Louis Anquetin

Private Collection, France (possibly acquired from the artist)

Executed on cream wove paper. Work is affixed to a sheet of card on the verso at top edge. Minor tape residue on verso near bottom corners from prior mounting. There is a 1/8 inch tear at center of top edge and another of the same size at center of bottom edge. Otherwise fine. Colors are bright and fresh. This work is in excellent condition. Please note: The correct dimensions of this work are 26 7/8 x 19 7/8 in. (68.3 x 50.5 cm)
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Painted in a Cloisonnist style infused with Japanese influences, L'Avenue de Clichy offers us a picturesque glimpse of Paris during the Belle Époque. Louis Anquetin immortalizes a busy avenue situated close to his Montmartre home, bustling with crowds and activity towards the end of a rainy afternoon.

L'Avenue de Clichy is today considered to be one of the major paintings by Anquetin that in 1887 led Edouard Dujardin to hail him as the chief proponent of Cloissonism. This work indeed illustrates the principle elements of this new artistic movement that affirmed the supremacy of drawing and borrowed its style from medieval stained glass windows and enamels, but also from Japanese prints. The parallel between this blue-toned gouache & watercolour and the art of stained glass was indirectly confirmed by Emile Bernard who recalled that Anquetin's monochromatic compositions were inspired by the latter's habit of looking at landscapes through panes of coloured glass. The exceptionally elegant shadowy black outlines as well as the flat treatment of the motifs of this composition are evocative of enamel work as much as stained glass.

Aside from these references, L'Avenue de Clichy is also reminiscent of the art of the Japanese masters who were so revered by many of Anquetin's friends, notably Vincent Van Gogh and Emile Bernard: as Frédéric d'Estremau points out, "the iron and glass awning, an aspect of industrial design, above the butchers shop has a ethereal quality which suggests the roof of a pagoda, the legs strung up in a garland recall Japanese lanterns, the elegant woman seen from behind, raising her skirts, creates a gathering of folds that is drawn in a very Japoniste style, but [...] more than any of these details, it is the use of dark outlines and flat colours that brings to mind Japanese prints" (F. d'Estremau in Brame & Lorenceau (ed.), Anquetin, La Passion d'être peintre, Paris, 1991, p. 28).

For Anquetin, the street was a spectacle of which he never grew tired.  A butcher's shop appears in the foreground, the focal point of the composition and an autobiographical allusion to the artist's father who ran a thriving butcher's business in Normandy. Anquetin's vivid style subtly conveys the vibrant atmosphere of a rainy evening, when crowds jostle for space on the street. L'Avenue de Clichy thus aims to create a sensory impression, to suggest a "symbolism of sensation" as Anquetin called it.  With a confident style, the artist strives here to capture a fleeting impression of reality and to translate it visually.

It is not surprising that this work inspired Van Gogh in his celebrated masterpiece Le Café à Arles in 1888 (fig. 1), as Anquetin's stylistic preoccupations echoed those of the Arles master. Three other versions of L'Avenue de Clichy exist: an oil housed in the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford and two pastels; this version is the only known gouache &  watercolor of this subject.

Fig. 1  Vincent Van Gogh, Le Café à Arles, 1888, oil on canvas, Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, Netherlands