Léon Printemps
| Léon Printemps | |
|---|---|
Portrait of Léon Printemps in 1924
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| Born |
Léon Printemps 26 May 1871 Paris, France |
| Died | 9 July 1945 (aged 74) Paris, France |
| Nationality |
 French
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| Education | École des Beaux-Arts de Paris |
| Known for | Portrait painter, Landscape painter |
Léon Printemps (26 May 1871 – 9 July 1945) was a French artist known best for his work as a portrait and landscape painter.
Léon Printemps was born in Paris to a family which originally hailed from Lille. From an early age he was attracted to painting.
His uncle, the sculptor Jules Printemps, a student of François Jouffroy at the École nationale des Beaux-Arts, supported his vocation and prepared him for the entrance examination to this school. He was admitted in 1892, joined the workshop of Gustave Moreau and regularly visited it until Moreau’s death in 1898. He also associated with such artists as Rouault, Matisse, Evenepoel, Albert Marquet, Edgar Maxence and .
Around this period his work was largely part of the Symbolist movement and he experimented with a poetic or mythological vision and with the sensuality of the female nude.
He soon established his reputation as a portrait artist receiving commissions from such eminent personalities as Sully Prudhomme, the first recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Prince and Princess of Waldeck, Mr and Mrs Commettant, and Prince Yusupov, the assassin of Rasputin.
Léon Printemps married in 1903 and frequently painted his family in an intimate tone, particularly his daughter Lucile whose death at the age of 6 touched him profoundly, as well as his son René.
Léon Printemps was a landscape painter his entire life. His desire to meet Flemish masters prompted him to travel to Belgium and the Netherlands at the end of the nineteenth century, returning home with various studies. Later in life his attraction to the beaches of Normandy, which were quite fashionable at the time, became more marked. After the First World War he started painting landscapes in Brittany and particularly the islands of the Vendée coast, the island of Noirmoutier, the , where he painted seascapes and portraits of fishermen and old farmers’ wives.
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