Jean-Baptiste
OLIVE

Jean-Baptiste Olive is one of the best known and most appreciated names among amateurs and collectors of Provençal painting.

Born in 1848 into a family of modest wine merchants in the Panier district, where painting was not considered a profession, the young man was nevertheless allowed to become a house painter and join the workshop of a decorative painter. 
Etienne Cornellier, who employed him, encouraged him to enroll at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Marseille. Together, the two artists then left the city of Marseille for Paris and from the end of the 19th century, the painter lived alongside the artistic upheavals of his time in the capital, notably those of impressionism, fauvism, cubism and abstraction. However, Jean-Baptiste Olive seemed to be completely impervious to them.

Throughout his career, his paintings express the warmth and sensuality of the Mediterranean coast. In Paris, Olive painted Marseille and the South of France. Far from the extravagance of Fauvism and Cubism, he was more interested in observing and expressing the effects of light on water. It is his "library", a documentation made of sketches taken on the spot and on different supports, in particular small wooden panels, which allows the artist to produce numerous Mediterranean views from his Parisian studio. In reality, he never detached himself from his native city, where he kept a pied à terre for regular stays.

In his works, with their rigorous compositions and sometimes daring framing in the manner of a photographer, Jean-Baptiste Olive paints the burning sun at the end of the day and buries the rocky massifs. For him, the entrance to the Old Port of Marseille, where boats, fishermen and urban life are in motion, is a permanent spectacle and an inexhaustible source of inspiration.

During his lifetime, the painter was entrusted with prestigious commissions, notably the decor of the restaurant Le Train Bleu and the hall of the ticket offices of the Gare de Lyon. His clients were loyal and his account books were full.

Olive was awarded the Léon Bonnat prize in 1930. A major retrospective of nearly eighty-two works was organized at the Cantini Museum in Marseille in 1948, followed by another at the Musée Regards de Provence in 2008.

Works by the painter are now in the collections of the MuMa in Le Havre, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Marseille, the Musée d'Orsay, the Fondation Regards de Provence and the Musée Cantini in Marseille.