Léon Frédéric (1856-1940) A Summer Landscape, Oil On Canvas Signed

 Léon Frédéric (1856-1940)
A Summer landscape
signed at the lower left
Oil on canvas transfered on panel
29 x 44 cm
Framed : 39 x 54.5 cm
in good condition, However, there is a crease in the canvas running all the way to the left of the work, which must have occurred when the canvas was mounted by the artist on the wooden panel.
Léon Frédéric always presented his landscapes in oil on canvas on mahogany panels like this one.

Provenance :
Galerie Giroux, Bruxelles (see the gallery label on the back)
Private colection, Belgium

Léon Frédéric's predilection for landscapes is well known, especially those of the Nafraiture valley in the Belgian Ardennes where he stayed.
For him, it was a motif for painting that gave rise to variations on colour. Here, it is the greens of the vegetation in summer that inspire this almost musical landscape.
The photos don't do justice to these brilliant colours
But in the centre of the painting you can see the soft green of a meadow in the distance
The artist excels at conveying the depth of the landscape through nuances of colour. There is a real jubilation in the rendering of the spectacle of nature. A symphony of green enhanced by the red tones of a rock.

The Galerie Georges Giroux, whose label can be seen on the reverse of the work, was based in Brussels and was one of the most important art galleries in Belgium in the first half of the 20th century.

Léon Frédéric was born on 26 August 1856 in Brussels and died on 25 January 1940 in Schaerbeek.
The son of a prosperous jeweller, Léon Frédéric was apprenticed to the painter-decorator Charle-Albert in 1871, and attended evening classes at the Brussels Academy. In 1874, he worked in the private studio of Jean-François Portaels. The following year, he joined forces with a group of young painters to rent a studio where they could study live models. From 1876 to 1878, he prepared for the Prix de Rome, which he failed, but his father offered him a year's travel to Italy. From 1878 to 1879, he made his debut with the artistic group l'Essor, which brought together proponents of realism. In 1883, he was hailed as a promising painter with his painting Les Marchands de craie, a triptych combining modernism with the genius of the primitive masters, and in the 1890s he became one of the most popular painters in Belgium, cited alongside Constantin Meunier and Eugène Laermans.
On 24 April 1929, King Albert I awarded Léon Frédéric - at the same time as James Ensor - the title of Baron.

In 1882, he discovered the work of the French naturalist painter Jules Bastien Lepage at the Brussels Salon.
Some of his paintings took the form of esoteric allegories, such as Intérieur d'atelier (1882), in the Musée d'Ixelles. These works suffice to classify Léon Frédéric as one of the masters of the Belgian Symbolist movement. They foreshadow certain Surrealist themes, as shown by the right-hand side of the triptych L'Eau, L'Eau dormante.
His large triptych, Les Ages de l'Ouvrier, exhibited at the Musée d'Orsay, is also very famous.

But his smaller-format landscapes - including an impressive series of views of Nafraiture in the Belgian Ardennes and his views of dunes on the Belgian coast - reveal a body of work that is just as bold, but more intimate in nature, that of a contemplative landscape lover.
He favoured high horizons, with the sky reduced to the upper third of these canvases, expressing the point of view of a painter who voluntarily allows himself to be dominated by the force of the natural spectacle that fascinates him.

His works are held by the Musée d'Orsay, the Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts de Belgique and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, among others.