Louis Floutier (1882 - 1936) Game Of Pelota In Dancharia, Gouache And Stencil, 18 X 27.5 Cm

Louis FLOUTIER (1882 - 1936) Game of Basque Pelota in Dancharia. Gouache, stencil, signed in the sheet lower left. Framed under glass. Beautiful wooden frame. H: 18 cm x W: 27.5 cm (sheet). Louis-Benjamin Floutier (Toulouse 1882 - Saint-Jean-de-Luz 1936) was not born in the Basque Country, but in Toulouse, in 1882. It was there, at the School of Fine Arts, that he began his artistic training. Graduating with honors, he went on to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, from which he also graduated with honors. He quickly accumulated awards and began to make a name for himself. However, the war disrupted his career. Enlisting as a volunteer, he decided to put his art at the service of his country and joined the 13th Artillery Regiment and the 1st Engineer Regiment as a camouflage artist. In 1919, with the war over, he did not return to Paris, but settled in Saint-Jean-de-Luz and, with Lukas and Etienne Vilotte—two artists he had met in the trenches—founded the Ciboure art pottery workshop. He worked there for two years, decorating stoneware pottery and creating a new Basque Art Deco style that blended forms and inspirations from Ancient Greece with a modern Basque regionalism. In 1922, he set up his own studio in La Pergola in Saint-Jean-de-Luz and devoted himself to painting the Basque Country, its landscapes, customs, and people. Floutier was a wonderful landscape painter who belonged to the Impressionist movement, and to whom we owe the popularization of the Basque Country. At his death in 1936 in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, he left behind more than a thousand works, now scattered in private or public collections.