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Printemps, Léon (1871-1945)
Léon Printemps sat in Gustave Moreau's atelier beside Matisse, Rouault and Marquet, the room from which modern French painting came, and he was the one who did not blow anything up. He went instead toward Symbolism, exhibited at the Salon every year for fifty-two years, and died in the studio that had once been Delacroix's.
| 1871 | 1892 | 1897 | 1900 | 1945 |
| Born in Paristaught to draw by his uncle | Moreau's atelierwith Matisse and Rouault | Salon de la Rose-Croixtwelve paintings, aged twenty-five | Gold medalExposition Universelle | Dies in Parisin Delacroix's studio |
Fifty-two consecutive Salons · second gold medal at Seattle in 1909 · Prix Frattesi in 1942
Compiègne / Versailles / Cholet / Riom
A listed artist
He enrolled in the evening classes at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1888 and entered the atelier of Gustave Moreau in 1892, where he stayed until Moreau's death in 1898. He first showed at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1893 and exhibited there every year until his own death, fifty-two consecutive years.
The medals followed. Silver at Amiens and Lille in 1896, a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1900, a second gold at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle in 1909, and the Prix Frattesi de la Ville de Paris in 1942.
The Room Where Modern Painting Began
He was born in Paris on 26 May 1871, into a family from Lille, solid northern bourgeoisie, not a background that usually produced painters. His uncle, the sculptor Jules Printemps, saw the talent early and drilled him in classical drawing, and by thirteen the boy was painting.
Moreau taught by refusing to impose a manner. I do not look at what you paint, I look at how you see. That is how one room produced Matisse's colour, Rouault's dark slabs, and Printemps's hushed interior Symbolism at the same time. His classmates were Rouault, Matisse, Albert Marquet and the Belgian Henri Evenepoel, dead at twenty-seven. Printemps took the lesson in the direction Moreau himself might have gone, toward vision rather than rupture. In March 1897 he showed twelve paintings at the sixth and last Salon de la Rose-Croix, Joséphin Péladan's Symbolist ceremony. He was twenty-five.
Portraits and the Northern Journey
Portraiture paid. He had travelled to Belgium and the Netherlands at the end of the 1890s to study Rubens, Van Dyck and Jordaens, and the trip shows, a warmth and a weight in the shadows that owes more to Antwerp than to Paris. Among his sitters was Sully Prudhomme, the first Nobel laureate in literature. But the pictures that stop people are the private ones, his wife Marie, and his daughter Lucile, painted again and again with her bouquet of roses. She died at six.
Delacroix's Studio
After the first war he turned to landscape. Brittany, and above all the islands off the Vendée coast, Noirmoutier and the Île d'Yeu, flat, windswept, fogbound, the sea merging into the sky. He returned through the 1920s and 1930s and the paintings loosened each time. Sunrise at Île d'Yeu of 1925 is barely figurative, just bands of colour, and Evening of Life of 1928 is the same thing in autumn. They are paintings about time, dressed as views of an island.
His studio, where he spent his last decades, was at 6 rue de Furstenberg in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the rooms where Eugène Delacroix had lived and worked until his death in 1863, and which are today the Musée National Eugène Delacroix. Moreau had revered Delacroix above all painters, and his pupil ended his life working within the same four walls. Printemps died there on 9 July 1945, two months after the war ended, aged seventy-four.
Recognising a Printemps
Three bodies of work, each recognisable. The Symbolist compositions and allegories of the 1890s, close to the Rose-Croix. The portraits, Northern in palette, darker and quieter than the Parisian society mode, with sitters who watch you a little too carefully. And the late landscapes of Brittany and the Vendée islands, where form dissolves into bands of light. Throughout, the drawing underneath is classical, the legacy of his uncle's training, however loose the surface becomes.
Printemps belongs to the generation of French painters who kept plein-air landscape alive between the wars. One of them is in our directory, Pierre Forest.
Where to See His Work
Printemps is held in French public collections at Châlons-en-Champagne, Châtenay-Malabry, Cholet, Compiègne, Noirmoutier, Paris, Riom and Versailles. For decades after 1945 he was a name known mainly to auction regulars and Symbolism specialists. That changed when his studio contents, more than a hundred and forty unseen works, came to sale at Vaux-le-Pénil, giving scholars and collectors a body of work to look at for the first time.
The arithmetic is unusual. A painter from the most famous teaching studio in French art, with two gold medals and a Nobel laureate among his sitters, whose canvases still trade for a fraction of what his classmates command.
Biographical information compiled from museum records and published artist reference sources. Photographs of the painting by GalerieClub Fine Art.
