Antique Jehan Berjonneau “Toledo” Italian City View in Oil, Framed

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A lovely signed oil on board by the french painter Jehan Berjonneau depicting a view of Toledo in Italy. The … Read more A lovely signed oil on board by the french painter Jehan Berjonneau depicting a view of Toledo in Italy. The work is signed lower left on recto and titled en verso. A beautiful painting - the artist exhibited at the Paris Salons and elsewhere and is well-collected. In new custom wood frame with hand-painted linen liner.

Title: “Toledo”

Signature: Signed lower left and titled verso

Provenance: Private french collection

Medium: Oil on board

Size: c. 13 x 16 Inches unframed

Condition: Very good condition for age

Few French painters of the twentieth century arrived at their vocation by a more unlikely route than Jehan Berjonneau. He was born Jules Berjonneau in the small Poitou town of Montmorillon on 26 December 1890, into a family of modest farmers in the rural quarter of Les Mâts, and his childhood was spent herding goats and wandering the woods and fields of the Vienne. He never attended an art school. By trade he was a house-painter, and he earned his early living working for the SNCF as a painter on the railway tracks. Everything that followed he taught himself.

His vocation came in the strangest of places. Held prisoner of war in a German camp during the First World War, Berjonneau began drawing his fellow inmates and his guards, and resolved there and then to give his life to painting. He returned to France in 1919, exhibited that October with the Franco-Anglo-American "Rainbow Group," and the following year won the Prix de la Compagnie Transatlantique.

Between the wars he travelled widely — Europe, North Africa, the United States — and gained real recognition. He became a member of the Société Coloniale des Artistes Français, the Salon des Indépendants, the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Tuileries. In 1930 he was commissioned to paint a vast decorative frieze — 65 metres long — for the General Government of French Equatorial Africa at the Antwerp Colonial Exposition, and the following year contributed to the great Paris Colonial Exposition. In 1943 he won a prize from the Société des Artistes Français for his still lifes.

He worked principally in gouache on panel, with a sure post-Impressionist touch, and was also a fine wood-engraver. After 1946 he settled in the Ardèche, painting the woods and rivers he loved until his death in Paris on 23 December 1966.

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