Olivier Fornoy Painting Old Impressionist Charente Landscape Young Woman On A Bridge

Olivier Flornoy XXe. portrait jeune femme sur un pont sur un étang dans un paysage charentais

Charming oil on panel signed lower left by Olivier Flornoy, depicting a young woman wearing a straw hat, leaning against the railing of a small bridge thrown over calm water. The entire scene is based on a simple, accurate composition: a tall tree with sloping trunks frames the left-hand side, the bridge stretches its horizontality in the center, and the isolated figure gives the landscape its human presence. The fresh palette blends soft greens, watery blues, milky skies animated by rosy hues and a few warmer accents in the trunk and bridge. The whole is in a muted, luminous and decorative post-impressionist vein, in the spirit of mid-twentieth-century country and waterside landscapes.

Olivier Flornoy, born in Nantes in 1894 and died in Saint-Brice in Charente in 1962, was a pupil of Ernest Laurent, Jules Adler and Louis Biloul at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français from 1922, winning a silver medal in 1925 and a gold medal in 1931, before being excluded from the competition in 1932. His career path explains this solid, pleasant and luminous painting, and his Cognac and Charente roots are consistent with a repertoire of landscapes and watersides to which the artist is also attached in sales and collections.

Good overall condition of presentation. Fresh, clearly legible paint surface. Old frame repainted or reworked in a light tone, with minor marks and rubbing. The panel is attached to the reverse in a simple mount. Decorative and sound.

Dimensions with frame: 39 x 36 cm

Dimensions of panel alone: 32 x 30 cm