My Mother’s French Painting
My senior year of high school was a blur, spent adrift in the plains of Lincoln, Nebraska where my family was transferred after four magical years around Washington, D.C. While I spent the year feeling sorry for myself and impossibly distant from my classmates in McLean, VA, my mother unpacked our belongings, enrolled us in our new schools, and carried on. Looking back, I realize that she must also have missed life in the nation’s capital at that very special time. It was the era of Camelot when Jacqueline Kennedy established the White House Historical Association to assist with acquisition and preservation efforts to make it a museum, protected by Congress, and renovated many rooms.
The First Lady had exquisite taste, hired a French chef for the White House kitchen, wore sleeveless dresses which my mother copied, and championed art. Following a trip to France in 1961, Mrs. Kennedy negotiated for Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa to travel to the United States where it was visited by millions of Americans in Washington, D.C. and New York City in 1963. The Kennedy White House was a cultural center, and ballet, musical performances, opera and theater filled its halls.
Half a continent away in the middle of her first Nebraska winter, my mother Alice must have been transported to Paris the day in 1962 when she wandered into Gold’s Fine Arts Department in downtown Lincoln. For that was the day she fell in love with a painting of a street leading up to Montmartre Cathedral, painted by French impressionist artist Louis Peyrat (1911-1999). Since travel to Paris did not look to be in her future anytime soon, she put the painting on layaway and paid for it in monthly installments. By the end of that cold Nebraska winter, it was hanging on a wall in our living room—my mother’s magic connection to Paris on days when she was feeling blue.
Louis Peyrat was born in Saint Germain Les Belles, Limousin, France in 1911 and was the cousin of French Impressionist artist Utrillo. By 1958, the year my parents had been transferred to Washington, D.C., Peyrat was making a comfortable living painting in Paris, especially scenes in the neighborhood around Montmartre that made him a success. His work hung in Parisian galleries such as the Roussard Gallery, at Mont-Cenis Street in Montmartre alongside works by Degas, Pascin, Buffet, Picasso, Utrillo, and other artists in the Volney Circle.
Perhaps Mrs. Kennedy’s interest in French art inspired Peyrat to bring some of his paintings to America in 1963. I believe that was how my mother’s art acquisition ended up at Gold’s Department Store’s Fine Arts Department that winter and caught her eye. After my parents retired and moved to San Antonio a decade later, it hung in a sitting room where I admired it whenever I was home for a visit. When Mother was well into her 90’s, she finally passed it on to me.
Over the years, Kit and I had traveled to Paris and walked the winding streets in the Montmartre neighborhood that Peyrat had made his living painting. On one of our trips, we bought a painting of our own while walking around the Place du Tertre near the Roussard Gallery where Peyrat had exhibited work in the 1950s.
We had separated and walked opposite directions around the square where contemporary artists exhibit their canvases, in search of a painting that stood out from the bins of others. After meeting back where we’d parted, we discovered that we’d both fallen in love with the same painting. It was an oil painting of a house in Provence painted in 1999 by a Spanish artist named Llilert, the same year that Louis Peyrat, my mother’s French artist, died.
After Kit took a picture of me with the painting and artist, the canvas was carefully rolled up and a purchase negotiation completed in a mixture of Spanish and French. Kit carried it back to our hotel that afternoon, and I had it framed immediately upon our return to Breakfast Creek. Like mother’s French oil painting, ours has a story that connects me instantly to Paris and to my mother. I revisit it these days in our home here in the Sierra Foothills. Mother’s painting hangs in the dining room just around the corner.