Charles and Gabriel Blanche (French, c.1863-1937)

Beautifully painted in watercolor, this large format painting depicts a Cambodian temple, possibly in the Angkor Wat temple complex. The Blanche brothers, Charles and Gabriel, who were Parisian architects, oversaw the cleaning and recording of hundreds of temple sites in Angkor in the 1920s and created casts to be replicated upon their return to France (K. Robson and J. Yee, France and Indochina: Cultural Representations, Lanham, 2005, pg. 20). The present work could have been created during their assignment in Cambodia or afterwards in France.