Albert Grenier entered Cormon’s studio, a place of ferment and decisive encounters where, in the 1880s, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Anquetin and Bernard rubbed shoulders. It was there that the friendships that would shape his life were formed: with Anquetin, a companion in training and experimentation; and above all with Toulouse-Lautrec, whose affection for Grenier and for Lili, his wife, would last to the end. These studio bonds are no mere anecdote: they explain the presence at Villiers-sur-Morin of artists as seemingly far apart as the bohemian aristocrat of Montmartre and the Brie painter settled in the countryside.
Settled at Villiers with his wife Lili, whose portrait by Toulouse-Lautrec is now held by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Grenier led a life of exemplary discretion, far from the quarrels of Paris. A painter of landscapes and genre scenes, he also practised satirical watercolour with a gentle irony that his contemporaries sometimes underestimated: the series on hunting in the Brie, noted by the journalist Leroux in 1901, reveals an observer attentive to the foibles of his time, capable of the same acuity in laughter as in contemplation.
Grenier died in 1925. His presence in international collections owes less to his own work than to his closeness to Toulouse-Lautrec, but those who knew him at Villiers knew what that discretion concealed: a rare sensibility and lucidity, an eye that needed neither scandal nor provocation to say something true about the world.
These notes draw on a combination of institutional, documentary and local sources: the artist directory of the Musée d’Orsay; the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP); the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT); Bénézit, Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs (Gründ); art market databases (Artprice, Drouot); the catalogues of the Salon des Artistes français and the Salon d’automne; the Satet-Menon collection relating to the painters of the Grand Morin valley; local sources relating to the Vallée des peintres (the commune of Villiers-sur-Morin, Coulommiers Pays de Brie Tourisme); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (Madame Lili Grenier, portrait by Toulouse-Lautrec, 1888); the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka (work by Yuzō Saeki).
