The Bread Merchant - Matteo Brondy 1866-1944

Dimensions: 34 x 44 with frame Dimensions: 28 x 38 without frame

Sent to Black Africa where he carried out several missions, he was then assigned to Meknes around 1915. With the columns of General Poeymirau, he surveyed the Middle Atlas. From 1918, he managed the Meknes tourist office for which he painted posters or exhibition panels. He continues to survey the Middle Atlas and brings back paintings and watercolors of different Berber ethnic groups. It reveals a still unknown Morocco, land of powerful and mysterious seduction.
His paintings were immediately a great success. "His life in the village allowed him to know the thoughts of the beings he painted, relates Georges Louis, in La Vigie Marocaine, men and beasts, he had finely observed them, with amused sympathy and it is above all their expression," their Moroccan thought that he was trying to reproduce.

The bread merchant If the Berbers of the Atlas fascinated and inspired Matteo Brondy, the lively scenes of the streets of Meknes also provided him with numerous subjects for paintings. Here, it's a bread merchant, this small round and soft pancake that is baked and eaten, dipped in tagine sauce. He never moved without a notebook in which he sketches street scenes, fleeting expressions, attaching himself to the picturesque of what he saw with an insightful and never jaded eye.