It is always a pleasure to visit Evian les Bains, a tiny town high up in the mountains next to the Leman Lake south east of Paris. The lake itself is not very vast and one can see its other end quite clearly on a relatively bright day. As a matter of fact, if you take a boat from Evian, you are in Switzerland in a few minutes.

This year the Palais Lumière exhibition hall of Evian held an unusual show devoted to a highly controversial but also completely ignored artistic figure of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Albert Besnard was not only known in his time as a portrait and landscape painter but also as an art decorator of palaces and chateaux.

Why Evian? It is because, this year, the city’s cultural authorities decided to pay a much-delayed homage to the artist who had added astonishingly creative touches to the residence of Baron deVitta and by painting a number of landscapes, including the famous ‘Cachat Water Source’ inspired by the Evian Valley.

A much delayed homage to a forgotten artist of the 20th century, Albert Besnard, at the Petit Palais, Paris

Born in 1849 in Paris in a family close to the artistic circles, Besnard became famous in his youth by winning the much coveted Grand Prix at the Rome Art Exhibition at the age of 25. His work was a detailed mythological illustration of the assassination of the Greek tyrant Timophanes of Corinth by his own brother.

The artist apparently loved to move from city to city and country to country to feed his appetite for discovering unknown vistas and artistic challenges. His three-year stay in England is an explanation of the fascination for many of his watercolours in the traditional British technique.

A few months after becoming the biggest attraction at the biannual art show of Venice in 1909, a restless Besnard would once again move, this time to India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) where he lived and worked with his wife and two sons for almost a year. From Ceylon he eagerly shifted to Pondicherry to Banaras to Rajasthan and then finally to Bombay (now Mumbai) before returning to Paris.

For a hitherto unexplained reason the art world tends to ignore Besnard as a painter who in his lifetime was awarded the most coveted prizes of the period and was appointed to a number of prestigious posts. After the Rome Grand Prix in 1874, he also won the Gold Medal at the Paris Universal Exhibition. He then became the director of the Villa Medici Art Academy in Rome, and in the final years of his life, returned to Paris as head of the French Academy of Arts.

The most noted characteristics of Besnard’s works, while he was still at the height of his career, are the paintings of ladies of the Parisian upper society of the day — the most famous of them being the ‘Portrait of Madame Jourdain’. He soon began not naming his models in the titles of his works as they were already recognisable, thus deliberately preferring to leave his legacy as the painter of beautiful and elegant ladies with no names.

Besnard was awarded the French Legion of Honour beside a number of equivalent Belgian, Swiss and Italian titles. When he died in 1934, his funeral was declared a state ceremony. This was for the first time in France that a painter was rendered such homage.

To the question how could such a celebrity in his own lifetime be forgotten in less than a century after his death, Christine Gouzi, a Besnard expert who has played an important role in organising the artist’s exhibitions in Evian and Paris, says: “We human beings have a great capacity of forgetting things. We love to arrange our models in definite categories, but Besnard, a solitary figure, could never be classified as he never belonged to any artistic group nor did he remain attached to any particular style for a long time.”

The Albert Besnard show was shifted from Evian to Petit Palais exhibition hall in Paris on October 25 and will remain there until January 15, 2017

The writer is an art critic based in Paris: ZafMasud@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, November 20th, 2016