DELVAL Robert

Handsigned Oil on canvas. Sizes: 50x61 cm

The square Vert-Galant is a square in the 1st arrondissement of Paris.
It is located at the western tip of Ile de la Cité, in the Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois district of the 1st arrondissement. The level of the square is seven meters lower than the current level of the other parts of the island, which corresponds to the level it once had. The weak overhang of the square with respect to the Seine explains that it is flooded, or even totally submerged during the most important floods of the river.
It was created by the meeting of several small islands including the island of the Jews, where were burned the last Templars, and the island of the Patriarch. A commemorative plaque also recalls that it was at this place that took place, on March 18, 1314, the execution on the pyre of the "last great master of the order of the Temple", Jacques de Molay.
Before welcoming a square, the 2,665 m2 were devoted to the baths around 1765, then a coffee concert in 1865. It was destroyed by a flood in 1879.
In 1884, the State yields the land to the city of Paris.
On the occasion of the inauguration of the Montreal World's Fair in April 1967, a friendly ceremony organized by the city of Paris was held with Canadian Ambassador Jules Léger and his counterpart from the delegation. General of Quebec in Paris, Jean Chapdelaine. The mayor of Montreal, Jean Drapeau, could not come and he was represented by Léon Lortie and Jean Vinant, advertising the Exhibition in France. A stone from Île Sainte-Hélène (Montreal) was deposited in Vert-Galant Square. According to the author Yves Jasmin of The Little Story of Expo 67, there were more than 30,000 spectators who attended the event, when the ship Saint-Laurent arrived on the dock where the stone was transported with the prefect of Paris. (Source: wikipedia).

Robert Delval

Born in 1934 in Montmartre. 

His artistic education was forged with street painters in his childhood district, books and museums.  At twenty-five years old, he leaves with only his brushes and his notebooks to live the adventure in Europe, then in the United States ...  Back in France, he spends the spring and summer on the Mediterranean coast, autumn and winter in Megève where he sells his watercolors to passers-by, among them Françoise Sagan.  While he had deposited a small gouache in a framer in Montmartre, André Roussard, notice this view of the Luxembourg garden and asked the framer to tell the painter to go see him at the gallery. We are in 1970, Robert Delval meets André Roussard and thus his first merchant who will accompany him for more than thirty years. From the first exhibition, everything is sold. Together, he will mount many exhibitions in France, the United States and Europe (Belgium, Switzerland ...) and the works of Robert Delval will take place in the collections of very great art lovers.  Robert Delval is a master of color. By large flat areas he knows how to play with perspectives and trailing fields with great technicality.