Louis Welden Hawkins 1849-1910

Louis Welden Hawkins was born at Esslingen in Germany, the son of a British naval officer and his Austrian wife, Louise Sopransi, Baroness von Welden. His childhood was spent in England, but at the age of fifteen he was sent to sea. In 1870, when he was in his early twenties, he left the Royal Navy, and settled in Paris with the intention of becoming an artist. He lived in France all his life from this time forward, and in 1895 took French nationality.

In Paris Hawkins joined the Anglo-American circle of artists many of whom were students at the Académie Julian, and in addition was one of the many young artists of different nationalities who visited Grez-sur-Loing, as students of Jules Bastien-Lepage. Early works  show the influence of Bastien-Lepage, with their distinctive flattened picture space and muted colours. In the later 1880s Hawkins adopted the monumental style of Puvis de Chavannes, as seen in works such as La Procession des âmes (private collection, Paris). In the 1890s Hawkins came into contact with various writers and poets associated with the nascent Symbolist movement, including Paul Adam (who was supposed to have first applied the word Symbolism to the contemporary literary movement), and Stéphane Mallarmé. In 1894-5, Hawkins was invited to exhibit at the Salon de la Rose+Croix. In addition, he worked as an illustrator for the periodical L’Oeuvre d’Art International and was known for his designs for painted masks. Hawkins’ later paintings and designs are quintessential products of the French decadence.

When in 1905 L’Oeuvre d’Art International ceased publication, Hawkins resolved to leave Paris, taking his wife Raffaela and daughter Jacqueline to live at Perros-Guirec, near Lannion on the north coast of Brittany. There he painted landscape subjects, adopting a free and fluent style and clear colours quite different to those that he had used in his earlier rustic subjects. A number of these were displayed at the Paris Salon of 1910, the last exhibition in which Hawkins was represented before his death that same year, and various works were acquired by museum collections in France (for example, Ombelle jaune which is now in the Musée du Petit-Palais, Paris).

Les Préludes was painted at Grez-sur-Loing, the French town that Hawkins first visited in 1880 by which time it had developed a considerable reputation as a haunt for artists from Britain, Ireland and America. The list of artists that visited Grez included, the Americans Lovell Birge Harrison, Alexander Harrison, Robert Vonnoh and Kenyon Cox and Scandinavians Karl Nordstrum and Carl Larsson. Among the British artists were William Stott of Oldham, Roderic O'Conor and perhaps most famously John Lavery. 

The relationship of the two figures in Les Préludes standing in an expanse of meadow with a rustic fence and farm buildings beyond, closely follows the composition of Les Orphelins (formerly Musée du Luxembourg, on loan to Pouyastruc Mairie, Hautes-Pyrenees) painted by Hawkins in 1881. Les Orphelins was the picture that made Hawkins name and was much celebrated. John Lavery noted that the original subject of this rather bleak image of two orphaned children, was the meeting of two young lovers and it therefore appears likely that following the success of Les Orphelins Hawkins decided to paint his original idea, which he titled Les Préludes.

The young musician in the present work is not of the rugged shaven-headed type painted by Lepage and Dagnan-Bouveret, his hair is long beneath his velvet cap and he has Latin features. His costume suggests that he may be a pifferari, one of the travelling musicians that originally came from the hills and towns around Naples. His curious instrument is a form of harp played like an ancient lyre, with a combination of a stringed arc-shaped bridge and guitar-like resonator.