361 - Victor CHARRETON (1864–1936)

Victor CHARRETON (1864–1936) Portrait of Maurice Sarraut, 1914 Oil on cardboard Signed, dated, and inscribed in the lower left corner 60 x 73 cm Framed (Minor losses) The condition report is available upon request at the following email address: contact@neo-encheres.com We thank the association “Les Amis de Victor Charreton” for confirming the authenticity of this work. This work will be reproduced in Volume III of the catalogue raisonné currently in preparation. A certificate of authenticity will be provided to the buyer. PROVENANCE French private collection, then passed by inheritance to the great-grandson of Mr. Sarraut, who is depicted in this portrait. Same provenance as the following lot. Note: Maurice Sarraut, editor of the newspaper *La Dépêche*, was assassinated by a militiaman on December 2, 1943. A Radical Socialist and Freemason, he advocated for the restoration of a parliamentary and republican regime. Sentenced to death by the Militia in Paris, he was executed in Toulouse by Maurice Dousset, a member of the Legion of French Volunteers, in front of his home in the Saint-Simon neighborhood. BIOGRAPHY Born in Bourgoin, in the Isère department, Victor Charreton studied law and practiced as a lawyer at the Lyon Court of Appeals before leaving the bar in 1902 to devote himself entirely to painting. He received guidance from the landscape painters Ernest Hareux and Louis Japy, made his debut in 1894 at the Salon of the Lyon Society of Fine Arts, and subsequently exhibited regularly at the Salon des Artistes Français. After settling in Paris, he was among the founding members of the Salon d’Automne in 1903. His marriage took him to Auvergne, which became the heart of his work: snowscapes, orchards in bloom, and villages nestled among the volcanoes. Between 1910 and 1925, the École de Murol formed around him, bringing together painters drawn to the light of the Auvergne landscapes. A landscape painter in the Lyon tradition, drawn to the fleeting effects of light, he also spent time in Brittany—notably in Pont-Aven—and in Provence. During his lifetime, he founded the Bourgoin-Jallieu Museum, which houses the largest collection of his paintings; the Musée d’Orsay, the Musée de Grenoble, and the Brooklyn Museum also hold works by him. Note: The Dauphiné, Victor Charreton’s native region, was also the chosen home of Auguste Ravier, who settled in Morestel, a few kilometers from Bourgoin, and around whom the so-called Morestel School formed, of which François Guiguet remains the best-known figure. Ernest Hareux, one of his earliest mentors, belonged to the circle of landscape painters from the Creuse Valley, alongside Armand Guillaumin and Léon Detroy. A founding member of the Salon d’Automne, established in 1903 on the initiative of Frantz Jourdain, Charreton engaged with the artistic explorations of an entire generation without straying from his own path. In Auvergne, the Murol School emerged from his encounter, in Besse during the winter of 1911, with the painter Wladimir de Terlikowski, and later with Father Léon Boudal, the parish priest and painter of Murol; nearly a hundred artists would work there during the first half of the century. In Pont-Aven, he was reminded of the circle of Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard. Known primarily as a landscape painter, Charreton here turns to portraiture, a genre less frequently explored in his body of work.