Visitors to Galerie de l'Institut in Paris might expect to find works by Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Joan Miro, the Modern masters for which the gallery is known. This autumn, however, the walls of its 12 rue de Seine space are devoted instead to Jean-Pierre Cassigneul, a French figurative painter born in 1935 who has a longstanding relationship with the gallery. The show runs through Tuesday 24 November and coincides at its start with the eighth edition of Paris Print and Drawing Galleries Week, in which about 20 Parisian galleries are taking part through 1 November.

Women are at the heart of Cassigneul's work. His figures tend to be tall and slender, with fine features and meticulously rendered, stylish clothing, and the motif of idealised beauty runs through his oeuvre, suggesting an artist who has returned to the same face over decades in order to refine it. The settings are places the artist knows well and viewers are likely to recognise: the Luxembourg Gardens and Bagatelle in Paris, the beach at Deauville, and the edge of Lake Geneva. The scenes are frequently solitary, conveying solitude and silence carried as much by the landscape as by the figure.

A highlight is the 2009 canvas En robe blanche a pois, showing a woman in a flower-trimmed hat beside a bowl of fruit, with a sailboat and Alpine peaks beyond. The presentation also shows how deftly the artist has moved between painting and print: a suite of drawings, some made for the lithographs in the volume Toquades from 1991, traces how a sketch becomes a printed image, while further lithographs are available to view on request.

Taken as a whole, the presentation of paintings and works on paper shows an artist using sharp line work and a bold palette to build atmospheric, timeless images. The show offers a rare sustained look at a painter whose quiet, elegant figuration has long sat in the shadow of the gallery's better-known Modern names.