This page was made for you. It tells the story of this painting, the remarkable man who made it, the France it belongs to, and the world it came from.
A tall old village house stands at the center, rising up through a screen of bare trees, with rooftops and chimneys stacked around it and the hills of the countryside receding softly behind. The composition is vertical, which is unusual and clever for a landscape. It makes the eye climb, up the face of the house, past the branches and the blue roof, out to the pale distance. This is not the postcard view of a French village. It is a real corner of one, the kind you would come across on an ordinary walk and stop to look at because the light was right.
The brushwork is loose and confident, modern in feel while still holding on to the charm of a traditional village scene. And the color is where it turns sophisticated. Slate blue, warm ochre, terracotta, pale grey, and a soft mauve move through the whole picture in a palette that has an almost pastel softness, nothing loud, nothing fighting. Then the frame does something lovely: a gilt frame with a red inner border that picks up the warm tones already in the chimney and the rooftops, and gives the whole piece a polished, gallery-like presence.
Delamoriniere had a lifelong love of the intimate and the everyday: a tucked-away village corner, a small bridge, a scene that feels personal rather than staged for an audience. This painting is that instinct in its purest form, a modest, honest place, seen up close and painted with real affection.
There is a memorial page for the man who painted your village scene. Not an art-world listing. A military one, maintained by the memorial to France's Free French paratroopers, because before Marc Delamoriniere was a painter, he was a soldier in one of the most dangerous units of the Second World War.
He was a Parisian, born in the city in 1904. When France fell, he did not stay under occupation. In June 1943 he crossed to Free French forces in North Africa, and from there into the airborne. He earned his parachutist's wings in England at the start of 1944 and was assigned to the elite 3rd SAS, the French special forces regiment. That autumn he jumped out of an aircraft into his own occupied country, on a mission behind German lines, to help take it back. He came home decorated, with the Croix de Guerre among his honors, and he lived until 1979.
Hold that against the painting in front of you. A man who had every reason to see the world as a grim place chose, for the rest of his life, to seek out the ordinary corners of France, a village house, a stand of bare trees, a huddle of rooftops, and paint them in the softest, most tender colors he could find. This is not a naive painting. It is the opposite. It is a man who had seen the very worst, deciding, deliberately, to spend his days looking for beauty in the everyday places of the country he had risked his life to free. That is what you have on your wall.
Marc Delamoriniere was a Parisian, born in 1904 in the 16th arrondissement, the elegant district on the Right Bank where the city meets the Bois de Boulogne. But his brush was never tied to the capital. He had a real feeling for the intimate face of France: a village house, a tucked-away corner, a small bridge, the ordinary places most people walk straight past.
That is what makes this painting so characteristic of him. It is not a grand monument or a famous view. It is a modest French village seen up close, the kind of corner that only rewards a painter who actually stops and looks, and he clearly did.
He belongs to a long line of French painters who gave their lives to the light of their own country, from the Barbizon painters who left Paris for the countryside to the Impressionists who chased the sun across it. Delamoriniere carried that love into the 20th century, with a special affection for the plain, unfamous corners of France.
This particular painting surfaced a lifetime later near Lyon, in the east of France. From there it has traveled across an ocean to reach you.
The painting's journey: from the France of Marc Delamoriniere, found near Lyon a lifetime later, and now on its way across the world to you.
Delamoriniere painted in the years right after the war he had fought in, when the grey years lifted and life came roaring back, in Paris and far beyond it. Fashion, film, music, and new inventions poured out of the peace he had risked everything for. Here is a little of the world of those years.
This is an oil painted on cardboard, a support many mid-century painters loved for working quickly and directly from life. It is rigid like a panel and appreciates a stable, dry environment. These are the basics of keeping it beautiful for the decades ahead.
Every painting that leaves Raw Brush goes to someone I will probably never meet. I film a short message for each one, so that at least once, you hear directly from the person who found it.
In this video I share what drew me to this painting, and a genuine thank you for trusting me with your walls.