Lot 50 Dα

From around 1885, the painter Albert Dubois-Pillet from Paris created numerous landscapes, cityscapes and seascapes in a pointillist technique. Inspired by Georges Seurat, the founder of pointillism, he developed a divisionist style of brushwork during his transition from impressionism, and he was also the first to apply this technique to portraits.
Dubois – he began using the maiden name of his mother, Pillet, in 1884 – was a trained French officer, who served in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 and was even briefly a prisoner of war. He became interested in art early on, and he trained from the mid 1870s as an autodidact and under the direction of the artists Seurat and Signac, with whom he was friends. In 1884, after being denied permission to participate in the Salon, Dubois-Pillet founded the artists association “Société des Artistes Indépendants”, writing its statues and serving as its organiser.
The landscape “Champs en Ile-de-France”, which is on auction here, is from Corboud’s excellent collection of impressionists. For the field lying in the foreground, Dubois-Pillet has selected little dabs of green, red and yellow paint. The forest that closes the scene off at the back has been painted with a bold mix of violet and dark green tones. The sky behind it appears in light yellow, becoming darker towards the upper edge of the picture. Three trees with red and brown leaves rise up to link all the picture’s planes together. While Dubois-Pillet has still used the dots in the lower half of the picture to describe individual flowers, stalks and leaves, the paint increasingly gathers into coloured shapes towards the horizon. On the whole he has created a vibrant landscape painting full of blooming cornflowers. Its dating to 1889/1890 makes it one of his final pictures.