View Of A Gothic Cathedral From A Wooded Hill, Signed Vanier, C. 1940

View of a Gothic Cathedral from a Wooded Hill, signed Vanier, c. 1940

Claude Vanier, born Simon Abramovitch (Le Havre, 1903 – Paris, 1958)

Oil on pressed fibreboard (Isorel).
49 × 60.5 cm.
Signed upper left.

Claude Vanier’s painting is distinguished by a highly personal sensitivity to colour, recognisable in his recurring harmonies of violet, mauve and blue. In this work, colour becomes poetry: the Gothic cathedral emerges through the leafless trees, bathed in violet and rosy light that lends the landscape a deeply lyrical atmosphere.

Executed on pressed fibreboard (Isorel), a support widely used by French artists around the 1940s.

Claude Vanier, born Simon Abramovitch in Le Havre in 1903, studied at the city’s Académie des Beaux-Arts before moving to Paris, where he attended the academies of Montparnasse. From 1929 onward he exhibited regularly at the major Paris Salons and held solo exhibitions in the city’s galleries. His work, devoted mainly to French landscapes, seascapes and urban views, evolved from Impressionism toward a personal Post-Fauvist style in which colour assumed a central role. He died in Paris in 1958.