Raphaël Ponson (1835–1904) - The Bird Mirror

Raphaël Ponson: Official Painter of a Changing Provence

It was undoubtedly family tradition that first led the young man to pursue painting. His father, and his grandfather before him, had made it their profession. Originally from the Var region, the Ponson family settled in Marseille in the 1840s, and a few years later, the young Raphaël Ponson enrolled at the city’s École des Beaux-Arts. Emile Loubon had been its highly regarded director since 1845. He introduced a less rigid approach to teaching than had previously existed, focusing on nature and recognizing each student’s unique sensibility, thereby encouraging their individuality. He inspired a new generation of young painters eager to learn from life, in direct contact with nature—a move that constituted a small regional revolution at the time.

Raphaël Ponson was among them, further benefiting from exposure to masters from diverse backgrounds, particularly the Barbizon painters, who, through the Salon of the Society of Friends of the Arts, came to present their work in Marseille. At the end of this apprenticeship, Raphaël Ponson decided to move to Paris. At the Louvre, he immersed himself in the art of his predecessors, particularly the landscape masters Poussin and Le Lorrain. While working in a fan-painting studio, he refined his style and mastered the meticulous technique that would later influence his works on paper. He also discovered Normandy, under a sky so different from the ones he had been accustomed to painting until then.

Before returning permanently to settle in Marseille, he undertook the traditional artistic pilgrimage to Italy: Rome, Venice, and especially Naples, where he rediscovered his beloved Mediterranean stretching out at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. Upon his return to Marseille in 1859, Raphael Ponson settled into his family and professional life. He married Marie Lefèvre in 1862, and the couple had three children. He began submitting works to the Parisian salons in 1861, where they met with great success. Prestigious public commissions were not long in coming, and as early as 1865, Charles Émile de Maupas, prefect of the Bouches-du-Rhône, commissioned the artist to create the décor for the gallery in the private apartments of the new Marseille prefecture, which would be inaugurated in 1867. That same year, he presented a large-scale composition at the World’s Fair.

The painter, whose reputation was growing, was soon entrusted with the decoration of three rooms at the Natural History Museum housed in the Palais Longchamp—an iconic building of the second half of the 19th century erected to commemorate the arrival of the waters of the Durance River in Marseille. Around 1878, he set up his studio in a townhouse on Rue Sénac and continued to make a comfortable living from his painting, gaining the support of many art lovers and taking on various decorative commissions, both private and public. At the dawn of the new century, however, the explosion of innovative artistic movements caused him to lose some of the interest of critics and the public.

After his death, the artist’s studio remained closed for nearly thirty years. It was not until 1932 that his daughter, yielding to numerous requests, agreed to a retrospective exhibition at the Caors-Cottier Gallery in Marseille. Alexis Pentcheff is the recognized expert on the painter Raphaël Ponson. In 2008, he published a monograph on him and has been cataloging the artist’s body of work for several years with a view to producing a catalog raisonné of his work. From March 30 to August 28, 2016, the Musée Regards de Provence paid tribute to this artist through the exhibition: Light and Gentleness by Raphael Ponson.

Discover more works by this artist on the gallery’s website: https://www.galeriepentcheff.fr/fr/peintre-raphael-ponson#Bio