Biography

Louis Vivin was a French primitivist painter. Vivin was self-taught and a representative of naïve painting. He showed great enthusiasm for painting as a child, but his career took him in a completely different direction: he worked as a postal clerk until 1922, pursuing his art only in his spare time. Eventually, he was discovered by the German art critic Wilhelm Uhde (1874–1947), an association which helped him start exhibitions and build a reputation as a serious artist. When he worked in the postal service, his job was an inspector. Once he retired in the year of 1923, Louis Vivin finally took up the full-time part of being an artist. His birthplace was in the city of Hadol, France. He moved to Paris, France in the year of 1889 where he lived with his wife in the district of Montparnasse. The subjects of Vivin's paintings were still life, hunting subjects, and the city of Paris. Vivin was a contemporary of Henri Rousseau, Camille Bombois, André Bauchant, and Séraphine Louis, known collectively as the "Sacred Heart Painters" and as masters of French naïve painting. Vivin's works are known to have a sad and dismal theme to them. He was also known for painting from his memory. Louis Vivin was influenced by the work and details of Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier’s paintings. His works depicted genre scenes, flower pieces, hunting scenes and views of Paris, "notable for their charmingly wobbly perspective effects". Louis Vivin’s first one-man exhibition was placed at the Galerie des Quatre Chemins, and it was organized by Wilhelm Uhde in 1927. His later work was considered to become less dependent of the melancholy mood, and it focused more on blocks of color and form.