A bel Lauvray occupies a modest, yet original  place amongst the descendants of Impressionism.  His parents, from a prosperous family of  Norman notaries, had a house in Vétheuil, and his  father commissioned Claude Monet (1840-1926),  at one of the most difficult times of the painter’s  life, to paint a portrait (1880; private collection) of  his son André, Abel’s younger brother. These contacts  no doubt came in useful later on, when Abel  Lauvray began painting seriously. Not needing to  sell his paintings to survive, he sent his work on a  regular basis to the Paris Salon, the Société Nationale  des Beaux-Arts (1898-1908) and the Salon des  Indépendants (in 1906, and 1912-1939). In spite of  a fire that destroyed a part of his studio in Mantes  in 1940, upon his death Lauvray left many hundreds  of paintings, zealously preserved by his wife  and sister, arousing the interest and curiosity of the  public. This abundance of works included numerous  landscapes inspired by the Seine at Vétheuil and its  environs, as well as landscapes of Touraine and of  the Villeneuve-lès-Avignon region. Lauvray also  painted in Italy and Greece.     

The two landscapes in the A. G. Leventis Collection  belong to a series painted in the Midi; the larger  one is probably a view of Villeneuve-lès-Avignon,  while the smaller one depicts the beautiful village  of Moustiers Sainte-Marie in Provence, famous  for its faience and recognisable by the rocky gorge  in the background, a motif which recurs in other  compositions by Lauvray.1 Both paintings attest  to Lauvray’s dependence on Impressionism, which  led him to focus on the subject and a direct description  from nature. Their dense method of execution,  the result of a system of energetic brushstrokes, is  typical of the painter and immediately identifiable,  thanks to his somewhat muted palette and blunted  forms.