Henri Le Sidaner first visited the idyllic town of Gerberoy in the Beauvais region of France in March 1901. Le Sidaner was searching for a house in the country that would give him space to paint away from the bustle of Paris. Le Sidaner’s son Rémy remembers that Le Sidaner ‘longed to plan a garden of his own, in which the landscape would be designed by him personally and in which he could achieve his favorite light effects. He mentioned this project to Auguste Rodin, who directed him to the Beauvais area. A potter living in Beauvais, answering to the name of Delaherche, recommended the village of Gerberoy’ (Rémy Le Sidaner, quoted in Yann Farinaux-Le Sidaner, op. cit., p. 14).

A fortress town situated sixty-five miles northwest of Paris on the border between Picardy and Normandy, Gerberoy is renowned for its distinct brick frame and timber homes with quaint cobblestone streets. This unique urban landscape offered the artist ample inspiration for his evocative compositions. In 1904 he purchased the cottage he had been renting and devoted himself fully to his painterly investigations of the region. The white stone cottage with its beautifully landscaped gardens and picturesque pavilion seen in the present work, would prove to be the artist’s most enduring and distinctive motif. Here, Le Sidaner paints the pavilion nestled within the verdant flora and fauna of the garden. Bathed in a twilight glow that accentuates the intimacy and quiet stillness of the scene, Le Pavillon exudes a pervading sense of mystery redolent of Le Sidaner’s roots in Symbolism. The warm glow emanating from the window of the pavilion instills a sense of life into the scene, countering the lack of figures so characteristic of Le Sidaner’s compositions. The French poet Camille Mauclair discusses Le Sidaner’s preference to leave his compositions unpopulated, remarking that: ‘the silent harmony of things is enough to evoke the presence of those who live among them. [...] ‘Indeed, such presences are felt throughout his works. Deserted they may be but never empty’ (C. Mauclair, Henri Le Sidaner, Paris, 1928, p. 12).

Le Sidaner was greatly influenced by the garden paintings of Claude Monet and he frequently visited Monet’s famous Giverny garden located only seventy kilometers from Gerberoy. This influence is notable in Le Sidaner’s loose impressionistic rendering of the rose trellis and close cropping of the composition. Monet scholar Karin Sagner has commented upon the similarities between the garden paintings of Monet and Le Sidaner: 'Parallels to the Impressionism of Claude Monet can actually be found not only in Le Sidaner's style of painting, but also in his choice of motifs, such as close-up views of peaceful garden corners, facades of buildings and reflections in still waters. Moreover, his repeated depictions of the same motif at different times of day or year - like Monet's series - engendered ever new variations of form and light... both artists deliberately used light to effect a dissolution of solid form and of precise figurative representation' (K. Sagner, Henri Le Sidaner, Ein magischer Impressionist: A Magical Impressionist, Chemnitz, 2009, p. 34). Taking as its subject matter a beloved motif of the artist and of the Impressionist movement, Le Pavillon is a meditative reflection upon the subtle variations of light and colour painted at the height of Le Sidaner’s artistic prowess.

Le Pavillon was recently exhibited in the exhibition Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2016 alongside major Impressionist works.