Emile Charles Lambinet
(Versailles 1815-1877 Bougival)
"Les Lavandières"
on panel: 22 x 40 cm;
signed and dated 1863 (l.l)
Provenance
Rob Noortman, Hulsberg, 1975 (stock no S-726); from a private collection, Belgium; from a Dutch private collection.
NotesCharles Emile Lambinet was a successful painter in the nineteenth century. Art critics and collectors held his work in high regard. It is said that what made his work special was his light and airy brushstrokes which suggest a natural setting as well as his talent for depicting atmospheric conditions such as the wind. He exhibited in the Salon regularly between 1833, and 1878. He won a number of medals in 1843. In 1867, he was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour.
Lambinet studied at first under the history painters Michael Martin Drolling and Emile Jean Horace Vernet. Vernet was well known for his paintings celebrating French military prowess, including large battle scenes for Versailles. He also studied under Charles Daubigny and Jean Baptist Camille Corot, the best known painters of the Barbizon school.
Lambinet is often referred to as one of the members of the Barbizon school. In fact he never actually painted in the area surrounding the village of Barbizon and Fontainebleau. The manner in which he approached rural subjects and landscapes though, was much in the same style as the successful Barbizon artists of that day. His style of painting appealed very much to the same critics and collectors who supported the art of the Barbizon school.
He lived most of his life in the area west of Paris near to Versailles and made regular painting trips to Ecouen, a town north of Paris. He was not the only artist to be enticed by this area. Ecouen was to become an important artist's colony that would come to include a number of American painters such as Mary Cassatt and Henry Bacon. Mary Cassatt visited Ecouen to study with the artist Paul Soyer.
In the 1850s, and 1860s, collectors in Boston were particularly interested in his work and in the Barbizon School in general. The relationship that Charles Emile Lambinet had with his American student Joseph Foxcroft Cole was certainly an important one in his artistic career. Cole promoted the work of Lambinet to a number of prominent art collectors of the time, such as Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow. It is partly thanks to Cole that Lambinet found a good market for his work in America and particularly Boston.
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Category
French 19th - 20th century
landscape