Paul Rue (1866–1954). *deer In The Underbrush* School Of Crozant, Châteauroux, Maillaud, Creuse

The second and final work by Paul Rue, this time depicting a scene in the woods with deer, most likely in the Brenne region, signed in the lower right corner.
Beautiful dimensions: 46x38 cm and 61x53 cm including the frame.
Delivered in an antique frame.
Authenticity guaranteed.

A very beautiful Post-Impressionist composition by Paul Rue; here he paints a scene he depicted many times—deer in the woods. He did indeed love hunting scenes, but here there are no hunters, just two peaceful deer in the forest;  still rendered in his signature Sienna earth tones—orange, brown, and green—against a lovely sky-blue sky.

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 years.
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 visited frequently. Regarding the latter, he wrote in an autograph 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.