtel 1907 – 1986)
The Dordogne from Domme
Titled by the artist “La Vallée bleue”
Gouache on photographic pape
H. 26 cm; W. 17.5 cm
Signed lower right
1982
Provenance: Private collection, Paris
Born in Switzerland, Hans Seiler spent his childhood in Bern where his father, a doctor, practiced. At 17, he was already passionate about drawing and would walk around with notebooks that he filled with sketches. The curator of the city museum, who was able to take a look at his work, advised him to begin artistic training. Seiler went to Lyon and entered the city’s School of Fine Arts in the sculpture section under the direction of a student of Rodin. The latter quickly encouraged him to take flight and join Paris. In 1927, he entered the Académie Ranson where Roger Bissière taught him painting. This connection would be felt in Seiler's art until the last days of his life. Having become a friend of his master, he met Marcel Gromaire, who would also be an artistic pillar in his life and a loyal friend. In 1934, he settled in Chennevières-sur-Marne with his wife, then bought a charming house in Périgord, in La Roque Gageac, at the dawn of the war. This residence, which overlooks the Dordogne and offers a breathtaking view from the terrace, would be a place of resource and life for the painter and his family. Many works would be created at the foot of the cliffs and seen from inside the house. Seiler would travel extensively through Finistère and Normandy from the 1930s onwards, then the Netherlands and its flat landscapes with heavy skies. He discovered Spain in 1978 and stayed there every autumn until 1986, creating magnificent works of fortified cities and dry mountains. Numerous exhibitions have been devoted to his art during his life and since his death, notably at the Bonnat Museum in Bayonne, the Meudon Museum in 2007 on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth, at the Bordeaux Museum of Fine Arts in 2010, and until 2024 in Paris. During the summer of 2025, our gallery is organizing an exhibition of the painter's Périgord works. Stylistically, Seiler works on plays of light, between shadows and illuminated points, which he often delimits with lines crisscrossing the compositions. From contrasting works with bright colors, he moved in the last fifteen years of his life to light, pastel shades, which give landscapes a new approach that no artist had yet given in Périgord.
This view taken from Domme, is typical of the 1980s in Seiler's work. The Dordogne flows towards the Roque Gageac whose cliff can be seen in the background on the right. The process used here is not academic. During the last years of his life, the painter had a photographer friend make black and white prints of his own works, on which he would recompose with gouache, changing the shades, the lights, and many details. Here, we can sometimes see some original areas of the photograph left blank.