René Fontayne (born 1891 in Vergèze, died 1952 in Vergèze), was a French painter and illustrator . Biography René Fontayne's artistic career began to take off during the fertile period between the two world wars. Born in Vergèze, in the Gard, on 3 January 1891, he graduated from the École Municipale des Beaux-Arts de Nîmes in 1910, and in 1912 went to Paris on a national scholarship to further his talent as a painter and decorative artist, a talent that would come to be especially active and appreciated in the field of decorative arts. His first-known works date from the start of the 1920s. Fontayne expressed an early fondness for detailed drawing, particularly evident in his still lifes. The artist simply and directly arranges the elements against a uniform background. The same economy of means is also seen in his early landscapes, which suggest a figurative Cubism like that taught by André Lothe in the academy he founded in 1921 in the Rue d’Odessa. Paris and Brittany The year 1929 marks a turning point in Fontayne's career. At his initial appearance at the Salon des Indépendants, his decorative compositions sparked interest from the Galerie Simonson in Paris, which offered the artist his first solo show in April of the same year. For his Paris debut, Fontayne immediately demonstrated his fondness for landscape. His search for subjects led him to the basilica at Vézelay and to the Limousin for views of Uzerche and Crozant, as Armand Guillaumin had done before him. Along the Vézère, flowing through the Corrèze and Périgord, Fontayne captured the reflections of the houses in the water, the subject of one painting acquired by the French government in 1928 at the 19th Exposition de l’Éclectique. Between 1931 and 1933 Fontayne, now in great demand, took part in a range of group shows in Paris.13 The exhibition ‘Artistes Protestants Modernes’, which featured, along with Fontayne, such renowned artists as Raoul Dufy, Gérard Sandoz, Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann, Jean Dunand, Le Corbusier and Jean Jeanneret, questioned the identity of a specifically French Protestant art. The restraint of Fontayne's compositions clearly resonated with this philosophy, like the rigour that pervades the lines of the Art Deco furniture and modernist architecture. Fontayne and the Art Deco style His several watercolours reveal a sensitive study of light, for example those of the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris, where he sketched the park's regular visitors and,