Besançon - Les Brenets (after Tanconville)

 

Christophe Adrien (Count) Regley de Koenigsegg

  1823 - 1903 (biography)

c. 1895  

watercolor 

6 x 4 1/4" image size 

not signed, as usual 

1 of 1 unique 

"d'apres Tancouville" in ink on tan wove backing sheet, lower right 

 

white wove 

 

 

13193 

$400.00 

After the advertising poster for Besancon-les-Bains health spa and resort in Besancon, France, in the Jura mountains. Tourism in late 19th century eastern France often highlighted neighboring Swiss villages. Here, the majority of the poster features a scene along the Doubs River as it meanders through Les Brenets, a small Swiss municipality not far from Besancon. A small red boat holds two women and a man preparing to take a large haul of green hay to where it will be processed for winter feed.

The original artist was Henri Ganier (French, 1845-1936). He would later use the pseudonym "Tanconville" in honor of the village where he raised his family. Before pursuing art he studied law, and served in the Franco-German war. He then he worked for several years as a magistrate before retiring in 1893 to focus on a career as an artist and graphic designer. For over thirty years he was employed by the Compagnie des chemins de fer de Paris à Lyon et à la Méditerranée (PLM) tourism company, designing posters and other tourism ephemera.

A specialist in Alsatian military drawings and Napoleonic uniforms, Tanconville, a Francophile artist, was expelled from Alsace in 1914. With the outbreak of the First World War, escape to Geneva, then joined his eldest son in Chambéry. He then retired to Baume-les-Dames after his younger son, a Captain of the 140th Infantry Regiment, was killed in action in 1917. Henri Ganier-Tanconville died there in 1936.