This lithograph is signed by Yves Brayer and is numbered 251/300. The landscape shows olive trees in the foreground and the Alpilles hills in the background. The lithograph is framed behind glass. There are some minor water marks on the mat board, refer to photos.
Extract from Wikipedia (translated from French):
Most of Yves Brayer's childhood took place in Bourges where his father, a polytechnic officer and rider, passed on his passion for horses. A stay in Provence with his mother made him discover landscapes which dazzled him and found themselves in his sketches. Impressed, his mother enrolled him at the National School of Art in Bourges.
While he is destined for a military career, a kick on horseback fractures his kneecap. It was then that he turned definitively to painting. On his arrival in Paris in 1924, where his father, who had become a general, was assigned to the Ministry of War, he attended the academies of Montparnasse and the Grande Chaumière, then the École des beaux-arts de Paris where he was appointed professor in 1926 He asserts his personality from his youth. Elders, such as Jean-Louis Forain, encouraged him, and the sculptor Robert Wlérick introduced him to modelling.
Still a student, he exhibited at the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Indépendants. In 1927 a travel grant from the State enabled him to do his " Grand Tour " and go to Spain where he met the masters of Prado Museum in Madrid will have a decisive influence on his future work. After a stay in Morocco thanks to a prize created by Marshal Lyautey, he was awarded the Grand Prix de Rome in painting in 1930. First of all he regretted Spain, and then he let himself be carried away by the richness of Italian life. of the 1930s and the pleasures of life at the Villa Medici, then directed by the sculptor Paul Landowski .
On his return to Paris in 1934, he brought together his harvest in a major exhibition at the Galerie Charpentier, Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where the public discovered the authenticity of this twenty-seven-year-old painter with a powerful and original temperament. After having lived in the Panthéon district, he moved, in 1935, to rue Monsieur-le-Prince, in the sixth arrondissement. Then from 1936 to 1938, he bears witness to the work preceding the International Exhibition in Paris, the parties and receptions he was given to attend. Demobilized in Montauban in 1940, he stayed during the war in Cordes-sur-Ciel, in the Tarn, where the Albigensian architecture reminded him of the colors of Rome. In 1942 he returned to the capital where Jacques Rouché commissioned him to imagine his first models of sets and costumes for a ballet at the Paris Opera.
One of his dance paintings is in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. He stayed there during the occupation and painted the snowy town, then the liberated town. The year 1945 marked a new stage in his work. He marries Hermione Falex (1921-2019) who becomes his model and support. In Provence, he realizes that there are other harmonies than those of architectures created by Man, those of pure and wild nature, and he is soon fascinated by the diversity of the Alpilles and their limestone folds then by the expanses of the Camargue populated by white horses and black bulls. He soon settled in Provence for several months each year.
At the beginning his works disconcerted the public who kept the memory of Italian architecture, then the amateurs will get used to his landscapes of Provence and Camargue which will finally make their fame. When he returned to Italy and Spain in 1948 and 1949, his vision and style would then be more stripped down.
Condition and wear consistent with age and use.
Approx. overall 34¾" high x 47¼" x 1¼" deep.
Approx. overall 88cm high x 120cm x 3cm deep.
