The Forgotten ones: Édouard Béliard
In the series of forgotten painters from the first exhibition of the Société Anonyme Coopérative des Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs in 1874, this third article evokes Édouard Béliard (1832-1912). Painter of the Batignolles group, son of an architect, very close to Zola, he received advice from Corot and Bonnat. Essentially a landscape painter, he painted very beautiful views of the Île de France and in particular of Pontoise, Lisle-Adam and their surroundings.
A friend of Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne, Édouard Béliard's dealer was Pierre Firmin Martin, nicknamed le père Martin, who was the provisional manager of the Société Anoyme des Artistes Peintres, Graveurs, Sculpteurs in 1874.
Edouard Béliard presented 4 and 8 paintings respectively at the first two Impressionist exhibitions, in 1874 and 1876.
Édouard Béliard's painting and in particular his snow effects are very delicate. A few rare characters appear there, unique testimonies of life in a universe where a certain nostalgia pierces. By his luminous touches and the presence on his canvases of assumed modern elements like factory chimneys, Édouard Béliard clearly finds his place in the ranks of the Impressionists, as attested by the novelist and art critic Paul Alexis. who described him as a painter of great merit.
Sensitive to Proudhonnian thought, Édouard Béliard's atypical career led him to enter politics and become mayor of Etampes between 1892 and 1900.
In his art history lectures, Fabrice Roy combines the past with the present, in a poetic and playful evocation of the French 19th century...
