Overview
“For my part, I certainly don’t put myself on a par with master Michel — but I definitely don’t therefore imitate Michel either. (Vincent Van Gogh to Theo, 2 March 1884).
Vincent Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo reveal his intimacy with and admiration for Georges Michel’s work. Above everything, Van Gogh revered the landscapes Michel imbued with beauty, sentiments, and dramatic tension. Vincent and Michel not only shared the same sensibility, but also the habit of compulsive, almost obsessive sketching.
Today, little is known about the master’s life. As the 2018 Michel exhibition explained, most of the information we know comes from the story recounted by his widow to his first biographer, Alfred Sensier in 1873, thirty years after the artist’s death. According to her, Michel came from a humble family in Paris, his father worked at the great market, Les Halles. He first trained with the history painter Leduc, an associate professor at the Académie de Saint Luc and then with Carle Vernet and Nicolas-Antoine Taunay. In the 1780s, Michel met Jean-Baptiste Marie Roslin, Baron of Ivry, an amateur painter, who became his patron. At the turn of the 19th century, Michel worked as a restorer for the e influential dealer Jean-Baptiste Lebrun and at his request, made nearly perfect copies after paintings by Dutch landscape artists such as Jacob van Ruisdael.
In 1791, Michel debuted at the Paris Salon, thanks to a new rule authorizing independent painters to submit works. He remained an active exhibitor until 1814 without obtaining much notoriety, although this may have helped him to secure from the State the job of restoring the Dutch and Flemish paintings at the Louvre. Until about 1808, he collaborated with other French artists, such as Jean-Louis Demarne and Jacques-François Swebach, both painters of popular landscapes and genre scenes. Michel briefly taught painting in his own studio but decided in 1813 to follow the footsteps of Lebrun and many other painters at the time, and opened a small shop of curiosités, furniture and paintings. His career as a dealer was however short-lived. He sold his boutique seven years later upon the death of his last son. The heartbreak led him to become a recluse, only existing to paint. He could only be seen outdoors when sketching Paris’ untouched surrounding countryside, such as Montmartre - earning him the nickname of “The Ruisdael of Montmartre”- the plains of Saint-Denis and the villages of Vaugirard or Grenelle.
Michel worked relentlessly and produced an immense corpus, and except for a few early paintings, his works are unsigned. In 1842-1843, falling ill, the sale of his studio consisting of more than 1000 studies and 2000 drawings was organized. Moved by Michel’s humility, dramatic landscapes and small plein air studies, Charles Émile Jacque and Jules Dupré, two painters of the Barbizon School, made several acquisitions. In fact, Michel’s treatment of light, stormy skies and practice “sur le motif” in nature christened him a precursor of the Barbizon school and an inspiration for a future generation of artists, which included Vincent Van Gogh.