Cecile Hertz-Eyrolles was a French painter, born in 1875. She travelled extensively throughout Italy in her youth with her family, visiting both public and private art collections. Her first art lessons began under Lucien Levy-Dhurmer, and she went on to study at both the Academie Carriere and the Academie Julian alongside Henri Matisse. Eugene Carriere, a well-connected painter of the fin-de-siecle period, was close friends with Auguste Rodin and gave her both great encouragement and creative freedom. While travelling around Brittany, Belgium and London with a close circle of artistic friends, including the Belgian painter Marguerite Putsage and the sculptor Louis-Henri Devillez, she began exhibiting at the artistic societies on her doorstep in Paris including the new Salon d'Automne, the Salon National des Beaux-Arts and the Salon des Artistes Indépendants.
In 1906, she married Leon Eyrolles, politician, entrepreneur and future mayor of Cachan near Paris, where the pair created their elegant Art Deco home and studio. Leon founded the first Ecole Speciale des Travaux Publics, a leading engineering school in France. The French art historian Henri Focillon wrote the foreword to her solo catalogue at the Galerie Charpentier in 1939. After the death of her husband in 1946, Hertz-Eyrolles sadly lost the desire and will to paint and her studio remained untouched until her own passing in 1974. Hidden for decades, this fine collection of highly accomplished works in oil have now emerged for the first time.
