PAUL SURTEL (1893-1985)
The mont Ventoux (1, 911m - 6, 270ft)
France (Provence-Alpe-Côte-d'Azur)
1. The mont Ventoux from north, oil on cardboard, Private collection, France
2. The mont Ventoux from south-west, oil on cardboard, Private collection, France
3. The mont Ventoux from west , oil on cardboard, (not signed), Private collection, France
4. The mont Ventoux from south, oil on cardboard, Private collection, France
5. The mont Ventoux from Les Alpilles, oil on cardboard, Private collection, Switzerland
One can notice that there is not a single tree on those paintings of the Mont Ventoux, which is no longer the case today. This is the result of an intensive reforestation policy carried out by the French State services on this mountain which had been devastated by the forestry exploitation in the late 19th and the early 20th century.
The mountain
Mont Ventoux (1, 911m - 6, 270ft), Ventor in Latin, is located in the French department of Vaucluse (Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur). It is about 25 kilometers long on an east-west for 15 kilometers wide on a north-south axis. Nicknamed the Giant of Provence, it is the culmination of the Monts du Vaucluse, the ultimate link of the Southern Alps and the highest peak of Vaucluse. Its geographical isolation makes it visible over great distances.
The painter
Paul Surtel is a French painter and epistolier, the son of a family of coffee makers and restaurateurs living in the Paris region. Fernand Maillaud, the "good master", a landscape painter, very good friend of Paul's father, introduced him very early to painting. In1904, Paul Surtel went up to Paris,at the Lycée Charlemagne and the Arts Décoratifs, but especially at the "l'école buissonnière", visiting museums and exhibitions in the galleries of Paris instead to go to school ! He then became passionate for Rembrandt and especially Corot (who greatly influenced him).At the end of the First World War, he was enlisted as an artilleryman (at the beginning of 1917). From Seine and Marne in Lorraine, Belgium, Somme, he went from offensive to cantonments. Then he allows himself to be taken back by nature, draws, leaves emotion to guide his hand, the craft acquiring itself by dint of attention and work.
Demobilized in Hyères, Paul found a forestry foreman occupation in the Var, and discovered the Provençal nature that would become the source of his work and would make him known as a "regionalist painter", a rather pejorative label to carry in France until very recently. In 1937, during one of his first exhibitions in Oran (Algeria, at that time French department) Paul Surtel meets Elia Duc, a young teacher in a small the algerian city. They married in 1939. After that follows 48 years of passionate creation and happiness, especially in Peipin, a tiny village in the Alpes of Haute Provence where the couple settled. His paintings radiate tenderness, lightness, effusion, through impalpable matter. After two years in Quercy, then three in Orange, the family settles in Carpentras (Vaucluse), in 1951, where Elia is named professor.
From the 60s, Paul Surtel added landscapes, still-lifes and portraits.