Octave Boissin (1839-1891) - Allegory of Geography

Marc Joseph Octave Théodule BOISSIN
(Bénévent-l’Abbaye, 1839 - Paris, 1891)

Allegory of Geography

Oil on canvas
Signed lower right
75 x 125 cm without frame
100 x 150 cm with frame

Son of the municipal schoolteacher of Bénévent-l’Abbaye in the Creuse, Octave Boissin was born on April 25, 1839 in this same village, twenty kilometers southwest of Guéret.
His artistic career clearly began with satirical illustration work in newspapers such as L’Image and Le Journal Amusant among others.
Probably during the Second Empire, Boissin moved to Brussels where we find him as a caricaturist in the anti-Bonapartist Brussels magazines of the 1860s La Cigale and L’Espiègle.
On October 4, 1865, he married Henriette Anne Trippelvitz of Dutch origin in Paris. The couple had three children.
It is worth mentioning a single exhibition of his paintings at the Paris Salon of 1876 with a landscape entitled A Mill, in the Surroundings of Brussels. At that date, he was still living in Brussels according to the mention indicated in the Salon booklet and was a student of Léon Bonnat (1833-1922).
Octave Boissin died on February 7, 1891 in Paris at the age of 51.

In this allegorical still life, Octave Boissin celebrates geography as the science of understanding the world. A globe sits at the center of the composition, surrounded by ancient books, maps, and manuscripts, evoking exploration, cartography, and the transmission of knowledge. The realistic treatment of the materials, the dramatic lighting, and the dark palette give the whole a solemnity characteristic of 19th-century academic representations. This work is part of the tradition of scholarly allegories, blending erudition and symbolism.