Victor Charreton

Biography of Victor Charreton ( 1864-1936 )

"This landscape painter of rare quality, a real hinge between two centuries agitated by the most feverish research, remains jealously independent. " Geneviève Jamet-Cortat, Curator of the Musées de France.

Victor Charreton was born in 1864, the same year as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, one year after Paul Signac and three before Pierre Bonnard. He came from a wealthy family and became a lawyer. Thanks to his marriage, he discovered the landscapes of Auvergne, which he painted and thus made his debut with the exhibition of a view of the Puy-de-Dôme at the Salon de la Société lyonnaise des beaux-arts in 1894. He then decided to sell his solicitor's office in Lyon to devote himself fully to painting. 

A friend of Auguste Rodin, Claude Monet and Pierre Bonnard, with whom he co-founded the Salon d'automne in 1903, Victor Charreton quickly became very successful, mainly painting landscapes from different locations, captured in different seasons. He travelled and painted from the ground up in Dauphiné, Provence, Creuse, Brittany, but also in Paris, the Maghreb and especially in Murol in Auvergne, where he became the founder and master of a group of artists known as the "Murol landscape school". In 1929, he founded the Bourgoin-Jallieu Museum near Grenoble, which today holds the largest Victor Charreton collection.