Exhibition: Léon Bonvin, the unknown of Vaugirard

The poetry of the "zone", this no man's land between city and countryside, is a certain Léon Bonvin who would be the initiator.

To be convinced of this, it suffices to visit the beautiful retrospective that the Parisian Custodia foundation devotes to this painter who until then was almost unknown.

It was before the suburbs.

Léon, a humble and shy little guy, was born in 1834. His half-brother, François, seventeen years older, a friend of Courbet, who would go down in history as a realist painter, quickly guessed a talent and encourages the child in the common passion.

Love via the engravings or by what they see together in the Louvre, Flemish peasant scenes, landscapes and still lifes by the masters of the Dutch Golden Age and, of course, compositions of flowers and fruits by Chardin...

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But here it is: Father Bonvin, a veteran of the Napoleonic wars - he would have guarded the Emperor's gate at Schönbrunn Palace during the occupation of Vienna -, has built up a small capital as a country guard.

And acquired a hovel where he started selling wine.

He needs the kid to run what he aims to be a cabaret.

We discover the place with picture rails, seen from the outside or from the inside, in a few black chalk drawings.

The rustic eatery, with the sign displaying an easy pun, Bonvin de Bourgogne, grew like a wild mushroom in the plain of Vaugirard (precisely, on what is now rue de Dantzig, in the south of the 15th arrondissement Parisian).

Decor as characters seem straight out of Balzac.

In his portrait (on loan from the Musée d'Orsay), with a hard gaze emerging from the half-light, we cannot distinguish the patriarch's grumpy earrings.

But those who knew him and left some testimony of him (the aquafortist Félix Bracquemond or the writer Jules Vallès) assure that he always wore them.

A moving melancholy

Willy-nilly Leon has become his factotum.

He is at the service as in the kitchen.

Watercolours, leads and brushes, he takes them out of their box only in the rare spare hours.

Either at night or in the early morning.

Art is born in this way, by the lamp, near the stove, because, thanks to the hutches fitted out in the backyard, gibelottes simmered with thyme and sips of black sauce make, according to the

of 1861,

.

In the evening, the clientele of ragpickers and quarrymen needed for Baron Haussmann's construction sites dance to the sound of a harmonium, the only luxury of the address.

Léon believes in it, gets married, has children.

But it causes more expense.

Soon, the household experiences embarrassment, then misery: the city is constantly gaining ground and has begun to strangle the modest guinguette with other pleasures.

Overwhelmed, Léon hanged himself in the forest of Meudon one night in January 1866.

Still Life with Pomegranate

(1864), by Léon Bonvin.

Baltimore, The Walters Art Museum, via Custodia Foundation

As he hardly sold his delicately watercolored flowers, his kitchen corners or his palisade sections treated in black and white on small formats, so many motifs taken from the garden or between the walls, Vallès will see there a pure cursed artist.

Since the family needed resources, he helped François set up a charity sale at the Hôtel Drouot.

A group of artists, including Courbet, Daubigny, Bracquemond, Monet, Boudin, Fantin-Latour and Whistler, are invited to include some of their works.

All of this will generate a substantial sum.

In particular the background of Léon, subtle variations of light in a grove, an arbor, and from which deaf a moving melancholy.

A rich American, William T. Walters fell in love with it.

Today, this large set is kept at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, which explains the relative neglect of its author in France.

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The Fondation Custodia brings him back to view, also defending Léon Bonvin through the recent acquisition of a self-portrait.

Dedicated to the wife, it was made a few days before the suicide.

Disappeared at the age of 31, the manager of the Bonvin de Bourgogne left fields of flowers, meticulous jumbles of brushwood, tufts of grass in the brown earth.

Its feet of bellflowers, laurels, scabious of the fields, panicauts, wild chicory or flowering thistles seem, when one plunges into them, as many cathedrals.

With for example

, Bonvin appears forever lying in the alfalfa.

Happy at last, like on a Sunday in the country.

As for his cockles, catchflies, wallflowers, fresh asters or wilted viburnums, in pots or vases, they prove to be of equal delicacy.

We did not expect so much sophistication coming from a bare ground with sickly vegetation.

Similarly, one could not imagine on the tables of a suburban hovel those bottles or decanters whose fine tones harmonize here with an open pomegranate, there with fresh radishes, pickled herring.

Or, on an immaculate tablecloth that still retains the folds of ironing, with celery unrolling its complex root filaments.

Until January 8 at the Fondation Custodia, 121, rue de Lille Paris (7th).

Catalog, 304 pages, €35.

www.fondationcustodia.fr

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