André-Léon Vivrel (1886-1976) - Marine en bretagne

André-Léon VIVREL (1886-1976)
Marine in Brittany
Watercolor on paper
Dimensions of the painting: 26 x 33 cm
Signed bottom left.
Provenance: Private collection, Paris

Watercolor in very good condition.
Paper mounted on a thick paper.
As framing is included, it cannot be covered by insurance during transport.
Dimensions with frame: 54 x 64 cm

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André-Léon Vivrel was born in 1886 in Paris. At only 15 years old, he decided to become a painter. He was supported in this path by his mother, whom he describes as his first teacher, and his father, a wine merchant and First Prize in Drawing in 1870. A student at Lycée Louis-le-Grand, André-Léon Vivrel entered the Julian Academy in 1910. There he studied under Paul Albert Laurens and then frequented the studio of Marcel Baschet and Henri Royer at the École des Beaux-Arts. He rented a studio in Montmartre, at 65 Rue Caulaincourt, only eight numbers away from Auguste Renoir’s. His first participation in the Salon des artistes français dates from 1913. Mobilized in 1914, he received the Croix de guerre for heroic conduct in 1917. After the war, he returned to his Montmartre workshop. He was awarded an honorable mention at the 1920 Salon and the State purchased the two still lifes he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants. He also presented two portraits of Breton women painted after returning from a stay in Ploumanac’h (Côtes d’Armor). In 1922, Vivrel appeared for the first time at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. After receiving the Deldebat prize from Gonzalva in 1932, he obtained, the following year, a silver medal at the Salon des artistes français with “The Time of the Cherries.” In 1934, Vivrel presented bathers, the first painting in a series of large nudes sent to the Salon until 1943. The culmination of his study of the female nude, his “Bathers” of 1939 were awarded a gold medal at the Salon des artistes français. This ultimate prize crowned a silver medal Vivrel earned in 1937, at the International Exposition of Arts and Techniques in Paris. Critics unanimously praised his talent and, in 1940, Louis Paillard did not hesitate to write on the front page of the “Petit Journal” of May 6, 1940: “André Vivrel, I declare, is one of the best at this Salon [of French artists].” The exhibition “Vivrel — Recent Paintings,” organized by Galerie de Berri in May 1942, illustrated, in 31 paintings, the range of genres Vivrel tackled, but it is landscape painting in which he explored with the greatest passion. His homeland is the Loiret, where his elder brother Marcel owns a second home in Châtillon-sur-Loire, not far from Champtoceaux. In the aftermath of the Great War, moneyless, he refuges there to paint plein air at low cost. In spring 1926, Vivrel was again in Brittany, from which he brought back the “Port of Camaret” exhibited at the Tuileries Salon of 1926. A few years later, in 1934, he returned to the Côtes d’Armor, where he composed marine scenes that are as many studies of the sky. Vivrel spent the summer of 1926 in Corsica. There he produced watercolors that were shown, as early as autumn, at Galerie Georges Petit and then in New York. Each time, critics unanimously praised their qualities: “The exhibition of André Vivrel is of a sensitive, refined artist, while remaining broad in his concepts. His views of Corsica, Brittany, and Paris are like his flowers, delicately harmonious” (“La Semaine à Paris,” November 12, 1926, p. 63). In 1928, he again went to the Midi. Rendering Provence’s warm and vibrant light, he painted “The Port of Saint-Tropez” shown the same year at the Salon des Indépendants. The Mediterranean theme also appears at the Salon des Tuileries, where Vivrel presents harbor views and ocean liners, witnesses to a thriving tourist industry. When Vivrel is not on the roads of France, he takes Paris as his model. He painted the alleys of Montmartre and the capital’s monuments, such as Notre-Dame Cathedral, which he repeated in a series like Monet. He liked to linger on the banks of the Seine, which offered him many unusual viewpoints on the city and inspired paintings not unlike Albert Lebourg’s Parisian landscapes. Painting until his last breath, André-Léon Vivrel died in Bonneville-sur-Touques on June 7, 1976.

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