Jean-laurent Buffet-challié (1880-1943) Snow Landscape, Jura

A snowy landscape of the Jura Mountains by the painter Jean Laurent Buffet Challié. A post-impressionist painting with a modern, light, and fluid touch.

Oil on canvas
Signed lower right
Dimensions: 67 x 74 cm
Framed: 80 x 94 cm

Price: €3,900


"The wilder it is," he wrote, "the more deserted it is, the less lost I feel." Jean Challié.


Jean Laurent Buffet Challié, a painter in search of what is right and essential, enamored with nature and freedom.

Allergic to theories, he quickly gravitated towards a more emotional than intellectual form of representation and, like Derain, considered culture to be "a real danger to art." He has a love of freedom and nonconformity.

With this Jura landscape, so dear to his heart, Jean Challié doesn't seek to seduce, but rather to capture the truth of emotion and authenticity in the face of this landscape that moves him.

Courbet said, "I have a country, and I paint it." The same is true of Jean Challié, who paints scenes of farm work, forests, snowy landscapes, and family life in the Jura.

Snowy landscapes and art; here, an authentic Jura snowscape combining a light touch with a smooth, creamy impasto.

Artists have long been fascinated by the beauty of winter, this season that covers everything in its white mantle and seems to freeze time. The Impressionists particularly loved to paint this texture, which allowed them to explore the interplay of light and reflection in the snow.

Here, the landscape is devoid of any human presence. We are immersed in this cold, pure, and silent landscape. A break in the cloudy sky illuminates patches of snow. His touch is strikingly modern, both light and smooth.

Bibliography

Jean-Laurent Buffet-Challié was born in Echenoz-la-Méline in the Haute-Saône region. From a bourgeois family, his father was from the Jura region and his mother Parisian. They lived in Paris but frequently spent their holidays in Etival, a small village in the Haut-Jura.

Every summer, starting in 1884, the family gathered at the old family home, a combination farmhouse and manor house. From the terrace behind the house, the view stretched across pastures dotted with herds and cultivated fields, with the reassuring Jura horizon beyond, covered in beech and fir trees. For the children, it was pure bliss, a newfound freedom; a freedom that Jean would always cherish. A world of sensations that would be etched into the memory of a four-year-old boy, permeating his imagination and sensitivity and influencing his future paintings.

Training

Over the years, his parents had to face the facts: Jean had no taste for traditional studies or a military career, as his father had wished. From adolescence onward, art was his reason for living; nothing would deter him from the path he had chosen.

At 17, he attended classes at Gérôme's studio with Fernand Léger. He drew with Picasso and Fernand Léger at the Cirque Médrano.
He began receiving awards and prizes from 1900 onward. He moved to the Villa des Arts in Paris in 1904 and became friends with Raoul Dufy, with whom he painted and drew in Montmartre.

From 1903 to 1909, he refused to participate in artistic exhibitions. In 1907, he said: "The greatest mistake in the arts is to believe in spheres too lofty for the uninitiated."
In 1904, he moved to the Villa des Arts in Paris and met Picabia, who would become his brother-in-law.

1909 marked his return to the Salon des Indépendants, the Salon d'Automne, and to galleries…

Initially a Post-Impressionist from 1903 to 1907, he embraced a Fauvist period from 1908 to 1910. The last period of his life, from 1910 to 1943, was primarily focused on introspective works.

He was mobilized in March 1914. Gassed in 1915, he was discharged in 1917. He then settled with his family in Étival and painted scenes of farm work, forests, snow, and family life.
In 1920, he returned to Paris and resumed his studies. Exhibitions.

In 1939, at the outbreak of war, he returned to the Jura region. In 1942, he returned to his Parisian studio and participated in one last exhibition.

He died in 1943 from pulmonary complications following a bout of influenza.

Throughout his career as a painter, he exhibited alongside the greatest artists: Picasso, Bonnard, Denis, Vallotton, Valtat, Camoin, and Vuillard.

Ms. Laurence Buffet-Challié published the monograph dedicated to her father, Jean Challié, which earned her the 2005 Lucien Febvre Prize.