SOLDTags: Albert de Belleroche chalk women
Belleroche was a founder member of the Salon d'Automne, exhibiting
alongside the Impressionists and associating with Emile Zola, Oscar
Wilde, Albert Moore, Renoir, Degas, Helleu and Toulouse-Lautrec. He
shared a studio with his friend, John Singer Sargent, whose handling of
pastel was to be of great inspiration to Belleroche. In turn,
Belleroche's sensitivity to tone and creation of form through the
modelling of light exerted an influence on Sargent. Belleroche's talent
as a painter was recognized by his contemporaries - Degas owned three
lithographs by Belleroche and in the early 1890s the French state
acquired a
painting for the Luxembourg Gallery. Roger Marx, the critic who
discovered Renoir, was amongst Belleroche's fervent admirers, referring
to him as 'le peintre des femmes decoiffées' (Gazette de Beaux-Arts,
XLX, Jan 1905).
Marx also fully acknowledged Belleroche's importance as painter-lithographer, writing in 1908: Belleroche
holds a premier position in the current renaissance of lithography. No
one since Eugene Carriere has equaled Belleroche's technique or his
understanding of lithography. He is a master.... Indeed he is a
painter-lithographer: he brings his subjects to life in moving light and
shwadows. His ink creates tones which reach the limits of the joyous
and profound... His art, born in a daylight which is its own
jstification, is created from love." (Roger Marx, Peintres-lithographes Contemporains:Albert Belleroche" Gazette des Beaux-Arts I, vol 39, 1908, p. 74.
