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.

Giverny

His territory was Cernay-la-Ville and the Vaux de Cernay, then Brittany, the Loue valley and coastal Normandy. No source connects him to Giverny. 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

No source connects him to the Hôtel Baudy. He died in 1891, just as the house was becoming an artists’ boarding house.

Principal works