Emmanuel Lansyer
Île de Bouin 1835 – Paris 1893
Sailing boats in a cove, a harbor town on the left
Oil on paper.
191 x 268 mm – 7 1/2 x 10 9/16 in.
Initially trained to architecture, Emmanuel Lansyer also took drawings lessons at the Imperial School and finally decided to commit to painting. After a few months in Courbet’s atelier, he worked with Harpignies but also experienced painting in plein air, directly from nature, with the Barbizon school painters. Lansyer very early on enjoyed going to Brittany where he regularly traveled during fourteen years and painted numerous views, thus anticipating on the attraction this part of France was to exert on painters at the end of the 19th century.
Emmanuel Lansyer is particularly good at enhancing contrasts between the agitated and rough rock’s texture and the smooth and shiny surface of the sea at low tide. The intense and clever plays of light and resulting color combination reveal the painter’s acute sense of observation.
Condition report – Laid down on cardboard. One small tear lower right. The four edges yellowed because of former framing.
