Louis Frégier (1929-2014) Snow-covered Roofs

Louis Frégier (1929-2014) Snow-Covered Roofs, circa 1955, oil on canvas board, 24 x 33 cm, signed lower left.

              Born in 1929 to a father who was already a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts, he initially followed in his father's footsteps, becoming a teacher and thus enjoying a degree of independence. In 1945, he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Marseille, then in Paris; from 1951, he taught fine arts at the École Normale d'Instituteurs (teacher training college) in Aix-en-Provence.
He painted models and landscapes from life; well-known in the cultural capital of the Bouches-du-Rhône, he could no longer take a step on the Cours Mirabeau without being congratulated on his latest exhibition or the amateur theater group he had formed at the École Normale in Aix.
Throughout his “first period,” he painted Provence from nature. It is a land of light, he said, not a land of color: the greens are often gray, the rock often white or gray, and the autumn season rather short and indistinct.
                From 1961 to 1967, Louis Frégier experienced his “military period,” serving as one of the official painters of the French army. He was then seconded to UNESCO as an international expert in Cameroon from 1968 to 1975, and subsequently to the French cooperation agency (at the National Institute of Arts) in Mali from 1975 to 1991. He thus lived for twenty-three years in Africa until his return to Manosque, France, in 1991.