Georges Cyr - Sailboats In Honfleur

Watercolor charcoal drawing by Georges Cyr (1880–1964) depicting sailboats in Honfleur, circa 1920. Framed.

Dimensions: artwork: 26.5 x 38 cm; with frame: 41 x 52 cm

Provenance: Galerie Bertran, Rouen; from the current owner. Certificate of authenticity.

This lively work is characteristic of the artist’s watercolors. The artist, in fact, produced a variety of works. First, there were his schematic, almost expressionist oil paintings, notably of Normandy landscapes, particularly in the 1920s. Cyr began painting in Paris, under the guidance of Juan Gris.

Around 1910, he settled in Rouen. As a friend of Othon Friesz, he visited Le Havre, Fécamp, and Honfleur. He depicted these ports using a very understated palette, reducing forms to their essentials. Cyr also painted watercolors such as these in Normandy, and later more systematically in Lebanon, where he settled in 1934. For him, these watercolors were not studies but works of art in their own right.

In Beirut, he became one of the pioneers of the country’s avant-garde art movement. There, he produced post-Cubist oil paintings—sometimes on a large scale—that recall the compositions created in Montparnasse at the turn of the century.