"View Villefranche sur Mer" 
Louis Gautier (French, 1855-1947) 
Oil on board
Provenance: Private Collection Marseille, France
This painting is soon to be published in a biography devoted to Louis Gautier
10 1/8 x 5 3/4 (16 5/8 x 12 3/8 frame) inches
 
Beautiful finely detailed work by the Aix-en-Provence painter, Louis Gautier who represents a view of Villefranche sur Mer in Summer.
 
Louis François Léon Napoléon Gautier, born in Aix-en-Provence, was not the heir to any family artistic tradition. He shows from childhood a very keen taste for drawing and, at the Lazarist college in Lyon where he studied, a desire to devote himself to the Arts against the advice of his family. In Ais, he frequents the workshop of the painter Joseph Villevielle and enters a the competition for a place in the National School of Fine Arts and in 1880 he earns a scholarship to continue his studies there. 
 
A a pupil of the revered and unrepentant classicist Alexandre Cabanel, Louis François Gautier exhibited at the Salon of French Artists in 1884 and participated in regional exhibitions in Aix, Avignon, Marseille and Montpellier. He obtains the order for the decorations of the town hall and the theater of Aix en Provence.
 
In 1894 with the painter Edouard Ducros, he founded the Society of Friends of the Arts of Aix, then in 1901, he opens an ethnographic museum. He also became known as one of the fiercest critics of painter Paul Cézanne. In 1895, the Friends of the Arts organized their first exhibition during which Louis Gautier and the other members mock Cézanne by hanging his canvas above the door. "I'm just an old beast who almost wants to cry!" complains the painter.
 
His works are preserved in particular at the Granet Museum in Aix en Provence.