Formerly, in Toulon, was the Merchant Port. It was built in the eastern part of the small harbour. Ships came here to load their cargo before hoisting their sails to near or far horizons.
Of this district, only the name remains, carried in particular by a media library. The place was filled in with the debris of houses bombed during the Second World War. The Lycée Dumont d’Urville is located on the site of the former Gare du Sud – this station from which one left for Hyères or Saint-Raphaël and in which, it seems, macaroons were offered to passengers. Table The Merchant Port (2.20 meters high by 1.50 meters wide), painted in 1882 by Frédéric Montenard and now on display at the Toulon Art Museum, bears witness to this ancient district.
We see two sailboats with tilted masts, docked at a quay, at the foot of Provençal-style houses. The stage is bathed in soft light. In the background, the bald mass of Mont Faron, which in the last century was treeless.
Who was Montenard? A painter from an old Provençal family. He studied in Paris. School of Fine Arts and workshop of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. His debut at the Paris Salon took place in 1872. He was invited back there and regularly exhibited landscapes and seascapes thereafter.
Decorator of the Gare de Lyon in Paris
In 1873, direction Toulon. Frédéric Montenard created the Fine Arts studio there, with the painters Eugène-Baptiste Dauphin, Gustave Garaud and Octave Gallian, where he would teach.
Two paintings brought him success in 1883: The Cemetery in Provence and The Corrèze leaving the port of Toulonpreserved in the Museum of Brignoles.
In 1921, Frédéric Montenard became official painter of the Navy. He is also a public painter and decorates buildings such as the Palais des arts in Marseille, the Toulon Opera with a Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun or the chapel of the convent of Sainte-Baume in Saint-Maximin with paintings dedicated to Mary Magdalene.
We also owe him two large frescoes, representing Villefranche and Monaco, in the dining room of the gourmet restaurant. The Blue Train at the Gare de Lyon in Paris.
Death at Besse-sur-Issole
At the end of the Great War, Montenard was 70 years old. He decided to settle in the Château de la Croix de Bontar in Besse-sur-Issole. This is where he died in 1926. A street and the college in Besse bear his name.
“Independent in spirit, he does not belong to any school, explains Brigitte Gaillard, director of the museums of Toulon. This painting shows the tendency of Provençal artists of this generation to direct their gaze towards Impressionism without fully exploiting the technique. Anxious to render the intensity of the Provençal light which modifies the colours, Montenard plays on warm and cold tones. We observe here a juxtaposition of large flat areas (water, sky, mountain). We admire the solidity of the construction, the correct placement of the tones, the qualities of the atmosphere, the density of the paste and the touch.”
And so, under the tender brush of Montenard, a Toulon past reappears which no longer even exists in our memories and barely in the history books.
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A temporary exhibition is being held at the Toulon Art Museum (Mat) until May 22 under the title .
Forty-eight paintings from the 16th to the 19th century are presented there, testifying to the enrichment over time of the collection of the Toulon museum.
The themes of mythological painting, religious painting, still life and portraiture are presented according to a chronological route.
One can admire different aspects of the French, Italian and northern schools in the great pictorial movements of the Renaissance, Baroque, Classicism, Romanticism and Realism. Among the masterpieces on display, a painting by Michel Serre, a Baroque painter from Marseilles, on the theme of Bacchus and Ariadne, a sumptuous still life by Meiffren Conte, and a portrait by the northern painter Gerrit van Honthorst.
Among the portrait painters are Toulon painters such as Jean-Baptiste Paulin Guérin, Charles Bonnegrace or Octave Gallian.
At the heart of Jean Aicard’s Mat & la Provence collection.
Toulon Art Museum (113 boulevard Leclerc). Until May 22, Tuesday to Sunday, 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. Free.
Phone. 04.94.36.81.15.
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