Jos Henri
PONCHIN

In the mid-1920s, the young artist ventured to Asia, following his father, who had just won the Indochina prize and been entrusted with an important official state commission. Antoine Ponchin had transmitted to his son the taste for drawing and had encouraged him in his vocation, allowing him to follow a solid academic training with Cormon at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts at the end of the war, as soon as he was demobilized. After his first experiences in Corsica and then in Algeria, the young painter took up a teaching position at the French high school in Hanoi, until his return to France in 1931. Two years in Reims made him long for warmer climes and Ponchin soon moved his family to the South, where he seemed particularly attached to the representation of landscape. He devoted most of his work to translating the effects of light on Mediterranean panoramas onto canvas.