Painter
Henri Jean Pontoy
Henri-Jean Pontoy (1888–1968) was an Orientalist painter born in Reims into a family of musicians. A gifted violinist, he moved to Paris, painting by day and playing in restaurants at night. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under Luc-Olivier Merson and was influenced by the Barbizon School, whose plein-air approach shaped his entire career. He exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d'Automne.
The artist
A travel grant in 1924 took him to Tunisia and Algeria, but it was Morocco, and Fez above all, that enthralled him. Settling there in 1927, he had a studio beside the Bou Jeloud mosque and taught drawing at the Moulay Idriss college for fourteen years, before leaving in 1940 to devote himself to painting. The deep south, Guelmim, Ouarzazate, Zagora and its kasbahs and ksour, then became his great subject. In 1947 he travelled with Jacques Majorelle to the Fouta Djallon in Guinea.
Working outdoors in a realist approach while seeking to express a state of mind, he rendered with quiet poetry the blended shadows, light values and burning light of the south. He lived in Morocco until 1965, then settled in Aix-en-Provence, where he died in 1968.
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