Henri Plisson (1908–2002) Fog In Brittany. Painter Of The Navy Paguenaud, Montmorillon Carré

A beautiful, large gouache by Henri Plisson depicting a misty day in Brittany, signed in the lower left corner with the Marine anchor, and titled and numbered on the back.
Dimensions of the gouache alone (unframed): 33x50 cm; 51x67 cm including the frame.
The artwork is in excellent original condition and comes in its period frame.
Authenticity guaranteed

This is a magnificent gouache by Henri or Henry Plisson, which I believe was created around 1975–1985. It depicts a lovely seascape painted during a stay in Brittany; the artist depicts boats in a small bay on a misty day. He faithfully captures the Breton atmosphere through his characteristic technique, using broad blocks of color and, in this piece, a most subtle palette dominated by grays, blue, and white, accented by browns, oranges, and beige. 

Henri or Henry Plisson, born in Saint-Gaultier (36), is a painter, ceramist, and sculptor from the Montmorillon school, like Raoul Carré and Jehan Berjonneau, but he is also part of the small circle of marine painters, as were the Paguenauds, Haffner, Fouillé, and Marin Marie.
He attended middle school in Montmorillon, then enrolled in advanced drawing courses and classical art classes offered by the City of Paris (the Drawing Academy on Boulevard de Clichy and the City of Paris Drawing Academy on Boulevard du Montparnasse). After his military service in Indochina—from which he brought back numerous watercolors in October 1930—he became close to the painters Henri Deluermoz (1876–1943) and Iwan Cerf (1883–1963), and devoted himself to painting wildlife inspired by his visits to the Jardin des Plantes and the Vincennes Zoo. He was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris to study in the studio of Lucien Simon (1861–1945)

. As part of Gen Paul’s Montmartre circle, Henri Plisson married Rosamonde Wormald (1911–2005) on June 19, 1934, in Paris; she was a painter originally from Macclesfield (Cheshire, England) whom he had met at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. According to the catalogs of the Parisian art salons, the couple was then living at 8 Rue d’Orchampt in Paris’s 18th arrondissement.

Mobilized in the Saar region when World War II broke out, he befriended the writer Maurice Fombeure there, who would mention him in his book of memoirs from that period Les godillots sont lourds (Gallimard, 1948). After his demobilization, he left Rue d’Orchampt in 1940 for a new studio located at 11 Rue du Cherche-Midi in Paris’s 6th arrondissement, and in 1943, together with Rosamonde, he illustrated the collection Those from the Western Lands by Maurice Fombeure (Horizons de France, Paris)

In 1943, his discovery of Pierre Lebasque’s (1912–1994) studio and its ceramic kiln introduced him to the arts of fire, to which he would devote himself almost exclusively, moving to 10 Rue Franquet in Paris’s 15th arrondissement in 1947 and then establishing his own ceramics studio in Sartrouville, where, in the early 1950s, the sculptor Robert Couturier, the painters Paul Aïzpiri, Jeanne Aubrière, Jean Aujame, Louis Berthomme Saint-André, Roger Bezombes, Yves Brayer, Paul Charlot, Michel Ciry, Lucien Coutaud, Jacques Despierre, Emili Grau i Sala, André Hambourg, Jacques Lagrange, Pierre Leygue, Pierre Lelong, Roger Montané, Orlando Pelayo, Ginette Renoux, Georges Rohner, Gaëtan de Rosnay, Claude Schürr, Maurice Verdier, and Gabriel Zendel.Anne Lajoix, citing figures from Raymond Nacenta, estimates Henri Plisson’s body of work at approximately one hundred plates and two thousand ceramic figures; she also notes that the painters of the École de Paris, whom he invited to his home, “preoccupied with finding a personal style suited to the medium, and driven by a spirit of teamwork, mixed oxides into the clay, shared their technical discoveries, and their trial-and-error processes, which had an impact on their canvases.”
Henri Plisson divorced Rosamonde on February 26, 1959, and married Régine Renoux on December 4, 1959. From this second marriage, two children were born: Danièle and Claude.
He became an art teacher at the École ABC de dessin in Paris. He was appointed Official Painter to the Navy in 1973(which led him to travel the Indian Ocean aboard the Champlain, to the North Cape on the Durance, the Mediterranean on the Triton, and the Comoros on the Orage) and vice president of the independent union of professional painters.