Antoine GADAN
 ( Seurre, 1854 – Bône, 1934)

 Mount Eydough and the Ruisseau d'Or valley, near Bône - Algeria
 Oil on canvas
 Signed lower left
 48.5 x 81 cm

 Antoine Gadan, born in Seurre in Côte d'Or, learned his trade as a painter in his native country, in a self-taught manner, and some early works representing the Burgundy countryside still bear witness to this, but it was in his adopted country, Algeria, that he developed his exceptional talent as a landscaper.

 A whole part of the Gadan family, of modest origins – his father was a tavern keeper – left for Algeria to seek a better life and the young painter, then aged twenty-seven, stayed in Marseilles awaiting embarkation, with his parents, his brother, his wife and his first son Charles, who was born there in November 1880.

 The artist settled with his family "in a small street in the suburbs, parallel to Avenue Célestin Bourgoin, almost exactly behind the church of Sainte Anne. The house, simple like him, was almost buried in the greenery and flowers, and his studio was without the slightest pomp, at the end of the lush garden" (Louis Armand, Bône, son histoire, ses histoires, Constantine, Imprimerie Damrémont, 1957, p.214-215).

 In the countryside around Bône, his love of nature was heightened, everything contributed to the blossoming of his temperament in search of harmony. He immediately loved the luminous purity of the region, this wild and gentle moorland, dotted with oleanders, asphodels or tufts of rushes, these rounded mountains, these young children leading their flocks, and never tired of painting them. A commentator from the Revue nord-africaine illustrée expressed it perfectly: "Gadan excels in his paintings of the Sahel of Bône... The artist, one feels, is master of himself, because he is at home, among horizons and colors that he renders with a precision that only an intimate knowledge of the environment allows to translate so faithfully (...). His painting has something infinitely soft, tender, and at the same time captivating, because in the country of Bône, such is the charm of the plains and hills. (…) Gadan works in the morning and evening and surprises nature at its most intimate hours, when the shadows and the soft mists float over everything. (…) He does not seek great effects, he paints what he sees with truth and poetry. And with such simplicity, he achieves beauty” (Boyer, in Revue nord-africaine illustrée, February 2, 1908, P. 59-60)

 Two paintings presented in Paris in 1895, at the Salon des Artistes français, brought him to favourable attention: "The White River at El Kantara" and "Algerian Night". They were followed by "The Red River at El Kantara" at the 1896 Salon. Recognised from then on as a landscaper and decorator, Gadan was commissioned to paint the diorama intended to decorate the Algerian Pavilion at the Trocadéro, during the Universal Exhibition of 1900. He chose to illustrate "The Algerian Coast from Bône to Oran", a pretext to parade the most beautiful sites of the Algerian shores in a veritable pictorial journey. This immense diorama, which was exhibited in London and New York after Paris, was a great public success, while earning its author praise from the jury, in particular from the history painter Édouard Detaille and the landscaper Jules Breton, a member of the Académie des beaux-arts.

 Subsequently, Gadan was honoured with an exhibition of fifteen paintings at the Constantine Museum in 1908, organised on the initiative of the then curator Mr Hinglais. That same year ended with a warm welcome at the Salon d'Automne in Algiers where the critic C. Monplessis praised "the intense poem of luminous life" in which "the amethyst pink fluidity through which (Gadan) shows us the Bônoise dune" unfolds. The bard of eastern Algeria was then at his peak, nicknamed the "glory of Bône".

 Little else is known about the apparently peaceful and quiet existence of this artist whose works have their place among the best painters of Algeria.

 Museums : Algiers, Constantine, Paris (Porte Dorée and Quai Branly)…