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Signed ‘Théodore Lévigne’ (lower right).
Sizes:
Frame: 51.5 × 60 cm | 20.3 × 23.6 in
Artwork: 38.5 × 46.5 cm | 15.2 × 18.3 in
A stone bridge crosses a stream at the foot of green hills; poplars and willows stand along the bank, and beyond them a long violet mountain closes the view under a sky of rolling grey cloud. The picture is painted with the quiet, exact observation of the Lyon school — every plane of the landscape given its own tone, the light diffused and cool.
Théodore Lévigne (1848–1912), born in Noirétable and trained at the Lyon École des Beaux-Arts and briefly under Cabanel and Gérôme in Paris, was one of the most versatile Lyonnais painters of his generation: landscapes, hunting scenes, portraits and military subjects. His landscapes of the Loire hills, the Dauphiné and the Bugey, often in muted half-tones like these, are his most personal work.
Signed ‘Théodore Lévigne’ at the lower right.
Private Collection, Spain.
Oil on canvas, framed. A network of age craquelure across the sky and a few fine surface scratches in the centre; the paint layer is stable; the ornate gilt frame with minor losses. Please contact us to request a detailed Condition Report.
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Théodore Lévigne was born in Noirétable in the Forez hills in 1848, the son of a bootmaker, and grew up in the Saint-Jean quarter of Lyon, where his family moved in 1856. He entered the Lyon École des Beaux-Arts at twelve and at fifteen won its highest award, the Laurier d’Or; a scholarship from the city took him to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the studios of Cabanel and Gérôme.
Disappointed by Paris, he returned to Lyon, regained his stipend in 1867 and spent the rest of his career there, exhibiting at the Lyon and Paris Salons.
Lévigne painted everything — portraits, still lifes, hunting and military scenes, genre pictures of Lyonnais life — but his reputation rests on his landscapes: the misty waterways and wintry half-tones of the Lyon countryside, the Loire and Dauphiné hills, and, in contrast, the sunlit Mediterranean coast. The decorations he painted for the Peillard estate near Noirétable have been the subject of a recent study.
Rediscovered in recent years by the auction houses, he is represented in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon and in the museums of Roanne and Saint-Étienne. He died in Lyon in 1912.
Highlights of the Aurora & Athena autumn sale on 17 October 2026: Bridget Tichenor, Nicholas Roerich, Konstantin Korovin, Gerard Sekoto, Jan Zrzavý, Pan Yuliang, a Miró lithograph and the painters of the École de Paris.
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