Raoul Edmond Marie

Raoul Edmond Marie was born in Paris in 1852. Around 1860 his family moved to Bougival, the village on the Seine west of Paris where his parents kept a tobacconist’s shop, and Bougival remained his home and his subject for the rest of his life.

He painted landscapes and genre scenes, above all calm views of the river and its banks between Bougival, Croissy and Saint-Germain-en-Laye: towpaths under plane trees, the Marly machine and the aqueduct, barges and washhouses, the hillsides above the water. He worked in the open air with an even, careful light and a palette of greens and greys that owes more to the plein-air realism of the 1880s than to the Impressionists who had painted the same stretch of river a decade earlier.

Marie showed his work at the Paris salons, notably the Salon des Indépendants, and also painted in Brittany: Pont-Aven and Névez appear among his dated subjects of the 1870s and 1880s, and a watercolour of 1885 was made in Milan. His Seine paintings record the villages west of Paris in the years when they were still the weekend countryside of the capital.

He died at Bougival in 1925 (some dealers’ records give 1850 for his birth and 1926 for his death). His work is held by the Musée municipal of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, which devoted its ‘work of the month’ to one of his Bougival views in 2025, and appears regularly in French regional sales.