Technical information
- Title : Landscape
- Date : 1940
- Technique : Oil on canvas
- Dimensions : 38 × 46 cm
- Location : Private collection
Biographical / historical context
This “Landscape”, a pastel dated 1940, belongs to the more intimate vein of Breuillaud’s countryside studies. The artist observes an ordinary terrain—a path, a ploughed plot, a fringe of trees—and offers a sensitive translation attentive to the seasons and changes in light. The choice of pastel, a medium both rapid and nuanced, suits such notes taken from life: it captures delicate transitions (skies, bluish distances) while retaining a strong material presence in highlights and rubbed passages.
Formal / stylistic description
The composition is organised around a winding path that crosses the foreground and leads toward a group of leafless trees. To the right, the ploughed earth is rendered with oblique striations and alternations of browns, ochres and violet greys, while to the left a lighter bank, punctuated with subdued greens, opens a breathing space. The trees—with dark trunks and fine branches—stand out against a pale sky where very diluted pinks, blues and yellows mingle. Depth arises from the contrast between the more emphatic materiality of the foreground and the softness of the distance, treated in gradients. The pastel touch, sometimes rubbed and sometimes laid in nervous strokes, gives the landscape a discreet vibration, as if cold air were circulating between the branches.
Comparative analysis / related works
This sheet is close to Breuillaud’s road-and-woodland-edge landscapes, where the visual journey is guided by a curve (road, path, bank) and where the structure rests on a few stable elements: trees, banks, horizon. The treatment of ploughed fields, through hatching and superimposition, is also frequent in his rural corpus, as it immediately inscribes the season and the work of the land.
Compared with his more colourful Mediterranean views, the work adopts a softer, more earthen range, centred on beiges, browns and greyed blues. This chromatic restraint strengthens the meditative character of the motif, turning the landscape into a space of silence rather than a narrative scene.
Justification of dating and attribution
The date 1940 accords with the overall economy of the composition and with a deliberately restrained palette, found in several countryside studies from the same period. The pastel is used in a structured way: the path is traced, the ploughing rhythms established, then the image gradually softens toward the horizon—corresponding to an already mature language in the artist.
The attribution to André Breuillaud is supported by the signature at the lower left, and by consistent formal traits: simplified masses, the path as a vector of depth, and attention to the nuances of the sky, treated not as a neutral background but as a true field of variations. Signature: signed at lower left.
Provenance / exhibitions / publications
Private collection. Prior provenance and exhibition or publication history are not established. Any information (handwritten notes on the back, old framing, photographs, correspondence) could help document the work’s circulation.
Image data
Document type: colour photographic reproduction.
© Bruno Restout — Catalogue raisonné André Breuillaud