Robert FERNIER (Pontarlier, 1895 - Goux-les-Usiers, 1977) Opening of a road in winter in the Jura, 1941 Oil on canvas signed lower right, titled in ink on a label on the back (altered), stamped Salon des Artistes Français of 1942 on the frame 81 x 100 cm (Small area of wear in the upper right corner, a few small stains in the canvas; cleaning to be expected) Provenance : Weinberger Collection Exhibition : Salon des Artistes Français, Paris, 1942 Bibliography : Robert Jean-Jacques Fernier, Robert Fernier, 50 ans de peinture, Editions de la Gentiane Bleue, Paris, 1977, n°31 reproduced page 28 (in black and white) We warmly thank the Association Robert Fernier for confirming the date of the work. Robert FERNIER, painter of the Jura and the snow: Born in Pontarlier in 1895, Robert Fernier knew at the age of 16 that he wanted to be a painter. After a short period at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Dijon in 1913/14, he continued his artistic training in Paris (in 1914 and 1924-1929, having been mobilized during the First World War) in the studio of Fernand Cormon. He won a gold medal at the 1932 Salon with La Foire à Pontarlier. In 1937 he moved to a studio at 1 rue Chardin near the Trocadero. In the 1930s, he was already considered "the painter of snow". Several exhibitions were devoted to him, one at the Palais Granvelle in Besançon in 1935 entitled "Paysages de Franche-Comté". The journalists of the time evoke his talent to represent the regional landscapes, of snow in particular: "He has a sense of the wide expanses of plateau where, around the low houses, and as if crushed under a steel sky, winter modulates its white symphony... He excels in rendering the particular aspects of the harsh and beautiful nature of the Jura" (Gustave Kahn, Le Quotidien) and again "Beautiful Comtois landscapes, those of snow especially, where a subdued but rather harsh light, plays with the shadows and colors..." (Charles Devaux, Beaux-Arts). Throughout his life, Robert Fernier will try to transcribe in his paintings the aspects, the lines of his native land, as well as the rustic life, during his numerous and prolonged stays in the Comtois. He appreciates the varied motifs: mountains and springs, rivers and waterfalls, lakes and forests, villages and hamlets... that the snow ennobles during the winter months. In 1976-77* he wrote: "It is precisely winter that inspired me the most: with skis on my feet that I used as an easel in front of the motif of my choice, I fixed on canvas during my entire career these vast fields of gray snow or full of light that brightened up the landscape. "Pontarlier and its region, (...) the Swiss, Neuchâtel, Vaud or Bernese Jura, however austere they may be, have a grandeur, a nobility, a light, which seduced me and still seduce me, an attraction that many long trips overseas have not weakened. Coming from a peasant background, I was perhaps better prepared than others, mostly city dwellers, to understand and represent scenes of rustic life such as The Fair in Pontarlier, The Little Kings of the Epiphany, The Opening of a Winter Road in the Jura [our painting], or the Adoration of the Shepherds transposed onto a contemporary plane, or the evocation of the work of the woodcutters, the gentian pullers, the ploughmen, the long wood carriers." (Quoted in: Robert and Jean-Jacques Fernier, "Robert Fernier: 50 years of painting", editions of the Gentiane Bleue, 1977) Our painting, dated 1941 and presented at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1942, illustrates a common winter scene, where the snowy roads are "opened" with the help of a triangle pulled by several pairs of oxen. At the same time, the State acquired a winter painting in 1940, the Bridge over the Drugeon under the Snow, which was attributed in 1941 to the National Museum of Modern Art. In 1955, Auguste Bailly*, in the catalog he devoted to Robert Fernier, also evoked his dexterity in exploiting and rendering the subjects of snow, without monotony: "In this indefinite whiteness, his eye knew how to discover the thousand and one nuances which diversify it, and which make that no white, for those who know how to see it, is similar to another white. Once these luminous inflections were discovered, it was still necessary to possess the pictorial science which was to make it possible to return them, and to make shimmer with the eyes these immaculate extents, rich of a kind of interior rainbow. Here Fernier is the master. He made a palette for himself that nothing escapes, a palette that for us Comtois, is revealing; because in front of each of these paintings, we have the sudden impression of recognizing a truth that we had brushed a thousand times without seizing it. (...) It is this spiritual essence of the Jura that Robert Fernier tries to