| (...) Aside from a few Norman scenes dated 1904 and some landscapes from Rome, Vienna and Venice, done in 1906 and 1907, all Gireud's work has been devoted to celebrating the charm and beauty of his native land, Provence. In a representation of this enchanting place, so strongly marked with individual characteristics, so classical (in the best sense of that word), Girieud employs the retrained and secret eloquence, the peculiar gravity of observation, the force of meditative concentration and moving tendernes, which are the dominant features of his temperament. No one alive to-day can compete with Girieud in translating with pigments into a rectangle of canvas the rich and delicate beauty, the harmonious structure, the ancient majesty of this land, which "la lumire a enfanté en souriant" as Frederic Mistral says.
But Girieud is not only a landscape painter of the first order, and one of the best of the "jeune peinture française"; he is also a painter of genre and portraits of great merit. His nude figures are conceived and executed with an extraordinarily acute and deep sense of form. I myself believe that such canvases as the Après-midi Provençale, l'Artiste et son modèle, la Souce de la Tinée, and the nude of the 1923 Autumn Salon will count among the masterpieces twentieth century French painting. Pierre Girieud, finally, has in his stuff of which great mural decorators are made. He has all the qualities required for monumental work - general culture, sense of design, respect for tradition, imagination, lyrical feeling; and he has given proof of it. In the vestibule in front of the nave of the chapel at the Château de Pradines (Vaucluse) he has collaborated with Alfred Lombard, Georges Dufrénoy and Louis Riou in a serie of frescoes of exceptional beauty, which i hope it may some day be possible to reproduce for Studio readers.
In concluding these all too short notes on an artist such undoubted talent and fine character, i may say with justice that the painters of the younger generation esteem Girieud as a master.
Reproduction de la Garde et le Coudon et de Cucuron : route de Cadenet |