Paul
Rebeyrolle

Paul Rebeyrolle was born in 1926 in Eymoutiers, in the Limousin. A land where men are “steeped in the feeling of the earth, the sap of the trees, the harshness of working the land, violence, rage, the intoxicating scent of the woods… where it is said that the earth sticks to the shoes.” From this adolescence in the Limousin, he has maintained throughout his life a passion for nature, the countryside, and a fierce need for freedom.

In October 1944, at the age of eighteen, he took the first train to Paris after the Liberation. He took advantage of the Parisian post-war artistic frenzy to immerse himself in the art of the great masters at the Louvre and to become familiar with the art of his contemporaries in the galleries.

In the aftermath of World War II, he was a committed participant in the Manifeste de l'homme témoin, which, driven by the art critic Jean Bouret, advocated a return to reality at a time when the art scene was dominated by abstraction. A few years later, in 1963, he left Paris and Montrouge to settle in a mill in the Aube region, where he worked and lived in contact with the natural elements and his favorite landscape: a river noisily flowing through the earth.

He died in 2005 in his house in Boudreville in Burgundy (France) at the age of 78. A museum is dedicated to him, L'Espace Paul Rebeyrolle, in Eymoutiers, Haute-Vienne (France)