Charles-Émile VACHER DE TOURNEMINE (1812-1872) Flamingos and parrots circa 1866-1867 Oil on canvas, signed lower left Ch. de Tournemine On the reverse, stamp of the color and canvas dealer "Emmanuel Chenoz, rue de Condé". (Old restorations.) Height 89 cm; Width 180.5 cm Bibliography - Jean-Claude Lesage, Charles de Tournemine, peintre orientaliste, Aix-en-Provence, Édisud, 1986, ph.10. p.101 (reproduced in black and white from a photograph belonging to M. Bourget d'Aulnoy). - Explanation des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, architecture, gravure et lithographie des artistes vivants exposés au Palais des Champs-Élysées, le 15 avril 1867, p. 202 Exhibition: - Salon de Paris 1867, under n° 1485 Provenance : - French private collection. Charles Vacher de Tournemine was fascinated by the Mediterranean world, which he discovered when he signed up as a midshipman at the age of thirteen. He later moved to Paris, where he studied painting in the studios of Eugène Isabey and Louis Garneray. After completing his training, he continued his travels, which took him to the Maghreb, Asia Minor and the Balkans, and produced some of the finest canvases of French Orientalism. Familiar with the Salon des artistes français, where he exhibited from 1846 onwards, Tournemine received regular critical acclaim. In 1861, the French government purchased his "Café à Adalia", now in the Musée d'Orsay, as well as other paintings in the museums of his native Toulon, Marseille and Montpellier. In 1867, Tournemine presented two large canvases of the same format at the Salon: "Elephants of Africa" (under no. 1474), acquired and donated by the Emperor to the Musée du Luxembourg (now in the Musée d'Orsay), and our painting, "Flamingos and Parrots" (under no. 1475). With a lively touch and evident pleasure, the painter declines and multiplies colorful birds. Some fly into the sky towards the natural perch provided by a jacaranda trunk caught in the vegetation, while others fish, hidden in the plants that emerge from the calm waves, sleep on a branch, or observe each other, in front of the infinite landscape that borders this wide South American river. For this work of original territory, known only from a black-and-white photo in the artist's family archives, Tournemine drew inspiration from explorer Paul Marçoy's account of a trip to Peru, quoted in the Livret du Salon: "In the depths of perspective, distant shores stand out in silhouette . Sometimes the hollow trunk of a jacaranda tree, torn from its native soil by a riverbank collapse or overflow, floats on the surface of the water; while another, encountering a sandbank, stops in its tracks and comes to rest on the beach (...).... Beautiful pink flamingos frolic close to the shore in the midst of this luxuriant vegetation, and families of parrots populate this enguirlanded trunk, making these magical and incomparable regions resound with their cries". A painter of the Orient, Tournemine was fascinated by the animals he observed on his travels, particularly the wading birds of the Danube, whose verve and colors enchanted and fascinated the public (for example: Flamingos and Ibises, Turkish bank of the Lower Danube, 1861 Salon, coll. Préfecture de Nantes). Our work brings to a climax this fascination for exotic birds, which the Parisian public discovers with astonishment and curiosity. The critic Alfred Nettement commented in La Semaine des familles: "What the traveler tells, the painter shows with his magical brush. Nothing less than M. Tournemine's delicate, fine touch and bright, vivid colors were needed to evoke on canvas the solitude of the new world, populated by delightful birds, for nature is not like the coquettes of our salons; it is in the desert that she displays the most beautiful diamonds in her jewel case.