Honoré Gleizes 1855-1920

Born in 1855 in Ariège, in the heart of the Midi-Pyrénées, Honoré Gleizes moved to Paris at a young age to pursue an artistic career. Settling in Courbevoie with his family, he frequented painters’ studios and quickly developed an activity as a portraitist and landscape painter, adopting a style close to the still-emerging Impressionism. With the exception of a participation in the Salon des Indépendants in 1895, he initially kept his distance from the major Parisian Salons.

Above all, he played a crucial role as an informal teacher to his nephew Albert Gleizes, introducing him from an early age to drawing and to painting en plein air along the banks of the Seine in Neuilly, thereby exerting a decisive influence on his artistic development. In 1903, he exhibited a significant group of eight landscapes at the Salon des Indépendants. Several of their evocative titles, Après l’orage (After the Storm) (cat. no. 968), Derniers rayons (Last Rays) (cat. no. 970), Effet de matin (Morning Effect) (cat. no. 971), clearly reflect his Impressionist concerns. He repeated the experience the following year at the same Salon with six new canvases in a similar vein, striving to capture the shifting effects of light directly from nature.

In 1911, when the first Cubist exhibitions provoked public outrage, Albert Gleizes took refuge for a time with his uncle Honoré in Courbevoie. This coincided with the latter’s curious decision to adopt the pseudonym Auclair, under which he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants between 1911 and 1913. Although he never achieved public recognition comparable to that of his nephew, Honoré Gleizes occasionally shared exhibition walls with the young avant-garde, notably by presenting three landscapes at the Salon de la Section d’Or, the landmark exhibition organized in October 1912 at the Galerie La Boétie by the Puteaux Group, in parallel with the Salon d’Automne.