Sunlit French Lauragais Landscape Oil Painting by Olympic Gold Medalist Henri Anspach

Two slender trees rise through this modern Impressionist French landscape, branches reaching across a pale sky. Behind them, the Lauragais hills roll toward the horizon in bands of wheat gold and sun-bleached ochre. The foreground is worked in short, loaded strokes of sage and olive, with flecks of turquoise cutting through the greens.

The reverse is titled Noueilles, a village of a few hundred people in the Lauragais hills roughly 20 miles southeast of Toulouse. Anspach spent his later decades in this region of southwestern France and died there. This is a place he knew, painted at close range.

About the Artist
Henri Anspach (1882-1979) reached the top of one discipline, then walked away and started over in another. Born in Brussels, he competed at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics and won gold in the team épée alongside his brother Paul. He also fenced sabre and foil at those Games. Then he stopped and began again as a painter.

He did not train casually. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Liège under Léon Frédéric, one of the masters of Symbolism, who took gold at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris and was made a Baron by King Albert I in 1929, the same year and same honor as James Ensor. Frédéric's paintings hang in the Musée d'Orsay, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Dallas Museum of Art. That is who taught Anspach how to see.

Then he went to Paris and earned his place in it. He exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1913, the Salon d'Automne in 1920, and the Salon des Indépendants from 1926 to 1928. The Salon d'Automne was where the Fauves detonated in 1905 and where Cézanne received his memorial retrospective in 1907. These were the rooms where modern painting was being argued out, and Anspach hung work in them across fifteen years. 

Why We Love It
Every tone in this painting belongs to the same family: sage green, wheat gold, pale blue-gray, and russet in the tree trunks. Nothing competes or shouts. Anspach found a warm, quiet register where the landscape feels harmonious from edge to edge. Get close, and the surface comes alive. Short, decisive strokes move through the trees, fields, and undergrowth, some scraped thin and others left standing in small ridges of paint.

But what draws us in even further is Anspach’s story. He had already won Olympic gold in fencing when he chose to start over as a painter. He left a world in which he had already succeeded to pursue another calling, with no guarantee that it would lead anywhere. That kind of courage makes this painting feel especially moving to us. It is a reminder that a life can have more than one beginning.

Key Features:

• Origin: Paris, France
• Medium: Oil on panel
• Period: Mid-20th century
• Signature: Signed lower left by the artist
• Dimensions: 10.2" × 13.4"
• Condition: Great condition. Please see photos for details.