Style Other / Ref.12749

Jean-Pierre HÉRON (1861-1909), Pair of paintings « Sous un soleil chaud d’été » and « Sous-Bois »

Jean-Pierre Héron signed these two paintings that he exhibited two years apart in two different Salons.
Painter native from Bordeaux, France, he was the student of the landscape painter Hippolyte Pradelles, also coming from Bordeaux. The lattest was part of the ephemeral Port-Berteau group (1862-1863) next to Camille Corot or Gustave Courbet. This group reunited painters sharing a taste for landscapes and open air painting.
This love for nature, combined to his pictural experimentations always more innovative, were transmitted from Pradelles to his student. Héron went further in the plastic and aesthetical researches, and got closer to the impressionist stroke in order to catch nature’s movement and capture the ambient light. Starting 1889, our painter displayed his works to the Salon de la Société des artistes français bucolic landscapes where he develops an impasted stroke, making almost tactile and tangible the atmospheric evolutions on the greenery.

« Sous un soleil chaud d’été »

This oil on canvas, due to the landscape painter Hééron, is signed as well as dated in the bottom right. It was exhibited for the first time during the 1890 Salon de la Société des artistes français (catalogue number 1203), next to another painting called A thicket in autumn. Both works granted him this year an honorable mention. Encouraged by this success, Under a hot summer sun is presented a second time to the Salon in Toulouse in 1892. The corresponding catalogue number, 251, remains.

This oil on canvas, as indicated by its title, appeals to the spectator’s sensations, thus sensitive to the stifling heat gilding the field in the background. Shadow and light are here stepped : conveniently placed in the shadow, the spectator’s look have then to face a sea of sun before hoping to find again the smoothness of a vegetal canopy.
Taking the shape of a window on the world, Under a hot summer sun is an opening on a sweet nature yet harbouring a certain violence, which can be seen in the oppositions between the gnarled trunks and the invading foliages, between the darkness of the shadows and the blinding sun. This summer landscape radiates, by its dimensions first, but also by the right balance of its composition.

« Sous-bois »

This oil on canvas is due to the landscape painter Héron, as indicated by the signature in the bottom right. The exhibit label bearing the number 868 refers to the catalogue of the Salon in Toulouse of 1892, where the painting was presented to the public.

This painting leads us on a forest path, among the oaks and birches, in the peacefulness of an undergrowth. The greenery in the foreground is the starting point of a perspective around which the vegetation is organised. If the shadow rules the main part of the painting, the golden horizon which can be sensed at the end of the lane gives to the undergrowth a reassuring and optimistic aspect, evoking the spring and a certain rebirth of nature.
The warm tones, the visible and sometimes impasted stroke, take part of a tradition born with the Barbizon school of painters and which started, in the last quarter of the 19th century, to impose landscape as a major genre in the eyes of the Salon’s visitors but of the members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts as well.
The painter is here playing with the codes of classical painting by introducing a quite traditional point of view, in the sens that he arranges a perspective focused around a main vanishing point. Yet, the framing is not without evoking the look already photographical that the painters fix upon their environment. This landscape, by its dimensions but also by its general aspect, produces on the spectator the effect of a window on the world.