Pierre Fleury (1900-1985) - Great Dune - Arcachon

Small oil on canvas by Pierre Fleury, titled on the back "Large dune and common forest. Arcachon". In good condition, with an invisible professional restoration; the patch is visible only on the back. 52 cm high x 72 cm wide with frame, 45 x 61 cm without. Signed lower right, signed on the back. "Pierre Fleury (1900-1985) was a painter from Boulogne-sur-Seine. A marine painter who frequently went to sea, painting its scenes, he divided his time between the Vendée, Brittany, the Bay of Biscay, and Paris. It was in Vanves and then Paris that he completed his secondary and higher education at the Sorbonne (mathematics, astronomy, philosophy) before dedicating himself to painting. Passionate about the sea from his formative years, Pierre Fleury embarked on a Mauritanian fishing boat in Camaret in the early 1920s, on a tuna boat in Douarnenez, and worked as a mariner." Coastal trawling on a cutter from the Île d'Yeu. He thus approaches the marine motif that will run throughout his work. A student of the engraver Bernard Naudin (1876-1946), and of the painters Charles Guérin (1875-1939) and Paul Signac (1863-1935), he learned by immersing himself in the Divisionist and Post-Impressionist trends that emerged in Paris at the end of the previous century – some thirty years earlier. His first solo exhibition took place in Paris in 1923 at the Galerie Balzac – followed by exhibitions at the Galerie Bernheim and the Galerie Saluden in Quimper. He became an official painter for the Ministry of Air in 1931 and was elected to the French Naval Academy in 1966. He adopted Impressionist pictorial techniques, juxtaposing different touches of color with small strokes to create shadows and the vibrations of light – of the sky and of The sea, landscapes in general. The closeness his canvases evoke with the marine element lies precisely in this more or less pointillist construction, which allows him to approach the vision of water as a sensation of infinite and subtle nuances of color and reflection. Using all types of vessels (from sailing dinghies to stationary weather ships) in French and international seas, Pierre Fleury painted from his own visual experience. He worked and exhibited throughout his career in Paris, where he died in 1985. On the Île d'Aix, where he lived—as well as in other locations in Brittany, Charente, and Vendée—a museum-association dedicated to the artist organizes exhibitions of his work through various marine themes.