Jean Puy

Jean Puy was born in a family of industrialists. From 1895 to 1897, he was the student of Tony Tollet, at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon. He moved to Paris in 1899 where he entered the Académie Julian and attended the workshops of Eugène Carrière and Gustave Moreau. He met André Derain, Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet, Henri Manguin, and Charles Camoin with whom he has maintained a long friendship, and with which he exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in 1905 where was born the Fauvism.

During his first years in Paris, he worked in common in the various workshops of fellow students from Gustave Moreau. He knows how to assimilate influences while developing a personal style. It presents a contrasting, high painting in colors, to the simplified shapes in a technique frank and broad where it appears often near his contemporaries: Henri Matisse, André Derain, themselves influenced by Paul Gauguin, and Paul Cézanne. After a period fertilizes it appears among the innovators, he abandoned works of draft or single-subject to more complex compositions, where the environment is taking a broader place.

The success comes between 1900 and 1905, as a result of the exhibitions at the Salon des indépendants, the Salon d'Automne and Berthe Weill that defends young artists.

As early as 1905, with its entrance at Ambroise Vollard, one of the great Parisian dealers, follows the notoriety. It is at the request of the merchant that he joined the Group of the "School of Asnières", painting and decorations of vases, tables, buttons and stanniferous tiles, in the workshop of André Metthey. The reasons are mostly figurative. He painted female nudes and exposes his works at the Salon d'Automne of 1907. He collaborated with the ceramist until 1910, producing dozens of parts.

Through the Vollard, charged by Russian collectors to choose representative works of contemporary artists, paintings by Jean Puy joined the Moscow Palace of Chtouchkine, a great collector who assembled an important collection of French painting since 1891. It even thanks to Vollard that Jean Puy enters the collection Hahnloser which are among the most active distributors of french art in Switzerland. Little concerned this glory, circa 1907-1910, he decided to turn away from the avant-garde painting. Little by little, he changes style to work on great works balanced in the years 1910-1914.

Will be briefly tried to pointillism, he turned to Fauvism awhile but without radicalism that can be observed among his friends. The way that this independent sets is determined by an intense love of life, reality and nature. It is through nature transformed by the idea and the feeling that Jean Puy convey human emotion. After World War I, he headed to an intimate painting orchestrated in a personal colour range, "a painting that resembles a Chamber Music" as will tell George Besson.