Leon Suzanne Painting French Impressionist

Leon Suzanne. (b. 1870-1923). French. Three Peasant Women on a Country Road. Oil on canvas. 18 x 24 in. Signed lower left. Inscribed in pencil on stretcher: "Suzanne, 1er. Prix des Tableau International, Belgrade, 1924". Son of a baker, Suzanne showed an early talent for drawing, illustrating the history of France and the Battle of Napoleon. He studied at the Free Academy in Rouen, where he spent much of his life. Suzanne was gifted as a landscape artist, relying on a frank, spontaneous and colored vision. He was a remarkable element among the Normandy painters, never influenced by the various pictorial movements which shook the art world at the beginning of the 20th century. He produced only 300 to 400 canvases. Charles Saint-Paul reminisced: "Whoever remembers this worker with the surly look, dressed in velvet and bristling beard, with a bony and sickly look, whom you saw everywhere in town and in all weather at his easel, creating in his suffering, works so true, so strong, so delicate".

Minor surface scuffs.