Aristide Maillol

Jos Hessel, Paris (acquired by 1928)
Fairfax Hall, Virginia (probably acquired from the above)
Private Collection (and sold: Christie's, London, June 22, 1993, lot 126)
Acquired at the above sale

Paris, Galerie de la Renaissance, Exposition portraits et figures de femmes, Ingres à Picasso, 1928, no. 105

Board is sound. Under UV light, a few minor spots of inpainting in the pink pigment below the mother's mouth and at the center of the right edge. Otherwise fine, work is in very good condition.
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While primarily known as a sculptor, Maillol painted throughout his career, and this aspect of his practice played a crucial role in his artistic evolution. The present work is a tender depiction of a mother nursing. It is very similar to Maurice Denis' mother and child paintings of 1895, and indeed the ideas of the Nabis group founded by Denis and Sérusier are crucial to our understanding of Maillol's paintings (see fig. 1). As Denis argued, "it must not be forgotten that a picture, before it is revealed as a battle-charger, a nude or some narrative or other, is fundamentally a flat surface covered with colour arranged in a certain order... the word décor has no pejorative meaning" (quoted in Waldemar George, Aristide Maillol, London, 1965, pp. 75-76). The work is still and calm in its intimate domesticity, yet simultaneously dynamic in the lyricism of the winding forms of the fabric in the background, the mother's head and neck and even the flowers in the foreground. The painting's domestic setting, harmonic palette, and its decorative forms evoke similar scenes by Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard.

In 1950, the poet Pierre Camo described the women Maillol depicted as "daughters of the earth," remarking upon "the line of a beautiful neck, the swelling breasts" and arguing that "no other artist since Renoir has loved and looked, caressed with his eyes, nor admired so voluptuously; nor has anyone but Maillol depicted the female form with such sensuous grace" (quoted in Pierre Camo, Maillol Mon Ami, Lausanne, 1950, p. 218).



This work will be included in the forthcoming Aristide Maillol catalogue raisonné being prepared by the Musée Maillol Paris.