1868
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Portrait of Jean Léglise, Merchant, Mayor of Saint-Martin-de-Seignanx is a 1868 unspecified by Léon Bonnat, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
This is a portrait of Jean Léglise, a man in a dark suit sitting in a red chair. His hands rest on the armrests, and he looks straight at you with a calm, serious face. Léglise wasn’t just a mayor—he made his money selling wood for the new railroads in southwestern France. The painting was one of two: Bonnat also painted Léglise’s wife the same year. You can see how the artist paid close attention to the folds of the suit and the texture of the chair. If you like this, look up *chiaroscuro*—the way Bonnat uses light and shadow to shape the face.
Jean Léglise (1813–1876) was the mayor of Saint-Martin-de-Seignanx, a small town near Bayonne in southwestern France. A trader in wood, he made a fortune from the construction of the railroad between Bayonne and Bordeaux. Bonnat painted a companion portrait of Léglise's wife, Maire-Augusta-Julie Léglise (1812–1894). The latter portrait, also signed and dated 1868, was donated to the Musée Carnavalet in Paris in 2001.
Bonnat was an academic painter as well as a teacher who encouraged freedom of expression and execution. He recommended traveling to Madrid to visit the Prado Museum, introduced Paris to Spanish painting technique, and influenced the evolution of French painting.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Léon Joseph Florentin Bonnat (French pronunciation: ; 20 June 1833 – 8 September 1922) was a French painter, Grand Officer of the Légion d'honneur, art collector and professor at the Ecole des Beaux Arts.
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