Paul-César Helleu

John Singer Sargent
Possibly, Sale, The Estate of John Singer Sargent, July 24, 1925, lot 290, as A Female Model Reading
Richard Green Fine Art, London

During the summer of 1889, John Signer Sargent invited a group of guests to stay at his house at Fladbury near Pershore.  Notable among the invitees were his good friends Paul Helleu and his wife Alice. It was at this time, inspired and challenged by Sargent, that Helleu painted the present work, a dramatic departure from his earlier canvases. A lovely woman in fine dress in a well-appointed room was not an unusual subject for Helleu or, for that matter, Sargent.  Known as a great dandy, described by the greatest aesthete of the day, Robert de Montesquieu, as the 'Master of Elegance,' Helleu was recognized for his splendid society portraits of elegant ladies in fancy hats and the intimate portraits of his own family and close friends.

Yet Madame Helleu marks her husband's introduction of more modern elements: the creamy pale greens and blues of the palette, loosely constructed forms built with visible brushstrokes, and a flattened pictorial space. Certainly works completed by Sargent such as Two Girls with parasols at Fladbury and Two Girls on a Lawn (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) hold clear parallels to Helleu's later canvases. Both Sargent and Helleu had recently been introduced to Claude Monet at Giverney; while they did not entirely adopt an impressionistic palette or deconstruct the human form to the same extent, they clearly were experimenting with the art movement's tenants. This is evident in Madame Helleu: the placement of Alice at the edge of the picture space, built up in a series of fluid, flowing, energetic brush strokes; and the artist's ability to evoke character by the posture of a sitter, rapid-fire application of paint and the sketch-like finish of Impressionism.  Despite Madame's calm repose, the somewhat radical construction of the canvas and the glimmering waterscape seen through the window provide a new vitality to Helleu's oeuvre and the understanding of this period of experimentation—a modernist strain he chose not to maintain as strongly in future works.