DOI article:
Segard, Achille: Charles Cottet, painter of Breton life and scenes
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.43448#0287
Charles Cottet's Breton Pictures
“le cabaret en plein vent’7
BY CHARLES COTTET
they have to their account,
these low-built churches
bending down as it might
be to the earth before the
winds, those livid effects
of light, these women in
their black mantles, and
these primitive and ob-
scure men of uncom-
promising conscience.
Here he has found his true
expression, and through
these scenes he reveals
himself.
Brittany would seem to
be the land for which, as
artist, Cottet was predes-
tined, this country which
he may not leave for more
brilliant and happier
scenes. He returns, de¬
sonority ; they strike a note of tragedy like the
slow tolling of a funereal knell, and long drawn out
and prolonged in the memory as the muffled note
of a bell re-echoes at twilight over the surrounding
landscape.
There is, however, no deadness in these pic-
tures ; indeed, it is these very blacks which vivify
them. They form as it were the visual focus ;
they sound the dominant chord and gather up the
other colours, made richer by contrast of the sky,
the sea, the fields, the ruined edifices into a
unity of expression and a unity of sentiment.
What a magnificent effect
these blacks do give when
handled by a fine colourist
and when they play in the
ensemble of the composi¬
tion the leading rdle with
which an essentially medi¬
tative spirit invests them !
I picture Charles Cottet
arriving one day in
Brittany, and I imagine
him, still striving to give
complete expression to his
ideals, feeling, as he must
have felt, a kind of silent,
yet ardent, joy in the
presence of these rugged
landscapes, these sinister
shores and treacherous
bays whose names are
reminiscent of the dead
parts again, comes back and settles there, and once
more takes his departure, but ever and anon retraces
his footsteps towards Brittany, gradually coming to
realise that other lands can offer him nothing more
than a perhaps valuable contrast, a necessary
reaction to his mind, but that in Brittany and there
alone, in the solitude and melancholy reverie into
which his analytical faculties plunge him, can he
succeed in sounding to their uttermost depths the
eternal sorrows, the sombre sadness, and the essential
emotions of nature and of mankind. Cottet’s aim
has been to place himself through his art in the
“MARCHE BRETON ”
BY CHARLES COTTET
“le cabaret en plein vent’7
BY CHARLES COTTET
they have to their account,
these low-built churches
bending down as it might
be to the earth before the
winds, those livid effects
of light, these women in
their black mantles, and
these primitive and ob-
scure men of uncom-
promising conscience.
Here he has found his true
expression, and through
these scenes he reveals
himself.
Brittany would seem to
be the land for which, as
artist, Cottet was predes-
tined, this country which
he may not leave for more
brilliant and happier
scenes. He returns, de¬
sonority ; they strike a note of tragedy like the
slow tolling of a funereal knell, and long drawn out
and prolonged in the memory as the muffled note
of a bell re-echoes at twilight over the surrounding
landscape.
There is, however, no deadness in these pic-
tures ; indeed, it is these very blacks which vivify
them. They form as it were the visual focus ;
they sound the dominant chord and gather up the
other colours, made richer by contrast of the sky,
the sea, the fields, the ruined edifices into a
unity of expression and a unity of sentiment.
What a magnificent effect
these blacks do give when
handled by a fine colourist
and when they play in the
ensemble of the composi¬
tion the leading rdle with
which an essentially medi¬
tative spirit invests them !
I picture Charles Cottet
arriving one day in
Brittany, and I imagine
him, still striving to give
complete expression to his
ideals, feeling, as he must
have felt, a kind of silent,
yet ardent, joy in the
presence of these rugged
landscapes, these sinister
shores and treacherous
bays whose names are
reminiscent of the dead
parts again, comes back and settles there, and once
more takes his departure, but ever and anon retraces
his footsteps towards Brittany, gradually coming to
realise that other lands can offer him nothing more
than a perhaps valuable contrast, a necessary
reaction to his mind, but that in Brittany and there
alone, in the solitude and melancholy reverie into
which his analytical faculties plunge him, can he
succeed in sounding to their uttermost depths the
eternal sorrows, the sombre sadness, and the essential
emotions of nature and of mankind. Cottet’s aim
has been to place himself through his art in the
“MARCHE BRETON ”
BY CHARLES COTTET