Renée Jullien (1903-1999) Portrait Yunnan-fou 1925

Renée Jullien (1903-1999) Portrait, Yunnan-Fou 1925, pastel, 38 x 27 cm, signed and dated 1925 lower right, silver frame 1925.

The daughter of composer Georges-Maurice-René Jullien and Madeleine Gretillat, she entered the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 1919, introduced by painters Louis-François Biloul and Jules Adler.... In 1923, she became the first woman to win the second Grand Prix de Rome. The following year, she traveled to Indochina and China on a government scholarship. Renée Jullien moved to Aix-en-Provence in 1940, where the landscapes she discovered became a source of inspiration. She opened a scultpure studio at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts at the request of Marcel Arnaud.
Renée Jullien was a complete artist, sharing her work between painting, sculpture and engraving. She wrote for the magazine "Le Feu", as well as three books on Asia, including "Yu-Non-Fou" and "Ville des nuages", a bibliophile work published in 1937, which she illustrated with her own drawings.
A member of the Salon National des Beaux-Arts and the Société de la France d'Outremer, Renée Jullien won the Prix du Maroc in 1952 and the Prix de l'Afrique Equatoriale in 1954. She then spent 8 months in Central Africa, in Gabon, where she was received by Doctor Schweitzer.
Renée Jullien's work is in the tradition of twentieth-century travel painters, a veritable voyage of initiation, from the China of 1924 to the Venice of the 70s, from the Cézanne-accented landscapes of Aix to the villages of Spain, Africa and Greece.