Rene Rousseau-Decelle

RENÉ-ARCHILLE ROUSSEAU-DECELLE La Roche-sur-Yon 1881 – 1964 Préfailles René Rousseau-Decelle trained at the Académie Julian in Paris, then from 1899 at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts, where he was the student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Luc-Olivier Merson, Marcel Baschet and Gabriel Ferrier. From them he learnt the academic technique favoured by the Salon. This education enabled the artist to produce extremely varied and technically very skilful works over the course of his career. He was capable of rendering huge panoramas depicting more than 500 people, each figure highly detailed, and often an exquisite portrait. Rousseau-Decelle painted portraits throughout his long career; of his friends and relatives, numerous politicians and important local patrons. But it was landscape for which he seemed to have the greatest passion, recording the memory of his travels: to Italy, the Pyrenees, the Midi, but especially the Côte Vendéenne, where he regularly stayed at his house in Préfailles. He also produced great decorative compositions, in particular for the dome of the Grand Théâtre de Reims and for a room at the Town Hall in the city of his birth, La Roche-sur-Yon in the Vendée. Rousseau-Decelle exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon, as well as regional exhibitions (the Salon Yonnais, Noirmoutier, d’Angers, Fontenay-le-Comte). He was made Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1926.