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Desvarreux-Larpenteur, James (1847–1937)
James Desvarreux-Larpenteur was a Franco-American painter of the late Barbizon school, trained in Paris in the studio of Émile van Marcke, who spent sixty years painting one country. The heather moor in flower, its flocks, its oxen and its long pale distances.
Born in Baltimore and formed in Paris, he lived five years in California at the height of his career, then came back to France and never left the moor again.
| 1847 | 1877 | 1885 | 1909 | 1937 |
| Born in Baltimoreinto a Franco-American family | First Paris Salonhe would show until 1914 | San Franciscofive years in California | Gold medalSeattle exposition | Dies at Sceauxaged eighty-nine |
Studio of Émile van Marcke, Paris · Société des Artistes Français · Salon from 1877 to 1914
Minnesota Historical Society / University of Kentucky Art Museum
A listed artist
He passed through the École des Beaux-Arts and the studios of Adolphe Yvon, Isidore Pils and Felix de Vuillefroy. But the decisive encounter was Émile van Marcke de Lummen (1827-1890), the pre-eminent cattle painter of the Barbizon circle and himself a pupil of Constant Troyon. From him Desvarreux took the lessons of a lifetime. Look at livestock as animals, not as symbols. Prefer soft, overcast light. Give the herd and the land equal weight.
He exhibited at the Paris Salon from 1877 to 1914, a run of nearly forty years, and took a gold medal at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle in 1909.
Born Between Two Countries
He was born in Baltimore on 20 October 1847, into a family of French descent. The Larpenteurs were a prominent Franco-American line, and one branch settled in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where the surname is still attached to one of the city's main thoroughfares. By birth and by name he was an American, but he was sent to France for his training, and France kept him.
At thirty-eight he left it all the same. He crossed the Atlantic and lived five years in San Francisco, showing at the California State Fair in 1888 and 1889, and the canvases of those years carry a brighter, more sun-bleached palette than anything he painted in France. Then he came back, and from the early 1890s until his death at Sceaux in 1937 he worked the same ground.
What to Look For
His mature compositions repeat with small variations, and once you know them they are hard to mistake. A shepherdess, often in a white blouse and straw hat, stands with her dog near the centre. The flock spreads loosely beneath ancient oaks. A strip of water catches the foliage, and a farm building or a country road recedes into haze.
There is rarely a cast shadow anywhere in the picture. That is the whole lesson of Van Marcke. The flat, diffuse light of an overcast afternoon, in which colour has to do the work that contrast usually does. The animals are drawn with care, the trees handled in broad, broken touches.
Canvases are signed most often simply Desvarreux in a lower corner, sometimes J. Desvarreux in small capitals, occasionally with the fuller Desvarreux-Larpenteur. Auction records show the signature at lower left as well as lower right. Works are sometimes confused with those of his son Raymond Desvarreux-Larpenteur (1876-1961), but the subjects part company. James painted the moors and their flocks, Raymond painted cavalry and battle.
Biographical information compiled from published artist reference sources, including Edan Hughes, Artists in California 1786-1940, Who's Who in American Art (1933), and Lois Marie Fink, American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons. Photographs of the paintings by GalerieClub Fine Art, from the works in hand.
