Portrait of Beethoven, charcoal with some touches of red chalk, signed lower right and left.
Alméry Lobel-Riche is a French painter, engraver and illustrator, born in Geneva in 1877.
After spending his childhood and adolescence in Montpellier, Lobel-Riche entered the Beaux Arts at the age of sixteen.
Thanks to the illustrations of the medical school's anatomy books, he acquires a great knowledge of the human body. A few years later, he moved to Paris to finish his training at the Beaux Arts while performing several trades.
During this period, he frequented many Parisian museums and collaborated with many painters such as Leon Bonnat (1833 - 1922),
Paul Saïn (1853 - 1908) or Antoine Calbet (1860 - 1944).
In 1909, he published his first artist's book "Etudes des filles". The same year, he illustrated the book, "The Left Hand" of Guy de Maupassant.
Mobilized in 1914, he spent part of the war in Morocco. Suffering from typhus, he exhibited at the Excelsior Gallery in Casablanca. From Morocco, he brought back oils, pastels, watercolors, drawings and etchings, used later to illustrate André Chevrillon's "Twilight of Islam".
In 1922, he became knight of the Legion of Honor and continued his drawing activity in Paris. He produced advertising posters for Peugeot. He also illustrated Oscar Wilde's "Salomé".
During the second world war, he flew to his wife's family, in Corrèze.
He died in Paris in 1950 and is buried in the vault of his wife's family, in Limousin.
His work is very varied. He is known to the general public for his studies of the world of gallantry and his many illustrations of scenes from the First World War.
He appeared at the exhibition entitled De Bonnard in Baselitz at the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris in 1992.
See: Benezit E. - Dictionary of painters, sculptors, draughtsmen and engravers.
Within its orginal giltwood frame.
France, Circa 1920
Dimensions with the frame : 53 x 49 cm (20.8 x 19.2 inch)
Dimensions without the frame : 34.5 x 33 cm (13.3 x 12.9 inch)
