A colourful oil on board of beautiful Anemones flowers by French painter Louis Pastour.
Louis Pastour was born in 1876 in Cannes, Alpes-Maritimes, in the South of France.
From a very young age, he was drawn to the arts, especially painting.
The times being particularly difficult, he was forced to work to help his family.
Thus, at the age of 13, young Pastour was hired as a house painter.
However, our artist did not give up on his dreams and enrolled in drawing classes at the Cannes Polytechnic Association, where he was awarded a medal for the quality of his work.
At 18, he decided to go to Paris. Working by day, he studied in the evenings at the School of Decorative Arts, where he progressed rapidly.
To save on his expensive brushes, he began painting with a palette knife.
This new technique allowed him to explore previously unknown avenues.
Back in Cannes, he married and resumed his daily life without ever abandoning his passion, thus, in 1902, he founded the Cannes Fine Arts Association with a few passionate friends.
In 1903, he opened a shop selling paints and art supplies.
He painted every day, starting at dawn to capture the first light over the Bay of Cannes.
His favorite subjects were seascapes, landscapes, and flowers, to which he devoted boundless admiration.
He embraced the Impressionist movement with his own unique palette knife technique, still relatively uncommon at the time.
He exhibited for the first time in Paris in 1920.
His sunny and luminous paintings were an immediate success, earning him the nickname “the painter of the sun”.
Exhibitions followed one after another, both in France and abroad, but Paris remained an annual destination.
Our painting depicts one of the artist’s favorite subjects: flowers.
In a very tight composition, Pastour used a dark red background that blends with the flowers of the same hue, highlighting the whiteness of the central blooms.
In this daring composition, he manages to make light burst forth from a simple bouquet.
His perfectly mastered palette knife technique allows him to work in varying thicknesses of paint, creating incredible relief and depth. A highly skilled colorist, he also subtly manipulates colors to combine or contrast them according to the desired effect.
His works are exhibited in numerous French and international galleries.
Oil on heavy cardboard, signed upper right, dated lower left 1943, in its original carved and patinated Montparnasse-style wooden frame.
Unframed 13 x 11 cm
Framed 17 x 15 cm