Renault, Charles Edmond (1829-1905)

Discover the other painters of our collection. A painter of the Barbizon School.

Charles Edmond Renault studied under Camille Flers, Camille Corot and Théodore Rousseau, the three men who between them invented French plein-air landscape. He then painted quietly for half a century, leaving a substantial body of work and almost no biography. He is one of the few painters on the market with that pedigree still within reach of an ordinary collector.

Born Paris 1829 · Pupil of Flers, Corot and Rousseau · First Salon 1857 · Member of the Société des Artistes Français · Dated canvases from 1869 to 1892 · Died 1905

Three Masters

He was born in Paris on 23 October 1829, and the trade references agree on the essential fact of his training: he was a pupil of Camille Flers, of Corot, and of Théodore Rousseau.

That list is worth pausing over. Flers belonged to the generation before Barbizon, one of the first French painters to work seriously out of doors and to treat an ordinary field as a subject in itself. Corot is the silvery lyricist of the group, the master of light filtered through foliage. Rousseau is its opposite pole and its acknowledged leader, the builder of oaks, the painter for whom a tree is a structure before it is an effect. A young man who passed through all three studios received, in effect, the complete inheritance of the Barbizon school: the plein-air discipline, the atmospheric key, and the structural drawing underneath.

Fifty Years of Landscape

He made his first Salon appearance in 1857 and became a member of the Société des Artistes Français. Beyond that, the documentary record is close to silent. There is no published biography, and the standard art-market databases list his dates and stop.

What survives instead is the work, and it is consistent enough to reconstruct a working life from it. Canal banks and river landscapes in the Paris region, one of them signed and dated 1873. Oaks with horses grazing beneath them. A gathering storm, painted on panel in 1869. Lake landscapes, riverside figures, cattle in pasture. And in 1892, a flock at Honfleur. That canvas is signed, dated and located, painted in the Norman port where the Saint-Siméon circle around Adolphe Félix Cals had made plein-air painting its own. He was sixty-three, and still working from the motif.

The trade references describe him as a painter-engraver, though the prints are far less often seen than the canvases.

The Palms of Brazil

One canvas does not fit. His highest recorded auction result is not a Paris riverbank or a Norman flock but an Allée de palmiers au Brésil, an avenue of palms in Brazil, sold at Christie's in Paris.

Nothing in the record explains it. Whether Renault crossed the Atlantic, or worked from another painter's studies, or from photographs, is not documented. It is a single anomaly in an otherwise entirely French body of work, and the fact that the market rates it above everything else he painted says something about how rarely such a subject appears from a painter of his kind.

The Painting in Our Collection

Women by the River. Two women stand at the water's edge on the left, partly screened by the trunk of a tall tree that rises the full height of the canvas. The river opens out to the right toward a distant town, and the light is the diffused silvery grey of an overcast day.

Both masters are visible in it. The tree is Rousseau: drawn as a structure, given the weight of the composition, holding the left edge so that everything else can recede. The light is Corot: no shadow anywhere, the far bank dissolving into vapour, the whole picture built in silver-greys and muted greens. And the two figures do exactly what the tradition asks. They are small enough to be inside the space rather than in front of it, and they tell you how wide the river is.

View this painting → · Signed oil on canvas, in an ornate carved gilt frame. 9 × 14 inches.

This canvas is discussed in its category in our guide to Animated Landscapes: Figures in 19th-Century French Painting.

Recognising a Renault

The subjects to look for are the rivers and canals of the Paris region, wooded banks with figures, cattle and flocks in pasture, and lake and estuary views. The manner is late Barbizon: a diffused silvery light, few hard shadows, foliage handled in broad broken touches, and a strong vertical, usually a tree, anchoring one side of the composition. Works are signed "Edmond Renault" or "E. Renault" in a lower corner, frequently with the date, and occasionally with the place.

Two cautions. The surname is common, and auction listings sometimes shorten him to "Edmond Renault", which invites confusion with unrelated painters. And he should not be confused with René Charles Edmond His (1877-1960), a later landscape painter whose name overlaps in catalogue indexes. The dates 1829 to 1905 and the Barbizon manner settle it.

Renault belongs to the generation that carried Corot and Rousseau into the last decades of the century. Two of his exact contemporaries are in our directory: Paul Emmanuel Peraire, born six weeks before him in 1829, and Adolphe Félix Cals, whose Honfleur he was still painting in 1892.

Where to See and Acquire His Work

Renault is documented in the Bénézit Dictionary of Artists and recorded in the standard international auction registers, where his canvases appear regularly in France and Germany. Unlike the three masters who taught him, he is not held in the great public collections, and no compiled biography of him exists. The reference databases give his dates and little more.

That silence is exactly what makes him available. A signed canvas by a pupil of Corot and Rousseau, in the full Barbizon manner, remains obtainable at a level that the same training would not permit under a better-documented name.

Biographical information compiled from the Bénézit Dictionary of Artists and from published auction and trade records.
Photograph, timeline and description of the painting: GalerieClub Fine Art.