Painting Of The Conchée Fort In Saint Malo And Wave Effects At Sunset

*Pierre Bertrand was born in Lorient in 1884. He entered the military school at Hennebont, but his meeting with Pégot-Ogier, who gave him his first lessons, encouraged him towards an artistic path.

In 1903, he won a silver medal at the Salon de Lorient. He chose to settle in Paris and become a painter without attending school. He contributed to several art journals, then became a private secretary. He exhibited six paintings at the Salon des Indépendants in 1910, inspired by the sites of Belle-Île and Groix, and put on his first private show in Paris with some fifty seascapes.

Pierre Bertrand was taken prisoner in December 1915. From the German camps, he brought back several drawings and a series of lithographs that were exhibited in Lorient and acquired by the Museum. He accumulated exhibitions, prizes and awards, and his reputation spread. Pierre Bertrand showed some forty paintings in Lorient in 1923, and the Museum acquired "Jour d'Orage à la pointe de Camaret". He was appointed painter to the French Navy in 1936, and was part of the French colonial missions that took him to North Africa.
The sea is his leitmotif.
Pierre Bertrand likes to take rocks, jagged cliffs and crashing waves as his subject, and paints with his feet in the water. He knows how to render the effect of daylight and backlighting, the shimmer of the sun, offering a bright and joyful material.
He didn't confine himself to one speciality: as a distinguished landscape painter, he also executed still lifes, portraits and numerous decorative panels, as for the 1937 International Exhibition.
Pierre Bertrand died in 1975.
Source: https://patrimoine.lorient.bzh/histoire/personnalites/b/bertrand-pierre