AB-PN-1933-001 — Renée in the Creuse (c. 1933)

Technical information

Title : Renée in the Creuse
Date : c. 1933
Technique : Oil on canvas
Dimensions : 65 × 81 cm
Location : Private collection

Biographical / historical context

The year 1933 marks a deepening of the PN cycle: Breuillaud narrows his focus to intimacy, everyday life, and the figures closest to him. Renée—his first wife—appears here not as a posed model but as a presence caught in a quiet activity: a domestic moment in which painting observes less the scene than the very act of attention.

The stay in the Creuse, or at least the reference to that territory, establishes a particular climate: warm light, slowed time, and a provincial atmosphere. After years marked by urban tension and social harshness, Breuillaud seeks in these interiors another kind of density—an untheatrical, gentle psychology carried by the material substance of paint and by a muted yet luminous palette.

Formal / stylistic description

The horizontal, compact composition places Renée in the foreground, leaning toward her task, her face inclined into a zone of golden light. The attitude is one of concentration: lowered eyelids, closed mouth, the neck slightly advanced. The scene recounts almost nothing, yet everything is constructed to make suspended time palpable.

The face is modelled with a vibrant, fused paint surface: warm flesh tones, rosy cheeks, and soft shadows beneath the chin. Dark hair, treated in masses, frames the face and heightens the sense of inwardness. A red necklace—set like a dense ring at the neck—plays a decisive role: a chromatic accent and anchor point that keeps the figure centred.

In the foreground, a bouquet bursts forth like a coloured breath: creamy whites, dense yellows, vivid pinks, and deep greens. The rounded, heavy vase catches dark reflections and, through its curve, echoes the curve of the torso. The still life is not mere décor: it balances the composition by answering the body’s mass and reinforcing a diagonal that traverses the scene.

The background remains deliberately sparing: a halo of browns, ochres, and dark reds—worked in broad strokes—isolates the figure within a bubble of attention. The paint, more fluid than in the immediately preceding portraits, nevertheless retains a density that holds light rather than letting it slip away.

Comparative analysis / related works

Renée in the Creuse belongs to the intimate portraits of the early PN period, in which Breuillaud gradually moves away from the frontal, isolated figure to introduce a minimal context—table, bouquet, gesture, silence. The canvas anticipates the more narrative portraits of the mid-1930s not through anecdote, but through the installation of a domestic atmosphere.

The vase-and-bouquet motif also recalls the rare still lifes of the period: in Breuillaud’s work, such objects never become simple ornament, but a second nucleus of paint and colour, charged with stabilising the figure and thickening the atmosphere.

Justification of dating and attribution

A dating to around 1933 is supported by the specific balance between a paint surface already softened and a construction that remains dense, as well as by the warm, interior palette associated with the Creuse stay (or motif). The work appears later than the more rigidly structured portraits of 1931–1932, and earlier than the more clearly asserted reorganisations from the middle of the decade onward. The “circa” therefore remains appropriate.

Provenance / exhibitions / publications

Private collection.