Paul Rue (1866–1954) Pastures In Brenne. School Of Crozant, Châteauroux, Maillaud, Creuse....

The first of two oil paintings by Paul Rue; this is an oil on canvas-backed cardboard depicting pastures and cows in the Brenne region, signed in the lower right corner.
The painting alone measures 27x35 cm, and 43x52 cm including the frame.
Delivered in its period frame with a white patina. Authenticity guaranteed.

This is a very beautiful Post-Impressionist composition by Paul Rue, who, as is often the case, paints a rural scene—here, cows in pastures...His brushwork is, of course, characteristic of his style, as is his palette, in which pastel colors dominate.
One can indeed recognize a work by Paul Rue quite quickly, at least as easily as a painting by Fernand Maillaud, who was, among other things, one of his mentors.
Paul Rue, born in Châteauroux on October 8, 1866, and died in Le Poinçonnet on May 26, 1954, was a French landscape painter. He was the half-brother of the poet Gabriel Nigond.
The grandson of a former mayor of Châteauroux, Paul-Joseph Rue, he lost his father just a few days after his birth. In her second marriage, his mother, Françoise Suzanne Duquesnoy, married Charles Nigond, a civil engineer specializing in bridges and roads.
After earning his high school diploma in literature at the Lycée de Châteauroux, it was not until 1906 that he turned to painting.
GabrielNigond, then living at “Les Epingués” (in the town of Verneuil-sur-Igneraie, Indre), introduced his half-brother to the community of regionalist artists among whom he had trained. Among its members were men of letters such as Abbé Jacob (Hector de Corlay) and Lionel Nastorg, as well as painters Henry Coutant and Fernand Maillaud. According to Raymond Christoflour in Maillaud, Painter of Life, his encounter with Maillaud would prove decisive in his development as a painter.
In 1908, he submitted six paintings to the Salon des Indépendants and became a member of the Société des Artistes Français in 1913. He received an honorable mention at the 1916 Salon.
He served as vice president of the Académie du Centre and of the admissions committee at the Musée Bertrand in Châteauroux.
Although he servedas mayor of the town of Saint-Martin-de-Lamps for sixteen years, it was in Les Divers, a village in the Poinçonnet region, that he would spend his final days.
Although the artist rarely left the Indre department, within its borders he proved to be a nomadic landscape painter: the Creuse Valley, the area around Le Poinçonnet, and the Brenne were all places he frequently visited. Regarding the latter, he wrote in a handwritten letter that he was captivated by its strange and alluring character. The Brenne and its ponds also lent themselves to the expression of inner turmoil, in a more directly poetic vein. In the same letter, he admits to enjoying evoking “the somewhat gray, rather melancholic atmosphere—everything that makes up the charm of our Berry skies.”
Consequently, his main themes are autumnal and wintry, illustrated for the most part by sunsets, twilights, and mist.
Trees are also a major focus of this work, always occupying an important place in the structure of the landscape. To this end, he studied trees on a daily basis.
We also find frequent hunting scenes. A former huntsman, he enjoyed evoking this iconography and honing his style through it.
While he produced a few illustrations, a series of his paintings was directly inspired by Gabriel Nigond’s Contes de la Limousine.
Today, he is a key figure among the painters of the Crozant School.