Robert Antoine Pinchon

Portrait of Geneviève Pinchon in a Hat

Robert Antoine Pinchon was a French painter born in Rouen on 1 July 1886, and one of the most distinctive voices of early 20th-century Normandy. Celebrated above all for his landscapes, river views, townscapes, and the changing skies of the Seine valley, Pinchon developed a vividly personal language rooted in direct observation and an instinctive, highly refined sense of colour. From a young age he embraced a bold, Fauve-inflected palette, yet he remained faithful to his own course and, unlike several of his contemporaries, did not move into Cubism. His art is consistently driven by light: shifting atmospheres, flashes of brightness on stone and water, and the heightened colour sensations of autumn and dusk. Pinchon’s most important works include a sustained series devoted to the Seine, often around Rouen, alongside numerous views of Haute-Normandie in which the landscape becomes a stage for chromatic experimentation. His paint handling, both energetic and controlled, allowed him to convey movement and weather with remarkable immediacy while maintaining a strong sense of structure. Claude Monet is said to have admired him as “an astonishing hand in the service of a surprising eye,” a remark that neatly captures the balance in Pinchon’s work between spontaneity and precision. Beyond his studio practice, Pinchon was an active cultural figure in Rouen’s artistic life. He was elected to the Académie de Rouen in 1932 and later became its President in 1941, recognition of his standing within the region. His life was also marked by the upheavals of his time: mobilised during the First World War, he was wounded at Berry-au-Bac during the Battle of the Marne and later taken prisoner in the course of the fighting around Verdun. Pinchon died on 9 January 1943 in Bois-Guillaume, near Rouen. Today, he is widely regarded as a leading Norman colourist of his generation, an artist who translated familiar places into radiant, ever-changing impressions, and whose rare figure studies offer a particularly intimate counterpoint to a body of work dominated by landscape and light.