BOCION, FRANÇOIS: "Venise". Lot n° 46

BOCION, FRANÇOIS (1828 Lausanne 1890) : "Venise"; oil on canvas; 28x42 cm; sig. u. dat. 1881 u.r., verso a. Gallery label titled Provenance: Galerie Paul Vallotton, Lausanne, no. 11087 (label on verso); private property, Switzerland. Exhibition: Galerie Paul Vallotton, 1977, no. 70587 (label on verso). Literature: Michel Reymondin, François Bocion. Oeuvre raisonnée, vol. 1, Monalbumphoto, o.O. 2011, no. 387 (with illustration). François Bocion came from a wealthy family of craftsmen and merchants in western Switzerland. He received his first drawing lessons from the German landscape painter and illustrator Christian Gottlieb Théophile Steinlen at the École Moyenne in Vevey, then from the French landscape painter François Bonnet in Lausanne. In October 1845 he moved to Paris, where he continued his training in the studios of Louis-Aimé Groslaude and Charles Gleyre, the important French-Swiss history painter. During this time he made crucial contacts with Gustave Courbet, Léon Berthoud, Albert de Meuron, Emile-François David and Alfred Dumont. They all worked primarily as landscape painters and were great admirers of the plein air painting developed by Camille Corot. In this context, Bocion created, on the one hand, large-format paintings in the studio, with which he supplied the exhibitions, and, on the other hand, small-format plein air studies in nature, which were later to establish his reputation as an early Impressionist and "painter of Lake Geneva". Bocion made his first public appearance with a painting at the "Swiss Art Exhibition" in Bern in 1848. Thereafter, he regularly participated in the "Turnus" exhibitions of the Swiss Art Association, where he initially showed mainly history paintings and later his light-filled, atmospheric and lifelike landscapes of Lake Geneva. In addition to his work as a drawing teacher at the École Moyenne et Industrielle in Lausanne, he developed a lively presence at international exhibitions and in the context of artists' associations in the following decades. In the 1870s and 1880s, four major solo exhibitions were devoted to him in Lausanne and Geneva. Between 1874 and 1881, François Bocion repeatedly stayed in Venice, where he produced numerous impressive views.