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Eugène Modeste Le Poittevin
(Paris, 1806 – Paris, 1870)
Sunset by the Sea
Oil on panel
H. 15 cm; W. 19 cm
Signed and monogrammed lower left
Probably circa 1845
Le Poittevin — whose real name was Poidevin — spent his childhood in Versailles, where his father held the position of “Assistant Curator of Crown Furniture.” His artistic talent enabled him to enter the studio of Louis Hersent around 1823, then that of Xavier Leprince. After Leprince’s death at the end of 1826, Le Poittevin settled in his studio and even completed the last unfinished works of his master. He was then notably supported by Alexandre du Sommerard, the great collector and future founder of the Musée de Cluny, who purchased several paintings from him.
Le Poittevin narrowly failed to win the Prix de Rome for historical landscape in 1829, but this did not prevent him from exhibiting at the Salon from 1831 onward, without interruption until his death.
His style, Romantic in the 1820s and 1830s — with works close to those of Eugène Isabey or Auguste Biard, with whom he was friends and sometimes collaborated — gradually became more realistic thereafter.
Although he was also active as an illustrator and caricaturist, notably through his lithographic series Diableries and his erotic, even pornographic drawings, the main part of his work depicts scenes of fishermen returning from the sea and marine views along the Normandy coast, particularly the Pays de Caux.
Here, the golden and softened light, as well as the balustrade bordering a park with tall trees, give this seemingly imaginary landscape an Italian, even Orientalist character, although chalk cliffs can perhaps be discerned in the background.
The form of the signature allows the work to be dated to the 1840s.
