The mill

Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 41 x 66 cm

Louis Hervier painter, watercolourist and engraver was a delicate landscape painter. His father, the miniaturist Marc Antoine, a former pupil of Jean Louis David, taught him his first rudiments then he studied with Léon Cogniet, Descamps and Eugène Isabey.

He is supported and encouraged by Camille Corot. He borrows his motifs from Beauce, Ile de France, Picardy and the Midi but it is in Normandy where he goes regularly, that he draws most of his themes, seascapes, rural scenes, groves crossed by a river.

Hervier knew how to break with the models of painting in favor of his emotion in front of the motif; he asserts himself as an authentic pre-impressionist. With frank and fair touches, he constructs his landscape which he animates with a magnificently felt light.