Pierre Bompard

Cliquez pour la version française (Fr)

It was towards the end of 2019 that I decided to look into  the history of our house which is located in the village of Mondion in the Vienne department of France. 

The Vienne has an archives service which makes many documents available online and among them are  the census records for the area. These records go back over a hundred years, but the most recent available was 1931 so this seemed like a good place to start my research. The records are not indexed but are simply scans of the original pages. Luckily our village of Mondion was never very large and so it was after only a few pages that I arrived at the entry for  our house. Living there, as would be expected for a small farm, was a farmer and his wife but also listed was Pierre Bompard born in 1890 in Verdun and his wife Juliette who both indicated their profession as "painter". Being British my knowledge of French is limited so I wasn't sure if that meant they were both artists or maybe they were more used to painting walls and skirting boards! 

The other thing that caught my attention was that Pierre Bompard was born in Verdun which was on the other side of France near the border with Luxembourg, whilst all the other inhabitants were born in Mondion itself or in one of the neighboring villages. A quick internet search revealed that Pierre Bompard was indeed an artist - and quite well known. Most of his works were scenes of boats and the Breton coastline but one stood out. It was the scene of a stable with cattle and chickens and was instantly recognizable as the stable attached to the back of our house. The arrangement of the beams and pillars had not changed over the years and from the way the light entered through the stable window I could say that it was painted in the late afternoon in summer. The image I had found was from a website for an auction house and it appeared that this work had been auctioned off several years ago, but I couldn't find out it's present whereabouts.

My next step was to find out why Pierre Bompard was living in our house in 1931, and to learn more about his life. The first page of the census documents contained a list of instructions concerning who should be included and it clearly stated that only permanent occupants should be included and not casual visitors. So Pierre and Juliette were not merely spending a few days there on holiday.

It appeared that the family of Juliette Bompard had run the farm in the past and that her sister Olive was now married to the current farmer Louis Bodin. Juliette's maiden name had been Marie "Juliette" Giraudeau and she had been born in the nearby village of Antran but somehow she had met Pierre Bompard and they were married on December 15, 1927 in Paris.

A website www.lesatamanes.com gave me a general idea of ​​Pierre Bompard's life.

"Pierre Bompard is a painter, engraver, illustrator, frescoist, French water colourist and lithographer born in 1890 in Verdun. It was at the Jullian Academy that Pierre Bompard was introduced to painting. He met Georges Braque, Dunoyer de Segonzac, and Legueult, among others. He then passed the entrance exam to the Ecole nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris and, during his studies, moved towards a sober and very structured realism. Bompard exhibited his first paintings in 1911 at the Salon des Indépendants. After the First World War, Bompard began to paint again and exhibited in 1924 at the Salon des Tuileries. He was quickly recognized as one of the future painters of Young French Painting, This movement stood out for its imagination and freedom from the painters of the Return to Order. Alongside Yves Alix, Georges Rouault, Maurice Asselin or Boussingault, it was distributed and exhibited by the renowned art dealer Paul Guillaume. He set up his workshop in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, 6 rue de la Saïda. His notoriety continued to grow and he obtained numerous orders for large wall decorations. The Lutetia hotel ordered decorations on the theme of the sea and ships for its lounges. In 1938, Bompard decorated the rotunda of the Collège de France with two allegories of Physics and Chemistry. He exhibited at the Salon d'Automne where he became a member of the committee. Passionate about the sea, his Lorraine ancestry did not prevent him from choosing Brittany as his second homeland. He painted the sea and sailors and his scenes of maritime life forged him an appreciable reputation. He moved to Carnac for a while. His Breton landscapes prove the attachment he felt for this region. He was appointed official painter of the navy in 1936. Bompard was chosen to decorate the large Salon of the Morbihan prefecture, in Vannes. He chose to represent the Saint-Fiacre du Faouët chapel, the passage of Saint-Armel and the castle of Josselin. In 1957, Pierre Bompard left for an eleven-month stay in French Polynesia. He was struck by the state of abandonment in which Paul Gauguin's tomb was located and proposed to the governor of Polynesia to restore it. Bompard then built at his own expense a funeral monument in red and black volcanic stones that can still be seen in the cemetery of Hiva Oa. Bompard brought back numerous works from this stay, including many watercolors. Pierre Bompard was marked by his meeting, at the Jullian Academy, of Georges Braque. Not all his works bear the imprint of cubism, because Bompard knew how to evolve with his time. But they all have a great rigor in the composition, a sober palette put at the service of the painter's design. Its landscapes in particular, his scenes of the countryside or the life of sailors are treated with great attention to masses and volumes, and highlighted with muted colors. His decorative work is more exuberant, but still very structured. These are in his works at sea, painted during his engagements as a marine painter that Bompard developed a completely different facet, with very cheerful colors, luminous watercolors in which he let himself be carried by the whiteness of the paper as a source of light. Bompard died in Paris in 1962. He rests in VERDUN "

So I now knew a little more about Pierre Bompard's life.

I also knew that he had written a little book about his trip to Polynesia and the restoration of Paul Gauguin's tomb entitled "My Mission to the Marquesas". I was lucky enough to find an example for sale online in a bookstore in Paris and was delighted to find when it arrived that there was a handwritten message from his wife Juliette Bompard that said: 

"To the lovely Jacqueline and Herve Baille - in remembrance of their friendship and the crazy days of Oceanie, affectionately Juliette Bompard."

Herve Baille was appointed Painter of the Navy in 1947. Member of the Committee of Cartoonists, he exhibited at the Salon des humoristes and appeared at art exhibitions in Lyon, Bordeaux, Barcelona, ​​Brussels and Berlin. The Air France company called on him to illustrate its posters and flyers in the 1940s. In 1955, he created a series of advertisements for "La vache qui rit."

Another section of Pierre Bompard's book gives an idea of ​​the circle in which he lived. He wrote:

It must also be said that I was lucky to be involved in various artistic circles where talent competed for fame. Through my friend, the cubist sculptor Henri Laurens, I came to know not just by acquaintance , before 1914, Serge Diaghuilef, Nijinsky, Pavlowa and Trouanowa. I got to know the cubists of the "Golden Section" there with Braque, Juan Gris, Picasso (from that happy period) ... In the independent world, I frequented Paul Signac and Maximilien Luce. Finally, more recently, a great friendship bonded me with André Derain with whom I organized the retrospective at Salon d'Automne, with the help of another friend, Dunoyer de Segonzac.

Amongst this list of names, I was then lucky to find an image of a photograph probably taken around 1935 showing André Derain and his wife Alice with Pierre and Juliette Bompard and Pierre Devaux in fancy dress costumes.

My initial goal of finding out about the history of our house had taken me down many different roads, and so far I had only looked at 1931!

Later I finally found and bought the stable painting and it has now returned to its original home. On the back of the photo, it says it was originally shown at an exhibition in Paris in 1928. So Pierre Bompard's presence with us in 1931 was therefore not the first time he had stayed there.