This Old Quarryman, who has spent his life in the stone quarries, was painted by Alfred Roll.
The latter was a friend of the Bordeaux artist Alfred Smith, also well-represented in the museum’s collections. One of them, entitled La Grave Quay in Bordeaux, touches on the same naturalist theme as the painting you are looking at now as it depicts quarrymen working on the docks.
We know that Roll, a painter of modern reality, made at least one hundred and fifty, popular, life-size portraits in his day. With the exception of the Old Quarryman, all these portraits were given titles that reflected the fact that the people portrayed were not just models but real people. His completely naturalist painting is characterised by this concern for representing workers without idealising them and for transcribing a world undergoing profound technical and social mutation. The static position and attributes of the trades, or the workers’ gazes directed towards the spectator are characteristic of Roll’s realist portraits.
Never condescending, nor sordid, the painter sought to procure a feeling of authenticity in these likenesses, expressed through his vigorous brushwork and use of impasto.