Louis Valtat: Paris - Seine - Notre Dame
Signed: L Valtat, lower right
Watercolor on paper
8 ½”h x 11 ¼”h matted
17"h x 20”w framed
 
This is an original signed watercolor by well known, listed,  French painter Louis Valtat with thousands of documented  auction records.   Created in watercolor, ink & pencil on a cream white paper.  Depicting an iconic Paris scene along the Seine in with Notre Dame Cathedral in the background 8 ½” h x 11 3/8” matted 17" h x 20” with framed   Provenance: private family collection since 1965; purchased from Galerie Rene Drouet, Paris in February 1965. 
 
Biography:
Louis Valtat was a French painter, printmaker and stage designer.  He spent much of his youth in Versailles, moving in 1887 to Paris, where he studied under Gustave Moreau at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and under Jules Dupre at the Academie Julian. There he met Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard and Albert Andre.
 
A leading founder of the Fauvist movement, Louis Valtat was an independent and versatile painter.  Fauvist principles required a total liberation of local color in favor of palette of unmixed paint used straight from the tube, often applied with firm, even violent brushwork. Forms are simplified and flattened, giving precedence to a patterned, decorative surface. Although Valtat had painted in this manner for several years, it wasn't until his exhibition in the 1905 Salon d'Automne that the term "Fauves," meaning "wild beasts," came into use, coined by a prominent critic to describe many of the artists exhibiting that year, including Matisse, Vlaminck, Derain, Manguin, Dongen Friesz, Puy and Valtat.