It is a large composition entitled Le Travail, which, presented at the 1902 Salon des artistes français, will allow Victor Tardieu to travel first in Europe. He was awarded a two-year travel grant with the first prize for painting that year, and favored Italy and England. London, Liverpool, Genoa, all attracted the artist's attention, who found in the intense human activity of these commercial ports an extension of the observations he had made in his native country.
He received several large public commissions before and after the First World War, for which he volunteered. In 1909, he was awarded the contract to decorate the town hall of Les Lilas, then a ceiling for the town hall of Montrouge after the war. But it is his next trip to the Far East that will be decisive. Winner of the Indochina Prize in 1920, he made a six-month trip there, after which he decided to stay. A large commission then occupied all his time, a gigantic and ambitious decoration intended to adorn the large amphitheater of the University of Hanoi.
The Metropole was to depict nearly two hundred figures, Oriental and Western, representative of the society of the time, and supposed to embody the idea of progress acquired through science and teaching. Soon, however, another task was going to take up all his time: the creation and then the direction in Hanoi, under the leadership of the colonial administration, of a Superior School of Fine Arts of Indochina, intended to train true artists among the young people of the local population. Nguyen Van Tho, known as Nam Son, a young artist who worked alongside Tardieu on the large commission he had received, told the master of the need to create such a structure in the territory. The two men went to Paris to bring in the necessary materials and to recruit the teachers, among whom was the young Joseph Inguimberty.
The Hanoi School of Fine Arts, which Tardieu directed until his death, succeeded in establishing itself as a unique educational model whose unexpected growth would prove particularly durable. It trained many artists who were at the origin of the development of an autonomous branch of creation in Asia. His heavy responsibility at the head of the School left the artist little time to paint freely. He did, however, express himself in rare compositions of studied construction that are today particularly sought after by collectors.