Picturing Places and Spaces

Louis Neillot captured a sunny day in the countryside near La Roche in the commune of Meillard in central France. Neillot lived in this area most of his life and chose views like this for many paintings. The distant hills look blue and only a sliver of the sky is visible. The artist focuses on the fields and the farm with its whitewashed buildings. The warm colors suggest the stillness of a hot summer day in this region of France. The two trees and the red diagonal in the foreground contrast with the repeating horizontal lines that demarcate the fields and the distant hills. Neillot uses large brushstrokes throughout, especially evident in the repeated lines representing grasses in the immediate foreground.

Louis Neillot was born in Vichy, France, and he studied at the municipal art school. In 1917 during World War I, he was called to serve in the military and suffered from exposure to chemical weapons. After a year-long recovery in a hospital, he went to Paris and worked as a draftsman while attending art classes at night. Neillot's first solo exhibition was in 1922, and he often participated in exhibitions during the course of his career. In 1924, he began to spend more time outside of Paris where he sketched from nature in the Bourbonnais region in central France, a practice that continued through the rest of his life. In the 1960s and 1970s, his paintings were shown at the International Galleries in Chicago, and in 1973 he had an exhibition at the Morse Caponi Gallery in Detroit.