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L'ÉGLISE ET LE PONT (Moret sur Loring)

Henri Le Sidaner

Description
PROVENANCE

Galerie Georges Petit, Paris

R. Chameroy

Galerie Pacitti, Paris

Sale: Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 27th July 1955

Sale: Christie's, New York, 16th November 1988, lot 291 ($ 263,297)

LITERATURE

Camille Mauclair, Henri Le Sidaner, Paris, 1928, illustrated p. 97

Yann Farinaux-Le Sidaner, Le Sidaner, L’œuvre peint et gravé, Milan, 1989, no. 387, illustrated p. 156

Henri Le Sidaner was born in Port Louis on the island of Mauritius. His father, a shipbuilder, moved the family back to France in 1872, settling in Dunkirk, where the young Le Sidaner first studied drawing and painting. Following his father’s death in 1880, Le Sidaner moved to Paris hoping to continue his education. Le Sidaner studied briefly at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he was in the atelier of Alexandre Cabanel, but, influenced by the Impressionists, he soon rejected the academy and pursued an independent career. He moved to Étaples in northern France for five years, where he developed his own style. The smooth surfaces and subject matter of his early works are reminiscent of both the works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Symbolists, but Le Sidaner’s style began to evolve around 1900, when he moved to Beauvais and began to paint in a pointillist technique derived from the work of Georges Seurat. Le Sidaner worked in this idiom for the rest of his career, producing highly decorative and poetic landscapes and still lifes imbued with fleeting effects of light and color.

In 1904, Le Sidaner moved his home and studio to Gerberoy, a picturesque village in Picardy in northern France. The artist had been visiting Gerberoy regularly since 1901, and in 1903 he began spending the spring and summer seasons in the village. Gerberoy soon dominated Le Sidaner’s oeuvre, with over 100 canvases painted during his years there. It was in Gerberoy that Le Sidaner turned to painting his hallmark interior scenes with open windows, garden-table compositions, and outdoor crepuscules that rank among the finest and best-known of his works. The village of Gerberoy itself, too, provided plenty of interest for the artist’s brush, with Le Sidaner executing a number of views of the village’s scenic buildings. And from Gerberoy, Le Sidaner traveled frequently throughout France in search of quiet settings appropriate to his pursuit.

More Information

Documentation:	Documented elsewhere (exact item)
Origin:	France
Period:	1900-1919
Materials:	Oil on canvas.
Condition:	Excellent.
Creation Date:	1918
Styles / Movements:	Post Impressionism
Incollect Reference Number:	107689