Pierre Pignolat

Fisherman by the river

Pierre Pignolat is a Swiss painter of French origin. He was born on May 22, 1838 in Geneva and died on March 12, 1913 in the same city. Pierre Pignolat distinguished himself above all as a landscape painter, but also painted still lifes and portraits. After an apprenticeship as an engraver in Geneva, he took lessons from Barthélemy Menn (1815-1893) at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva. For many years, he worked in various trades (in parallel with his artistic activity) to support himself. In 1880 (establishment in 1881), he was appointed figure professor at the École des Beaux-Arts, succeeding the painter Auguste Baud-Bovy, a position he held until 1910, training a whole generation of Geneva painters, including Maurice Barraud and Edouard Vallet. Pignolat distinguished himself as a master of the intimate landscape, in the wake of Jean-Baptiste Corot and the Barbizon School. He is practically contemporary with the Impressionists, who will lead him to lighten his palette in his later work. His paintings have some similarities with the first way of Ferdinand Hodler (another pupil of Menn). Of a solitary temperament, he stayed away from the pictorial movements that asserted themselves at the turn of the century, such as symbolism, cubism or expressionism, deepening his own way, bringing a maximum of luminosity and poetry into his paintings, giving his landscapes their characteristic "velvety", while maintaining a solid composition. His works can be found in several Swiss museums, including the Museum of Art and History in Geneva and the Museum Oskar Reinhart am Stadtgarten in Winterthur. He is considered one of the best landscape painters of the Geneva School of Painting, and his charcoals are also highly appreciated for their great richness of shades.