French, 1863-1927

Provenance: Petit Palais, Modern Art Museum, Geneva, Switzerland
Painter of landscapes, architecture, and of decorations and a watercolorist. Born in Le Havre.
Student of Lhuillier in his native city of Le Havre and went to live in Paris in 1887, exhibiting at the Bing Gallery in 1899 and then at the Paris Salons. Prunier became a member of the Societé Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1903. He exhibited as early as 1901 with La Cathédral and in 1902 he exhibited Chantier de construction. His Dimanche aux fortifications (1904) belongs to the city of Paris. One must site the following works by Gaston Prunier : La Rue Réamur (1906), - La Tamise (1908) , - Le Repos hebdomadaire (1909), - Le Lac Majou (1911).

Gaston Prunier fashioned himself into the painter of popular neighborhoods or “quartiers”. The artists sensibilities perfectly reflect the spirit of the era. Scenes of fortifications, construction sites, houses in demolition, cathedrals and mountain are amongst his imagery. His taste for verticals and ascending lines, which leads the artist to place the horizon line very low in his works is one of the characteristics of his talent. He also created numerous very dense watercolors, of a rich technique based on developed drawing.

Numerous views of Paris, including The Canal Saint-Martin in the Musée Carnavalet, where the powerful mass of the paint determines a generally dense and serious character, are part of his oeuvre. Solid and precise drawing that little by little becomes larger, a soft construction of intersecting lines, impregnate his views of Brittany and of the Pyrénées with a sort of controlled and carefully contained lyricism.
Prunier took charge in 1894 of the decoration of the Church of Saint-Palais located in the Pyrénées-Atlantique region of France.

The Musée Carnavalet conserves Le Canal Saint-Martin by the artist in their collection. The artist’s works appears as well in the permanent collections of the Museum of Luxembourg, the Museum of Toulouse, The Museum of Le Havre, and the Museum of Dijon.

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