Att. To Guillaume Bodinier (1795-1872) The Menhirs Of Carnac Megaliths

Guillaume BODINIER. Attributed to

(Angers, 1795 - Angers, 1872)

Carnac, les pierres druidiques

Oil on paper mounted on canvas

H. 26 cm ; L. 34.5 cm

1850

Related works : several pencil drawings preserved at the Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Angers

Guillaume Bodinier belongs to the same generation of Corot landscape painters, Caruelle d'Aligny, Léon Fleury and André Giroux, the successors of neo-classical artists such as Valenciennes and Jean-Victor Bertin. A student of Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, he followed his master to Italy in 1822, when Guérin became director of the French Academy at the Villa Medici; he spent most of his time there until 1848, a period interspersed with a few stays in Angers and Paris, producing a large number of landscapes of Rome and its surroundings or the Neapolitan region.

After a final trip to Rome in early 1848, Bodinier settled permanently in his native city in August of the same year. Little is known of his travels around Angers, except for a visit to Carnac at the end of July 1850, attested by dated drawings of the famous megaliths.

The treatment is certainly more modern, but we find in our work the creamy fluidity of the young Bodinier's Italian sketches between 1823 and 1825.