Hôtel Baudy Giverny
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Portrait of Léon Germain Pelouse
Portrait of Léon Germain Pelouse by Fernand Cormon, oil on canvas.

Landscape painter · French

Around Giverny

Léon Germain Pelouse

Leader of the Cernay school, a plein-air landscape painter in the line of Corot and Daubigny.

  • Dates1838 — 1891
  • NationalityFrench
  • DisciplineLandscape painter
  • Place of birthPierrelaye, France

Biography

Largely self-taught, he came late to painting: first an amateur attending evening classes, he took it up as a career only in 1865, the year of his Salon debut. His work descends from Corot and Daubigny without copying them — an austere, minutely observed nature, almost empty of figures, painted out of doors. He led the group of landscape painters known as the Cernay school.

Around Giverny

His territory was Cernay-la-Ville and the Vaux de Cernay, then Brittany, the Loue valley and coastal Normandy. He appears here for a family tie: after Ernest Raingo’s death he married his widow — Ernest Raingo being the elder brother of Alice, who married Claude Monet. This marriage rests on a single encyclopaedic source, contradicted by another that gives him a different wife.

Relation with the Hôtel Baudy

He died in 1891, just as the house was becoming an artists’ boarding house.

Principal works

Un coin de Cernay en janvier oil on canvas, c. 1879, 128 × 169 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, inv. RF 250, acquired at the 1879 Salon.
Souvenir de Cernay oil on canvas, 1872, 81 × 128 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, inv. INV 20112, bought from the artist by the State in 1872.

Key points

  • 1838Born — Pierrelaye, France
  • 1891Died

Sources

Around them

Related artists

Portrait of Claude Monet Discover Claude Monet 1840 — 1926 French · Painter His arrival in Giverny is the most frequently cited starting point of the village’s reputation. Son seul ami, a work by Germain Raingo-Pelouse Discover Germain Raingo-Pelouse 1893 — 1963 French · Painter A landscape painter of the Seine at Vernonnet, a few kilometres from Giverny, and a relative of Claude Monet by marriage.

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