Guirand De Scevola (1871-1950), Landscape Of The Rhone Valley, Palais Des Papes, Avignon

Lucien Victor Guirand de Scévola (1871-1950)
Landscape of the Rhône Valley, Fort Saint-André and the Palace of the Popes, around 1925-1930
Oil on canvas mounted on panel
15.6 x 21.6 cm
Trace of signature top left "Guirand de Scévola" (difficult to photograph)

Very good condition
Framed with care, under glass
Dimensions with frame: 30 x 36 cm

From the viewpoint offered by the Château de Montsauve, in Sauveterre in the Gard, property of his wife, the actress Marie-Thérèse Piérat (1883 – 1934), Guirand de Scévola painted this charming landscape of the Rhône valley, showing in the distance the Fort Saint-André in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon as well as the Palais des Papes, once painted by Camille Corot and Prosper Marilhat as well. A small format painting, inspired by a precise and heartfelt modernity, which reveals a rather unknown aspect of Guirand's production.

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Lucien Victor Guirand de Scévola (1871-1950) was a painter, draftsman and illustrator from the city of Sète. Trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris at the end of the 1880s in the innovative studio of Fernand Cormon, he then evolved alongside artists such as Jean-Louis Forain, Charles Léandre and Bernard Boutet de Monvel. Inspired both by the fin-de-siècle spirit and by the classical masters, he also charms with the atmospheres he manages to create in most of his works. There is a powerful, murky atmosphere in his symbolist works, an elegant silence around each painted portrait, and a precise sense of nature in his landscapes.

A recent exchange with the artist's expert, Mr. Rik Wassenaar, allows us to confirm that the landscapes of Guirand de Scévola, as isolated compositions, are rare in his production. They sometimes appear in the background of a Symbolist composition, or through the open windows of scenes tinged with eroticism that the artist liked to paint during the first half of the 20th century. We also know representations of the gardens of Versailles and certain landscapes of the South of France, in particular Saint-Rémy-de-Provence and Sète.

This landscape irradiated with light is a small format with a modernity that is both sensitive and audacious, which makes it exceptional. The style, the purity and the overall harmony evoke a way that we can certainly date from the 1920s or the beginning of the 1930s. We feel that Guirand de Scévola saw and questioned modernity in painting, the wild landscapes and cubists, as well as the return to tradition carried by artists such as Albert Marquet, Jean Puy or even Charles Lacoste and Willem Van Hasselt. The landscapes of Van Hasselt, friend of Guirand, are composed in a similar style, with a large place given to the sky, architectures simplified as possible and flat areas of luminous colors to paint nature.

This elliptical way of evoking a landscape also echoes, in a certain way, the experience of Guirand de Scévola as a great craftsman of camouflage for military ships during the First World War (or "dazzle ships").

Along the artist's brush, the spectator travels through this lavender blue perspective, these dirt roads which certainly become cobbled streets. The colors are reduced to a very sensitive abstraction, as if their perception were modified by the undulations imposed on the gaze by the heat of the ground, in the heart of the brightest season.

This painting deserves to be seen. The harmony that emerges is a constantly renewed pleasure.