Ernest Le Villain

Ernest Le Villain was a French artist known most for his landscapes and marine scenes, as well as a few genre subjects. We know that his first works were noticed by Camille Corot, the great Barbizon master, who had a definite influence on his early works. He was also the friend of Eugene Boudin and Stanislas Lepine.

The artist exhibited in the Paris Salon every year from 1870 through 1914. Two scenes of Pont Aven, in Brittany, where he worked around 1870, were sent for his Salon debut. He was often inspired by the sites of Calvados, Honfleur, and Yport, as well as the surroundings of Paris - the Marne and the Seine Rivers, the Normandy coast and the Brittany countryside.

A student of Guiaud, Le Vilain produced many more watercolors than oil paintings, and his oils exhibit the same vaporous freshness as his works on paper. In his technique, he gives an importance to a virgin support and to the color white, which he uses to lend a sense of brightness, and animates with the contrast of shadow and bright daylight.