Galerie Paul Prouté

Lucien Simon was born in Paris in 1861 into a middle-class family living in the Saint-Sulpice district. As a young student at the Collège Bossuet and then the Lycée Louis le Grand, he passed his baccalauréat without difficulty, but hesitated for a long time about his professional future. A literature buff and fervent admirer of Flaubert and Maupassant, Lucien Simon wrote short stories and plays as an amateur. Initially tempted by the literary route, he eventually chose to study painting and entered the studio of Jules Didier, a painter of historical landscapes. He later joined the Académie Julian, where he became close friends with Georges Desvallières. Despite an honourable artistic education, it was all the more travel that shaped the young painter’s eye. He was fascinated by the works of Frans Hals, discovered during a stay in Holland in 1882, and by those of Rubens and Rembrandt, which he had the opportunity to see in Flanders in 1884. As a young man, Simon also looked closely at his contemporaries, particularly Manet and Baudry.
Lucien Simon went to Brittany for the first time when he was seventeen, but it wasn’t until the summer of 1892, when he stayed there with his in-laws, that the artist really discovered the region. This trip was a revelation for Lucien Simon, who from then on drew much of his inspiration from the Breton countryside, its people and its customs. Frequently staying at his father-in-law André Dauchez’s house in Kergaït, he bought a house in Sainte-Marine in 1901. Like a number of his contemporaries, Lucien Simon devoted a significant part of his work to depicting Brittany.