Hippolyte Léty, The Old Church of Beauvoir-de-Marc, Isère (circa 1935)

HIPPOLYTE LÉTY (Vienna, 1878-1959) The Old Church at Beauvoir-de-Marc. Circa 1935. Oil on panel. 34 x 30.5 cm. Signed bottom right: H. Léty. Inscribed on the back: The Old Church at Beauvoir de Marc / Isère / Autumn Twilight / HLety. Hippolyte Léty, born in Vienna, an ancient town located 35 km south of Lyon on the Rhône, trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, where he studied under Tony Zac and Alexandre François Bonnardel, and then at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he was taught by Léon Bonnat, Ferdinand Humbert, and Luc-Olivier Merson. He began exhibiting in the salons of Lyon and Paris in the mid-1890s. For many years, Léty was a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Tourcoing, located near the Belgian border. Although he worked in the North, his heart remained rooted in the South-East, and he is one of the great landscape painters of the first half of the 20th century from this region: Dauphiné, Ardèche, Drôme, Loire, Bugey, and Savoie. Beauvoir-de-Marc is a village in Dauphiné about 20 km east of Vienna.