Alphonse Georges Fournier 1865-1931

Born in 1855 in Paris, Faubourg Saint-Martin, into a well-off family of merchants from the 10th arrondissement, Alphonse Georges Fournier studied at the Lycée Stanislas and then at the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures from 1877 to 1879. He began a career as an engineer, serving as a railway inspector in Pau from 1880 to 1885. Attracted to the arts, and likely encouraged by his architect brother Ernest, he took over the artistic direction of the Pierre-Claude Poussin Faience Factory in Bourg-la-Reine in 1886 and became its owner in 1888. Despite participating in the 1889 Exposition Universelle, where Fournier presented vases, tableware, and decorative tiles, the enterprise went bankrupt the same year.

Fournier then made the decisive choice to dedicate himself fully to painting, setting up his own studio at 90 Rue d’Assas in Paris, in the 6th arrondissement. After studying at the Académie Julian and with painter Auguste Joseph Delécluse, he exhibited almost every year at the Salon des Indépendants from 1895 onward, and at the Salon des Artistes Français starting in 1903. He quickly specialized in views of Paris and its immediate suburbs, adopting the impressionist technique of broken brushstrokes and light colors in both pastel and oil.

From 1896, he participated in avant-garde exhibitions of Impressionist and Symbolist painters organized by the Galerie Le Barc de Boutteville on Rue Le Peletier in Paris. In 1897, the gallery hosted his first solo exhibition, presenting seventy-four works—paintings, pastels, and watercolors—all depicting Paris and its surroundings. Balancing life between the capital and Versailles, where he also maintained a studio, Fournier regularly traveled to Brittany for study. In 1913, he built his own holiday home, Kerlann, in Concarneau, featuring a large second-floor studio with an east-facing glass roof to take advantage of the morning light. Living next to painters Fernand Legout-Gérard and Alfred Guillou, as well as the couple Leuze-Hirschfeld, he gradually turned toward rural and Breton-themed subjects, which achieved a certain success.

The two works we present belong directly to the early years of Georges Fournier’s production, during which he frequented the avant-garde circles of the Barc de Boutteville gallery. The first (cat. 1) is an oil on canvas dated 1895, depicting a wide Parisian boulevard, likely Boulevard Saint-Michel, captured on a cold, damp winter day amid bustling activity. Bare trees frame Morris columns and small kiosks covered with advertisements, aligned along the sidewalk in a subtle perspective that guides the viewer’s eye toward a square or monument marking the street. Fournier’s modern, loose brushwork conveys the atmosphere of the Parisian street, the reflections of puddles on the wet avenue, and the throngs of citizens, including passengers boarding a black omnibus visible to the left.

The second work (cat. 2) is a rare pastel of impressionist leaning, capturing the ephemeral light of the late afternoon. The more open urban layout, set on a gentle slope, suggests a Montmartre street. Fournier skillfully renders the yellow reflections of light on water flowing along the gutter. Beneath unlit street lamps, three young children carrying school satchels hurry along, reflecting direct observation from life and a high degree of technical mastery. Critic Léon Roger-Milès praised Fournier in the preface to the catalogue of his 1897 solo exhibition: “A colorist, Mr. Fournier is, with genuine power and bold frankness, particularly in these provincial corners, and especially in Paris, which he loves to surprise at twilight, in rainy weather; he affirms his wish to achieve vivid color without crude brutality, and sonorous without ceasing to be harmonious. Many of his views are nearly perfect, with their fortunate arrangements, colors that sparkle, and the bustling figures and animals, offering a true vision of life.”