Jean Puy

The French painter Jean Puy, born in 1876 in Roanne, belongs to the circle of the Fauves. Within this movement, however, the French painter Jean Puy occupies a rather quiet and independent position. After his study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, he moved to Paris in 1898, where he visited the Académie Julian and worked in the milieu of Eugène Carrière. There he met, among others, Henri Matisse, André Derain and Albert Marquet. He had already begun exhibiting early at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne; his participation in the 1905 Salon d’Automne linked him with the group of artists soon described as the ‘Fauves’. Characteristic of his painting is a fusion of impressionistically trained observation of nature and the freer, more colour-intensive language of French modernism. Landscapes, nudes, interiors and still lifes are among his preferred motifs. Unlike some of his artist friends, Puy sought less radical sharpness and instead a balanced painting in which colour, light and composition stand in quiet tension with one another.