Pierre Emmanuel Damoye

Damoye studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in the studio of Léon Bonnat, one of the foremost figure painters and portraitists of the late nineteenth-century. Damoye, however, seems to have committed himself to landscape art from the beginning of his career. His earliest dated works from the late 1860s also clearly reveal the influence of both Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Charles-François Daubigny, from whom he acquired both a brighter range of colors and a looser, more ‘impressionist’ brush style. And, although he was cognizant of the example of Corot and Daubigny, he built his repertoire of compositions and favored sites quite independently of the two ‘old masters’ of river landscape, thus developing a very personalized color scheme.

He is also one of the principal artists associated with the ‘school of Pontoise’, a group of young landscapists who painted primarily along the riverbanks of the Seine and Oise Rivers, north of Paris, often establishing homes in Pontoise. He also painted the river banks and upland plateaus of the Oise and Seine basins, worked frequently in Picardy and throughout the great Loire valley. He also made at least one trip to the Normandy coast.