Eugène VILLAIN - Still life with fruit

Eugène VILLAIN
Paris, 1821 - Paris, 1897
Oil on panel
21 x 36.5 cm (28 x 44 cm with frame)
Signed lower left "E. Villain".
Fine 19th-century gilded wood frame

Eugène Villain first studied painting in Paris with Nicolas Charlet and Léon Cogniet, from whom he learned the art of portraiture. But he became particularly attached to François Bonvin, and joined "the little colony of Vaugirard painters" who met at Father Bonvin's cabaret.
His first still life, a highly naturalistic "timbale d'argent" (with a plate of apples and a coffee pot) in 1850, brought him to the salon's attention. He went on to specialize in "kitchen" still lifes, painted in fine colors, with a clean touch and great effect. Examples include "le poulet" (Douai museum) and "le fromage mou" (Musée d'Orsay). Villain, in his own words, wanted to "make it fine, fresh and bright" - that's what "being distinguished" is all about! "Is it fine? Is it blond? It's powerful, isn't it? Is it worth my chicken? Is it worth my soft cheese?
As for his fruit, Eugène Villain's biographer Frédéric Henriet wrote in 1882 of his "peaches with their opulent velvet, apples with their golden skins stained with cheerful red revivals, plums with their juicy transparency" and his "raisins and amber Chasselas". "Villain is a dilettante in his own way, an impulsive, sincere artist who needs to be moved to get the full flavor of his work, and who will never paint by the yardstick. Every year, he sends a small canvas that is a model of its kind. Countless times in the morning, I've caught some of the day's favorites, or even some member of the jury, meditating before this wholesome work as if it were an example and a lesson! Villain was "convinced that, in the genre in which he excels, the simplest compositions are the most interesting, because they caress the eye without tiring it" "This was the aesthetic of Chardin, who never overloaded his compositions". When Bonvin was awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor in 1870, Fréderic Henriet recounts that Bonvin said to Villain, "Why don't you have it like me? You've earned it like your comrades. !

Ref: MV9PN7FILY