Léon Printemps
Léon Printemps (26 May 1871 – 9 July 1945) was a French artist known best for his work as a portrait and landscape painter. Biography. Léon Printemps was born in Paris to a family which originally hailed from Lille. From an early age he was attracted to painting. His uncle, the sculptor Jules Printemps, a student of François Jouffroy at the École nationale des Beaux-Arts, supported his vocation and prepared him for the entrance examination to this school. He was admitted in 1892, joined the workshop of Gustave Moreau and regularly visited it until Moreau’s death in  1898. He also associated with such artists as Rouault, Matisse, Evenepoel, Albert Marquet, Edgar Maxence and Charles Milcendeau. Around this period his work was largely part of the Symbolist movement and he experimented with a poetic or mythological vision and with the sensuality of the female nude. Work. Portrait painter. He soon established his reputation as a portrait artist receiving commissions from such eminent personalities as Sully Prudhomme, the first recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Prince and Princess of Waldeck, Mr and Mrs Commettant, and Prince Yusupov, the assassin of Rasputin. Léon Printemps married in 1903 and  frequently painted his family in an intimate tone, particularly his daughter Lucile whose death at the age of 6 touched him profoundly, as well as his son René. Landscape painter. Léon Printemps was a landscape painter his entire life. His desire to meet Flemish masters prompted him to travel to Belgium and the Netherlands at the end of the nineteenth century, returning home with various studies. Later in life his attraction to the beaches of Normandy, which were quite fashionable at the time, became more marked. After the First World War he started painting landscapes in Brittany and particularly the  islands of the Vendée coast, the island of Noirmoutier, the island of Yeu, where he painted seascapes and portraits of fishermen and old farmers’ wives. Flemish and Dutch influence. The appeal of the work of Flemish and Dutch masters during Printemps’ visits to the Louvre Museum inspired him to travel to Belgium and the Netherlands on several occasions with a desire to better understand the art of these great Flemish and Dutch masters. Several paintings, which were the outcome of his first visits to Belgium, were presented at the Salon des artistes français (1898 and 1905), the Salon artistique des  PTT (1905) and in regional exhibitions, in Lille (1898) and in Nantes (1906). In 1894 Printemps travelled to Belgium for the first time, presumably in the company of other students of Gustave Moreau, visiting Bruges, Ghent, Mechelen and Antwerp. Two years later he travelled to the Meuse Valley where he painted the Bayard Rock, a remarkable sight in Dinant. In 1897, he spent some time in the Netherlands visiting the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. In 1898, he returned to Bruges and Mechelen. In 1929 and 1933 he also took his son René, who was also studying to become a painter at  the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, on a trip to explore these two cities. Léon Printemps died on 9 July 1945, in his studio at 6 rue Furstenberg, where the Musée National Eugène Delacroix is currently located.