Edmond Eugène Valton (1836-1910) – Landscape Caught In The Fog, Signed Drawing

Edmond Eugène Valton (1836-1910)
Landscape caught in the fog, moon effect
Conté pencil on paper
15 x 23.5 cm
signed lower right, in pencil: "E. Valton"

Very good condition

Framed, under anti-reflective glass
Dimensions with frame: 32 x 38 cm

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A pupil successively of Paul Delaroche, Célestin Nanteuil and Thomas Couture, whose portrait he painted (now kept at the Senlis Museum, on loan from the Musée d'Orsay), Edmond Eugène Valton is a painter, draftsman and art theorist who lived through the 19th century while remaining attentive to the most remarkable developments in his art.

In 1884 he was one of the founders of the Salon des Indépendants, and thus a friend and collaborator of the most innovative artists of their time, namely Henri-Edmond Cross, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, alongside whom he exhibited. He was president of the Société des Artistes Indépendants between 1889 and 1908.

In his theoretical work of 1890 entitled Méthode pour dessiner, he liked to encourage both beginners and established artists to always go to the motif, as he certainly did here to fill this notebook page showing a study of a landscape in a foggy effect.
"Let's go to the countryside; an album and a pencil will be all we have. [...] Let's move a dozen kilometers away from Paris and go to the countryside. We will be very unhappy if we don't find some motifs for sketches. "

Here, the graphic effects of the nuances of the Conté pencil make appear both the moon, in a play on the reserve of the paper, and the desired fog effect, in the diffusion of the forms, without any clearly drawn line. In this work on the stump and the reserve, very well mastered, the landscape almost escapes the gaze, but the feeling of the freshness of the night and the rumor of the rustling of the trees are very present.

We know few drawings by this artist, but another sheet, very beautiful, also in the pure nuances of the pencil on paper, is kept at the National Gallery ofWashington.