Eugène Lavieille (1820-1889)

Born in Paris on 29 November 1820, Jacques-Eugène Lavieille trained under Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, from whom he received not only a technique but a deep conviction: that the landscape deserves to be looked at with patience and modesty, without seeking to dramatise or idealise it, and that the diffuse light of a day’s end over an ordinary plain contains as much pictorial truth as the spectacle of the Alps or the sea. Lavieille would carry this Corotian lineage to the end, never letting himself be seduced by the successive ruptures that shook French painting in the second half of the 19th century.

A regular exhibitor at the Salon, Lavieille was also an engraver and illustrator whose work documents the rural world of the Brie with precision.

His presence in the Villiers-sur-Morin circle, attested by The Last Gleams of Sunlight on the Banks of the Morin (Les dernières lueurs du soleil sur les bords du Morin), is naturally explained by his deep feeling for the landscapes of the great plain and by the ties his Corotian training had woven for him in the world of French landscape painting. He died in Paris on 8 January 1889, in the same winter, perhaps under the same grey light on the banks of the Morin, as that which, in The Last Gleams, unfolds in a range of golden greys and pale pinks.

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).