Robert Antoine Pinchon (rouen, 1886 – Bois-guillaume, 1943) - Portrait Of Geneviève Pinchon

Robert Antoine PINCHON (Rouen, 1886 – Bois-Guillaume, 1943)
Portrait of Geneviève Pinchon in a Hat (believed to represent the artist’s daughter)

Oil on canvas
50 × 39 cm

A wonderfully intimate and exceptionally rare figure study within Robert Antoine Pinchon’s oeuvre, this portrait is believed to depict Geneviève Pinchon, the painter’s daughter, caught in a quiet moment beneath a wide-brimmed hat, her face softly modelled against a vibrant, luminous green ground. Pinchon’s brushwork—at once lively and delicate—transforms the simplest motif into a subtle play of light and colour, with bold blues and fresh greens orchestrated in a distinctly early twentieth-century sensibility.

Pinchon is celebrated above all as a painter of Normandy: the Seine around Rouen, shifting skies, autumnal fires, and city glints rendered with a virtuoso colourist’s palette. Precisely for that reason, portraits and character studies are extremely uncommon in his production, making this canvas particularly compelling. It offers collectors a more personal, private side of an artist usually encountered through landscape.

Claude Monet reportedly admired him as “an astonishing hand in the service of a surprising eye,” a phrase that resonates here in the assured construction of the head and the spirited handling of colour, where observation and instinct meet in perfect balance.

Exhibition
Exposition R. A. Pinchon, Chapelle du Carmel, Bois-Guillaume, 19 January – 7 February 2007 (label on the reverse).

Provenance
Private collection, by descent in the Pinchon family.

About the artist (notes)

• From around the age of 19, Pinchon embraced a Fauve-inflected language, while notably never drifting into Cubism, unlike several of his contemporaries.

• Renowned as a painter of light and a master colourist, he captured the ever-changing aspects of the Norman landscape with remarkable freshness.

• Among his most significant groups are his paintings of the Seine (often around Rouen) and landscapes of Haute-Normandie.

• A friend of Guy de Maupassant.

• Elected to the Académie de Rouen in 1932, later becoming its President in 1941.

• Mobilised during World War I; wounded at Berry-au-Bac (Battle of the Marne) and taken prisoner during the Battle of Verdun.