Eugène Batlo (XIXe s. XXe s.)

Eugène Batlo is among those painters of Villiers-sur-Morin whose biography remains, to date, inaccessible in the documentary sources consulted, a situation that can neither disqualify his work nor erase his real presence in the valley. Several signed works depicting Villiers-sur-Morin and its surroundings, including Old Street at Villiers-sur-Morin (Vieille rue à Villiers-sur-Morin), dated 1930, attest to his activity as a painter in the valley in the early 20th century, as well as to his presence in the communes of Dampmart and Montévrain. The history of artists’ colonies is made up of such figures, whose renown does not extend beyond the local circle, whose canvases circulate without the name of their author always accompanying them, and whose contribution to the portrait of a territory is no less precious for being discreet.

The canvas Old Street at Villiers-sur-Morin, which represents him in the corpus, says the essence of his eye: an attention to the vernacular architecture of the village in what is most ordinary and most enduring about it, a way of laying paint on things without seeking to transform or idealise them. This documentary gaze, this fidelity to the motif as it presents itself, belongs to a tradition of pictorial testimony that has its own dignity and which, for this territory in particular, constitutes an irreplaceable visual archive.

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).