Michel, Émile (1828-1909)
Discover the other painters of our collection.
Émile Michel (1828-1909) was a French landscape painter and art critic from Metz, a pupil of Auguste Migette, who exhibited at the Paris Salon for fifty-five years and was elected to the Académie des beaux-arts in 1892.
Born at Metz in 1828 · First Salon in 1853 · Leaves Metz for Nancy in 1872, after the annexation · Elected to the Académie des beaux-arts in 1892 · Dies in Paris in 1909
The School of Metz
François Émile Michel was born at Metz on 19 July 1828, and he trained there under Auguste Migette, in the circle of painters known as the École de Metz. It was a provincial school in the best sense: a group of men who painted their own region, its light and its weather, at a time when Paris was the only place a reputation could be made.
He made his in the usual way. His first Salon was in 1853, and he went on exhibiting there until 1908, fifty-five years later, which is a career longer than most painters get to have.
1872, and the Road to Nancy
In 1871 the treaty that ended the Franco-Prussian war gave Metz to Germany. The inhabitants were offered a choice: keep their French nationality and leave, or stay and become German subjects. Tens of thousands left.
In 1872, Michel left. He was forty-four, he had been born in that city and trained in it, and he settled at Nancy, sixty kilometres away on the French side of the new border.
The painting we hold is dated that year, in his own hand, on the canvas.
The Scholar Who Kept Painting
What followed was a second career alongside the first. Michel became one of the most respected French writers on Dutch painting of his generation, and his work on Rembrandt was read across Europe. In 1892 he was elected to the Académie des beaux-arts, an honour that recognised the scholar as much as the painter.
He went on painting throughout, and his canvases entered public collections: the musée d'Orsay holds his Semailles d'automne of 1873, deposited at the musée des Beaux-Arts de Chartres, and the musée de Soissons holds another. He died in Paris on 23 May 1909.
The Painting in Our Collection
Woman with Her Turkeys, 1872. Signed and dated oil on canvas, carved gilt frame. 18 × 25 inches.
A woman stands alone in a mown field, in a teal-blue skirt, a dark bodice over white sleeves and a pale scarf at her shoulders, holding a handful of feed in both hands and looking down at the birds. Around her, fifteen or so turkeys are scattered across the stubble, white and mottled brown with red wattles, some upright and pressing forward, others settled in the grass. Behind them a belt of mature trees closes the picture, deep green on the left and already turning to rust and gold on the right, and above it a high blue sky with white cloud running across it. To the left the field opens out to a low horizon and a bank of grey weather coming in.
Two things are worth noticing. The trees are given as much attention as anything else in the picture, mass by mass, and they take up more than half the canvas: this is a landscape painter's field, not a genre painter's farmyard. And the light comes from the right, throwing the shadow of the wood forward across the grass, which is what gives the whole thing its depth. The stubble in the foreground is built up in short dashes of pale gold and green laid over one another, close enough to read as a mown field from across a room and as pure paint from a foot away.
He signed it lower left, E. Michel, with a long paraph beneath the name and the year abbreviated to 72 beside it.
The date is what makes this canvas worth pausing on. 1872 is the year Michel left Metz for good, and what he painted was a woman minding her birds at the edge of a wood: no ruins, no soldiers, no allegory of the lost province. He left no statement about it, and we will not supply one.
Recognising an Émile Michel
He signs E. Michel, lower left, with a long horizontal paraph under the name and often the year abbreviated to two figures beside it. His subjects are the landscape with figures and the rural working scene, in the naturalist manner that runs from Barbizon into the second half of the century, with the landscape usually given the larger share of the canvas. That manner has its origin in the generation before his: read our page on the Barbizon School.
Be careful with the name, because it is one of the most dangerous in nineteenth-century French painting. Georges Michel (1763-1843), the so-called Ruysdael of Montmartre and a precursor of Barbizon, is a different and far more expensive painter. There is also Ernest Michel (1833-1902), and the twentieth-century Michel Georges-Michel (1883-1985). A work by our Michel should always carry the forename and, ideally, the dates: Emile Michel (1828-1909).
Among the painters in our directory, his nearest neighbour is Paul Emmanuel Péraire (1829-1893), born a year after him and working the same French countryside in the same decades.
Where to See His Work
His paintings are in French public collections. The musée d'Orsay holds Semailles d'automne, dated 1873 and deposited at the musée des Beaux-Arts de Chartres. The musée de Soissons holds another. His writings on Rembrandt and on Dutch painting remain in libraries across Europe.
Biographical information compiled from published French reference sources. Timeline and photographs of the painting by GalerieClub Fine Art.
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