France Leplat 1895-1953

France Leplat was born in Lille in 1895 to a French father and a Canadian mother descended from the novelist Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon. Drawn to the arts from an early age, she divided her youth between music and drawing, winning first prize in piano at the Conservatoire of her native city before devoting herself entirely to painting.

In 1913, she entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Lille, where, five years later, she was awarded the first Montallut Prize in painting and sculpture. Thanks to a scholarship, she continued her studies in Paris and, in 1919, settled at La Ruche, a celebrated centre of the artistic avant-garde (fig. 1). There, she became one of the most highly regarded pupils of the sculptor Alfred Boucher, who encouraged her talent and helped bring her work to wider attention.

From 1925 onwards, she exhibited at the Palais Rameau in Lille and soon earned recognition for her talents as a portraitist. In 1928, she travelled to England, where she painted the portraits of several prominent figures, including General Pinney, Gaston Dubosc and Prefect Tourner. She made her debut at the Salon des Indépendants in 1929, followed by the Salon d’Hiver in 1930. Solo exhibitions were devoted to her work at the Duguet and Ashberg galleries in 1930 and 1931, and she enjoyed considerable critical success, as reflected in the following lines published in Le Monde illustré: “There is both heart and fire in the work of Madame France Leplat […]. The subtle interplay of colours lends a singular poetry to this impeccable draughtsmanship.”¹

After turning her attention and her brushes to the urban proletariat of the French capital, frequent stays in Brittany inspired her landscapes and seascapes. The birth of her daughter in 1939 profoundly renewed her artistic inspiration, giving rise to a moving series of children’s portraits and family scenes.

Following the Second World War, she produced numerous charcoal drawings, pastels and studies of dancers, partly inspired by her daughter’s dance classes. Captured from life, these works convey movement with remarkable accuracy, tenderness and great poetic sensitivity. Long known only to a limited audience, her œuvre has been rediscovered in recent decades, notably through the exhibition devoted to her at the Musée du Montparnasse in 2008.

¹ Jean Bever, Le Monde illustré, 26 December 1931