Robert Antoine Pinchon is best known for his Post-Impressionist Landscape scenes, favouring en plein air painting to being inside a studio. Born into an artistic family in 1886, Pinchon played a prominent part in the Rouen school of artists. It was in Rouen that Pinchon met the master of Impressionists, Claude Monet, with whom he exhibited in 1903 at the Exposition des Beaux Arts in Rouen. Monet said that Pinchon had ‘a surprising touch in the service of a surprising eye’. Naturally this early contact with Monet had a major impact on Pinchon’s artistic career .
Marcel Nicolle, claimed that Pinchon was too ‘unrestrained and wild’ whilst Charles Hilbert Dufour wrote an article in which he makes favourable mention of the entries by Pinchon in an exhibition, when he was only 17.
Following from this Francois Depeaux, an important Impressionist collector purchased several of Pinchon’s early works, thus kick-starting his career. Pinchon kept a close group of artistic friends, and interestingly, 1905 was also the first year that the artist showed in Paris for the first time, alongside other Post-Impressionists such as Maximillien Luce, Charles Camoin and Albert Lebourg.
It was in 1909 that Pinchon had his first solo exhibition in Paris, after which is popularity increased immensely and a few months later he had another solo show. The following November the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen opened a show with fifty-two paintings: three by Monet, nine by Sisley, three by Guillaumin, one by Renoir, thirteen by Lebourg, five by Delattre, two by Freshon and four Pinchon.
