Armand Jamar, Paris, oil on panel, 1923

Armand Jamar, Paris, 1923.
Oil on canvas glued to a wooden panel.
Signed and dated.
37x29cm.
Unframed.

Theme – travel.
Luminous Period - The traveling painter (1920-1929).
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Armand Gustave Gérard Jamar (1870-1946) embodies one of the most singular figures in early 20th-century Belgian painting. Initially trained as a lawyer in Liège, he traded the rigor of law for that of drawing, placing himself in the lineage of Evariste Carpentier and Adrien de Witte at the Academy of Fine Arts. His work, imbued with light and a quest for the essential, unfolds in three movements—from vibrant Impressionism to Metaphysical Expressionism.
In his early work, Jamar followed in the footsteps of Boudin and Jongkind: Ardennes landscapes, northern seascapes, Flemish interiors—all sensitive variations where harmony and observation intertwine. From the 1920s onward, light became his true subject: icy bursts of light, intense skies, and journeys to Venice, Spain, and North Africa nourished an art in search of the absolute. His brush became freer, color became language, matter vibration. The cycles inspired by Dante or the Apocalypse then asserted a spiritual and almost prophetic dimension.
A Knight of the Order of Leopold, honored at the Salon des Artistes Français, and celebrated by Michel de Ghelderode as "the most sincere and pathetic (in the sense of 'παθος,' the emotional force of his subjects' rendering) interpreter of Bruges and Flanders," Jamar remains a painter of intensity. His trajectory, both rooted in tradition and reaching towards the unknown, invites us today to rediscover an artist who made light a metaphysics of perception.