DETROY Léon French School Fauve painting early 20th century Crozant School Oil on canvas signed View of France The valley of the Creuse

DETROY Léon (1857/1955)

The valley of La Creuse.

Oil on canvas signed lower right.

54x65 cm

Certificate of authenticity.

Museums: Châteauroux.

The same table is reproduced in the book of The School of Crozant by Christophe Ramex page 97.

After befriending Claude Monet in 1889, Detroy uses his technique, but quickly adds the wild discoveries, to eventually create his own technique.

Literature: Bénézit, Dictionary of the small masters of painting by Gérald Schurr and Pierre Cabanne, The Crozant school, the painters of La Creuse and Gargilesse by Christophe Ramex. Léon Detroy Major works, Gargilesse.

Léon Détroy (1857-1955)

Born in Chinon (Indre et Loire) in 1859, the son of a doctor father who did not interfere with his artistic vocation, Léon Detroy was a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the 80s in the studio of a famous master, the painter Jean-Paul Laurens. Very quickly influenced by the landscape painters of the XIXth century wishing to practice his art in Nature and not in the studio, he left for Gargilesse to follow in the footsteps of George Sand and his novel “Walks around a village”. Friend of the poet Maurice Rollinat, he met Claude Monet in Fresselines. Renting a house in Gargilesse which he bought in 1912 and lived in until his death, he nevertheless never stopped traveling in North Africa and Normandy. But Léon Detroy is essentially the painter of Creuse. Classified among the post-impressionist painters, he was always faithful to the Creuse valley with its changing landscapes with rich nuances. These enchanting places inspired his best paintings. His work of a very diverse style is recognized but undoubtedly deserves greater fame on a par with that of Armand Guillaumin.

He never dated his landscapes with raw tones, melancholy lights, strange framing. A taste of eternity in this bear with the long hermit's beard? Neither impressionist nor fauve, enemy of social events and artistic salons, Léon Detroy remains as little known as his work, all classic and modern. Born into a cultured bourgeois family, this "Ravel of painting" settled as soon as he left the Parisian Beaux-Arts in the Creuse valley, where landscape painters were already flourishing, including Monet, who became his friend. If he likes to travel, from the Côte d'Azur to North Africa, Detroy is haunted by the sad and serious horizons of Bas-Berry. Views of the Creuse always renewed, trees and fields, houses and villages: the artist settled in Gargilesse, where George Sand had his "house in the fields" Detroy died at 97, continuing to paint flowers and fruits when he was not could no longer work in the open air in this sorcerer's country which loved him so much. He died almost a hundred years old in 1955, he is buried in Gargilesse.