Casimir Reymond undated.
Oil on canvas | 83 x 69 cm
Grenette Period
Characters
Inventory CR-73 | Colection Knébel, Switzerland
Photo: François De Grandi
Artistic features
Subject:
This work is emblematic of the primary inspiration of Casimir Reymond's pictorial work: the gestures of the work in the fields, the rural and artisanal world of Vaulion in the jura vaudois, the village where he was born in 1893.
Composition:
Three planes for three elements: the group of harvesters in the foreground, the chariot and scattered figures in the background. And finally the hills of the upper Vaulion in the third plane, surmounted by a triangle of blue sky defining a symmetry strictly aligned with the men loading the chariot.
On the other hand, the arrangement of the figures of the group in the foreground in no way follows this symmetry of the landscape, which reinforces the presence of their laborious gestures.
These three planes are not defined in relation to each other by any vanishing lines, but only by the all-encompassing surface of the wheat field, which thus magnifies the symbiosis of the figures with nature.
Medium:
The touch is still wise. It remains subject to the flatness, which Casimir declines in a range of adjacent surfaces of resplendent chromatic coherence.
Pallet:
A choice of colours restricted to two major scales: one of yellow tones for the fields, the other of brown tones for the characters: both scales remaining closely in the same tone, the browns being derived from the yellows by value reduction (addition of dark complements).
Background
Period:
Casimir is still a student at the municipal school of fine arts in Geneva: here we see that he assiduously puts into practice what his master Eugène Gillard taught him in composition and pictorial technique.
This composition was certainly part of the Grenette exhibition in 1913, where Casimir Reymond revealed to the public more than one hundred and eighty works.
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