"Cowboy on Horseback (Le Cowboy)" V.2
Louis Henri Deluermoz (1876-1943)
Ink and gouache
Signed lower right
12 ½ x 9 ½ (21 x 18 frame) inches
 
Henri Deluermoz, born in 1876, was one of the most gifted animal painters of his time, with a particular penchant for depictions of wild animals. Deluermoz studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the studios of Gustave Moreau and Alfred Roll. He also was a painter of Provençal landscapes, equestrian and bullfight scenes, and produced designs for tapestries, mural decorations, and his book illustrations were widely prized.
 
It wasn’t until 1909 that Deluermoz began sending paintings to the Paris Salon, when he was already in his thirties, Deluermoz's works immediately received critical success. Thereafter he exhibited there regularly and also showed at commercial galleries in Paris between 1913 and 1919.
 
At the Salon of 1911 a large painting of a stampede of wild animals before a flood elicited much praise from critics, with Arsène Alexandre writing in Le Figaro: “But what knowledge of animality in this great painting! What a truth in the observation of movements!”
 
While another critic wrote of the painting: “Each creature is represented in its own character, and in motion true to life, and one takes pleasure in studying in turn the elephant and the buffalo in their heavy flight, the panther bounding along, the deer leaping lightly forward – all this evolved in the mind of a Kipling of the brush.”
 
Deluermoz’s personal exhibitions in the Parisian galleries were also extensive in the 1920's and 1930's as well. An exhibition of Deluermoz’s work at the Galerie Reitlinger in 1913 led to the purchase by the State of a large drawing of a bullfight. In 1929, at the Galerie Le Goupy in Paris, an exhibition of his animal drawings was held  while a larger and more comprehensive retrospective of both Deluermoz’s paintings and drawings was mounted at the Galerie Charpentier in Paris in 1939
 
Deluermoz's unique work is characterized by a swift, delft hand with a touch of polish and a compelling stylization of shapes and volumes typical of 1920's art. (Among the books he illustrated were editions of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, Henri de Montherlant’s Les Bestiaires and Louis Pergaud’s Histoires de bêtes.)
Henri Deluermoz passed away in 1943