''Le vieillard'' (''The old man'') is an 1894
painting by
Léon Pourtau
Léon Pourtau (1868 – 4 July 1898) was a French painter and musician.
At the age of 15, an apprentice typesetter, Pourtau left Bordeaux for Paris. He worked in a small restaurant on the Rue Lafayette, where musicians gathered Orchestr ...
in the collection of the
Museo Soumaya,
Mexico City.
This work represents an old man in a deserted French street, during a
curfew of
Prussian occupation. The man walks with
crutches, probably with a physical wound. The scene is illuminated by the explosion of a bomb that produces an intense yellow colour that breaks the darkness of the night.
This work was produced in the context of the defeat of the
French Republic
France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its metropolitan area ...
to the
German Empire
The German Empire (),Herbert Tuttle wrote in September 1881 that the term "Reich" does not literally connote an empire as has been commonly assumed by English-speaking people. The term literally denotes an empire – particularly a hereditary ...
after the
Franco-Prussian War. Pourtau was a student of
Georges Seurat and this work shows influence of
pointillism
Pointillism (, ) is a technique of painting in which small, distinct dots of color are applied in patterns to form an image.
Georges Seurat and Paul Signac developed the technique in 1886, branching from Impressionism. The term "Pointillism" wa ...
and
divisionism
Divisionism, also called chromoluminarism, was the characteristic style in Neo-Impressionist painting defined by the separation of colors into individual dots or patches which interacted optically..Homer, William I. ''Seurat and the Science of P ...
. The technique employed by Pourtau to achieve a contrast between the dark and the distinct colours in the work is
impasto oil painting, which involves applying thick layers of paint. It is close in style to
German Expressionism.
References
1894 paintings
Post-impressionist paintings
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