William Malherbe French, 1884-1951

William Malherbe is the French Post-Impressionist painter the art world keeps rediscovering. Born on 28 December 1884 in Senlis, the medieval cathedral town just north of Paris, Malherbe produced some of the most colour-saturated, emotionally direct canvases of the twentieth century, works now held in the permanent collection of the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris and tracked across more than 310 international auction results at rooms from Dreweatts in London to sale houses in New York, Melbourne, and beyond. He arrived in Paris as a teenager and was exhibiting before he turned twenty. He studied briefly at the École des Arts Décoratifs, where architecture gave his compositions their underlying structural confidence, before abandoning blueprints entirely for paint. What followed was a period of genuine restlessness, Cubism, Fauvism, Neo-Impressionism, until he arrived somewhere that belonged to nobody but himself. Renoir and Bonnard were not merely influences; they were friends. That intimacy with the warmest, most life-affirming strand of French painting never left his hand.

The First World War changed him in ways that never fully healed. Four years of service produced a painter so inwardly withdrawn that Time Magazine, encountering him afterward, described him as almost pathologically shy. Yet, recognition came in the 1930s, when he began showing at the Salon d'Automne and was taken up by the Galerie Durand-Ruel: the legendary Paris house that had built its entire reputation by backing the Impressionists at the moment everyone else refused to. To exhibit there was not a commercial footnote. It was a position in art history. Then history intervened again. In 1939, as Nazi forces crossed into France, Malherbe was fifty-five. He crossed the Atlantic, settled in New York, moved eventually to a farm in Thetford, Vermont, and spent his summers painting the working harbour at Gloucester, Massachusetts. His exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. drew serious collector attention on both sides of the Atlantic. It was during these American years, in 1943, at the height of the Second World War, that he painted some of his most celebrated canvases, including the exuberant floral still life A Harmony of Colour, currently held by Gladwell & Patterson. He returned to Paris in 1948 and died in 1951. The Musée d'Art Moderne holds his work. The auction rooms keep returning to it. And collectors who find a Malherbe canvas tend not to let it go.