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Overview
"There are moments when I feel overwhelmed, when I don't know anything. My hand makes a series of strokes, but my eye is not in command, I follow my stream of thought... when I stop and step back, I am astonished at what I have done"
A contemporary of the Post-Impressionists, Henri Le Sidaner developed a distinctly individual approach. His technique often draws on Pointillism, yet he rejected its high-key colour, favouring greys and opalescent tones to create atmosphere, using broken brushwork to soften contours and diffuse light.
Born in Port Louis, Mauritius, in 1862, he returned to France in childhood and trained in Paris under Alexandre Cabanel. Encounters with the work of Claude Monet and Édouard Manet shaped his early direction, and by the late 1880s he was exhibiting at the Salon des Artistes Français. Periods spent in the fishing port of Étaples offered an alternative to academic study and informed his early subjects. From the late 1890s, his work turned towards more intimate, light-inflected scenes - gardens, quiet streets and waterside settings - typically without figures. Following his move to Gerberoy in 1901, the gardens he created there became a central motif. His career included regular exhibitions in Paris, London and the United States, a retrospective at Galerie Georges Petit in 1910, and election to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1930.
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Works
Henri Le Sidaner French, 1862-1939
Evening Glow, 1916Oil on Canvas65 x 81 cms / 25½ x 31¾ inchesSigned 'H Le Sidaner' (lower left)Price on ApplicationFurther images
Description
Painted at the height of his career, Evening Glow is characteristic of Le Sidaner’s most verdant and richly textured compositions from the 1910s. Le Sidaner’s lit window in Evening Glow is perhaps the most striking facet of the work. Emerging amidst the shadowy foliage, the window immediately centres the viewers eye, encouraging them to peer through the crepuscular leaves and branches in a mirror of evening vision, where the point of light emerges from growing darkness. The artist had begun to employ the motif of contrasting the red-oranges of the lit window with his favoured evening light in the early 1910s, particularly in his views of northern French towns. These points of light were often small vignettes within the work rather than their primary focus. In combining elements of both Versailles and Gerberoy, the artist demonstrated his desire to create an ideal subject matter through which he could express his style. That he would later choose the scenery developed in Evening Glow to stand as a paradigm of his approach shows that he succeeded in this endeavour.
Literature
Yann Farinaux-Le Sidaner, Henri Le Sidaner: Paysages Intimes, (Editions Monelle Hayot, 2013), n°355, reproduced p.146.
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