PAST IMPERFECT:French artist René Vincent was fascinated by cars, and his work is still held in great regard today, writes Bob Montgomery.
THE SKETCHES, drawings and paintings of René Vincent gave form to a golden world of pleasure and leisure in the 1920s and '30s.
His lightness of touch endeared him to the French public, and the work of this greatest of motoring artists stands as a monument to an age of personal enjoyment and hope.
He was born in Bordeaux in 1879, where his father Charles was a successful novelist, writing under the pen name of Charles Maël. When Vincent was five, the family moved to Paris and the boy grew up wishing to become an architect.
He was enrolled in the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts. During his time there, he began to sketch illustrations for books as a means of earning extra pocket money.
With a fascination for cars, not surprisingly, much of the work he sold was to the fledgling automobile industry for brochures and advertisements. So successful was he at selling his illustrations that he soon decided to forget about architecture and instead resolved to follow a career in advertising art.
His immediate success undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that his style was in complete contrast to the art nouveau illustrations so much in vogue during that time. From the start, Vincent depicted the everyday use of cars while linking them with fashion and attractive female models.
At the same time, he did not attempt to gloss over a cars structural details, instead depicting his cars accurately. In 1908, his fame had become such that he was invited to travel to New York to do work for both Harper's Bazaarand the Saturday Evening Post. While there, he became increasingly involved in fashion design, where he showed himself to be infinitely innovative.
It was this combination of his flair for fashion and his illustrative style that makes his automotive work so highly prized and still highly sought after some 70 years after his death.
With the outbreak of the first World War, Vincent returned to France and enlisted, serving in a motorised unit.
When the war ended in 1918, he returned to illustration and became a contributor to L'Illustration, that extraordinary illustrated news magazine which attained a circulation of more than 300,000 between the wars.
His work for such clients as Berliet, Hispano-Suiza, Bugatti, Delage, Lorraine-Dietrich, Peugeot, Renault, Voisin and Michelin ensured that his work became an intrinsic feature of French national culture.
Vincent had married in 1910 and had a daughter Ginette, while a second daughter died at birth during the first World War.
In the 1920s, he became president of the French Association of Designers and Artists in order to fight for copyright and royalty protection for artists - a long and drawn-out fight in which he was successful.
Vincent, arguably the greatest of car artists, died at the early age of 57 in 1936. His death was widely mourned by a vast band of artists as well as by an industry in motoring for whom he had defined a golden age.