Leon-Germain Pelouse: January: Cernay, near Rambouillet ca 1880s
There are artists whose fate spared them from personal tragedies, mental illness, posthumous fame and eternity. Leon Germain Pelouse had a normal life with a wife and a little home, and was appreciated by his contemporaries. He lived on a tranquil French countryside in Vaux-de-Cernay. Even during the Franco-Prussian war when German soldiers ransacked his village, they spared his house because of the many wonderful paintings they found in there.
Pelouse was a salesman who traveled a lot and saw many nice lands. He never went to any art schools, but rather taught himself to paint. He immortalized the landscapes around him. The nature of his pictures is never mystical or dead silent, like Caspar David Friedrich’s, and they are never tussled by distraction like Van Gogh’s.
His paintings are bold in color, gentle and beautiful. It feels good to look at them. Pelouse’ painting with his village, Cernay in the January snow is a nice example of his work. It is in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection but is not on display now.
My gaze is stuck on the sky. It is copper-like and intense. The dark, migratory birds against the copper vault are magnetizing. The static nature under the white snow, the tiny, naked tree, the abandoned rooftops protruding from the snow are all beautiful and serene.
I see Pelouse leaves the village early in the morning to find the right place to paint. His steps echo in the snow. He sets up the easel. He breathes on his hands to keep warm before he starts painting. He knows that when he finishes this picture he will go back to his warm home, his wife will pour him a cup of tea, and they will chat about common things like what happened in the village. I assume he was a content and cheerful person who lived in quiet happiness. A person who could create such fine and serene paintings could not be anything else but demure. His artworks are like therapy.
But these kinds of paintings were never as interesting as the ones created by troubled minds. Who cares about a pretty landscape? But peeking into an insane or uncanny person’s state of mind interests us, like hell. It is like peeking at the quarreling neighbors or listening to the news and being happy that all those awful things did not happen to us.
Perhaps that is why the Metropolitan Museum did not put his snowy landscape on show and nobody will ever mention his name together with Caspar David Friedrich or Vincent Van Gogh. But for me, he will always be the painter of serenity, in whose works I hear the silence.
