Painting oil on canvas mountain landscape signed Henri MARCHAL (Nancy, 1878-1942)

Painting oil on canvas mountain landscape
signed Henri MARCHAL (Nancy, 1878-1942)
height 50 width 61 cm
Biography[edit ]
Henri Marchal was born in Paris on June 24, 1876. His father, Jean-Victor Marchal, was a civil engineer and assistant to Gustave Eiffel, and when he was born, he was 39 years old, probably born in 1837, while his mother, Émilie Laurentine Virginie Legros, was 26, born in 18503.
At the age of 13, and at a time when Parisians were discovering Asia, Henri Marchal visited the 1889 Paris Universal Exhibition set up on the Esplanade des Invalides, where he was struck and amazed by a cast of the Angkor temple created by architect Lucien Fournereau (1846-1906). Fournereau specialized in the detailed study of the ancient city of Angkor Thom, for which he drew up a plan. He also began work on clearing Angkor Wat, recording inscriptions, photographing Angkor and making casts of sculptures for the Musée du Trocadéro, including the Angkor sculpture at the Exposition Universelle, a lasting dream for the young Henri Marchal.
Meanwhile, a slightly older visitor to the Exposition, Gauguin, discovered Indonesia with great interest, thanks to a reproduction of a Javanese village next to Fournereau's Angkor cast.
Following this memorable visit, Henri Marchal began reading about faraway lands with authors such as Jules Verne and Pierre Loti, and in particular the writings and drawings of Henri Mouhot (1826-1861), botanist and explorer, "discoverer of Angkor" who died at the age of 35 near Luang Prabang, Laos. After avidly reading Henri Mouhot's writings and descriptions, illustrated with numerous drawings and published posthumously in 1865, the young Henri Marchal decided that his goal was to save the temples4

Ref: MSYTLWG4BA