Auguste Prévôt-Valéri (1857-1930)

Born at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne on 21 January 1857, Auguste Prévôt-Valéri trained under Antoine Guillemet and Jules Lefebvre before making his debut at the Salon in 1884 with a double presentation, a medallion of Sarah Bernhardt and a landscape entitled The Stream at Villiers (Le ruisseau de Villiers), which announced from the outset the breadth of his ambitions and the depth of his roots in the Grand Morin valley. A member of the Société des Artistes français from 1884 to 1929 and a bronze medallist at the 1900 Exposition Universelle for Le clos Monsieur, he received the Rosa Bonheur Prize in 1908 for Return to the Hamlet (Retour au hameau), acquired by Baron Edmond de Rothschild and presented to the museum of Dijon.

A pastoral landscape painter in the tradition of Rosa Bonheur and Charles Jacque, Prévôt-Valéri was deeply rooted in the Villiers-sur-Morin circle. His canvases, Le clos Monsieur on the banks of the Morin, The Morin in Flood (Débordements du Morin), held at the Petit Palais, Shepherdess and Her Sheep on the Heights of Villiers (Bergère et ses moutons sur les hauts de Villiers), document the Brie landscape with a topographical fidelity that makes them sources for the history of the territory as much as works of art: in them one recognises the banks of the Morin, the heights of Villiers, the meadows that the spring floods turn into temporary lakes.

His son André carried on the family tradition, winning the Rosa Bonheur Prize in his turn in 1928, the very year in which Saeki painted his last stay at Villiers. This coincidence says something about the layering of the territory: two generations of Prévôt-Valéri on one side, Saeki on the other, and between them the same light of the Brie, seen through such different eyes. Auguste died at Jouarre on 5 August 1930, having lived to see his son succeed him in his love of a territory that he had been the first to learn to paint.

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).