THE MASTERPIECES OF THE LEON-DIERX ART GALLERY : Antoine ROUSSIN
Antoine Louis ROUSSIN
Avignon, 3 March 1819 - Saint-Denis (Réunion), 18 September 1894
A sergeant in the French naval infantry, Roussin arrived on Bourbon island in 1842 and settled there for good in the following year, when he decided to leave the army. He then took up the post of art teacher in Saint-Benoit in the east of the island, also gaining the recognition of the local press as a talented young artist.
In 1846, after marrying a Creole, he left Saint-Benoit and settled in Saint-Denis. In the same year, he came across an abandoned lithograph press, rehabilitated it and started producing lithographs. For over 40 years, while continuing to work as a painter, Roussin produced a collection of images unique on the island, first of all entitled Souvenirs de l’île Bourbon then the Album de la Réunion.
Also working as a printer, journalist and art teacher at the imperial high school, Roussin was one of the important figures on the cultural scene in Reunion from the 1840s until his death in 1894.
His Souvenirs de l’île Bourbon (which after 1848 became Souvenirs de l’île de la Réunion) consists of 144 lithographs, representing landscapes, public monuments, personalities and the island’s fauna and flora. From 1856 to 1876, he devoted his time to a new published work: l’Album de l’île de la Réunion. With over 200 articles and almost 400 lithographs, this collection of documents and images is unique in the history of literature and art in Reunion. It was re-edited once again between 1879 and 1886.
Today, his lithographs are the main reference documents for the period and his iconic documents are among those most commonly used to illustrate the history of the island.
La Cathédrale de Saint-Denis (The cathedral of Saint-Denis) , Antoine Louis ROUSSIN
1877
Oil on canvas
81 x 110 cm
Inv 1974.04.01
Antoine Louis Roussin produced a large number of painted or photographed portraits, but his paintings of landscapes, of which very few examples subsist, remain fairly unknown to us. This painting depicting the cathedral is a rare example and an important element of the collection in the Leon-Dierx art gallery.
This was not the artist’s first drawing of the monument: the first of his lithographs dates back to 1847 and is one of the illustrations included in his work Album de l’île de La Réunion. This religious edifice, the construction of which was finished in 1832, is located in the centre of Saint-Denis, the main town of Reunion island.
The cathedral, which is the main focus of the painting, dominates the middle-ground of the composition, lit up by the rays of sunlight at the end of the day, coming in from the left of the picture. Its vertical movement is emphasised by the palm trees growing around the edge of the square, which also reinforce the rather clumsy perspective towards the right of the picture.
The urban environment serves as a pretext for representing a multitude of little scenes disseminated in the foreground and middle-ground of the picture. The attitude of the somewhat stiff figures, carefully portrayed with the aim of adding a picturesque touch to the composition, is somewhat unnatural. These are actually details copied from his lithographs.
