“His entire work is influenced by a taste of tender, soft and silent atmospheres. Gradually, he even went so far as to eliminate from his paintings all human figures, as if he feared that the slightest human form might disturb their muffled silence.”
Painted in a rich palette of gold ochre and dusky mauve, Trafalgar Square, Londres, belongs to a series of eleven canvases which Le Sidaner painted after a trip to London in the winter of 1907. These canvases celebrated the architecture of the city. Whilst his primary subject was the buildings of Hampton Court, the grand Italianate structures of Trafalgar Square and its elegant fountains also captured the artist’s attention (see fig. 1). These paintings were made, not from life, but from meticulous observation and memory. As his son Rémy charmingly recalled: “My father would give me his usual sign and we would stop still whilst he scrutinised the horizon, committing what he saw to memory...he often made a colour sketch of the site, but this had nothing to do with the effect, which would later be committed to canvas in his studio from memory alone; they were too fleeting and too changeable to be painted on the spot” (Rémy Le Sidaner, “Le Peintre Henri Le Sidaner tel que j’ai connu” in Henri le Sidaner (exhibition catalogue), Musée Marmotton, Paris, 1989, p. 11).
With short, fragmented brushstrokes and jewel-like colours, Le Sidaner captures the nuances of a light experienced at dusk, imbuing the scene with a dreamlike and mystical quality. In his composition he elegantly balances the architecture of the space, framing the statue of General Charles George Gordon by Hamo Thornycroft (now moved to Victoria Embankment) with the flowing fountains on either side. Initially exhibited at the salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, this celebrated series culminated in a major solo exhibition for the artist at Goupil Gallery, London in 1908.