Henri Gervex

M. Hauch, Paris
Private Collection, New York
Schiller & Bodo European Paintings, New York
Private Collection

Possibly, Salon des Amis des Arts de Bordeaux, 1880 (as Nana lisant)
Possibly, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, Henri Gervex ... : exposition de peintures et pastels, May 16-June 5, 1905, no. 26 (lent by Hauch)

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This painting is restored. The canvas is not lined. The paint layer is cleaned and varnished. Under ultraviolet light, retouches cannot be easily identified. It seems that the varnish on the picture discourages positive identification of retouching under ultraviolet light. However, some cracking has been retouched in the center of the skirt portion of the dress on the right side, and there are a few retouches in the sunlit pink and white wall on the right. While the remainder of the picture seems to be very healthy, there may be a few other tiny spots of retouching. In general the condition is very good.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Gervex (fig 1.) painted La Toilette in circa 1878-9 soon after his scandalous Rolla (fig. 2) was removed from public exhibition at the Paris Salon of 1878, leaving him to show it at the art dealer Bagne's gallery. This repeated an experience shared by his friend Édouard Manet, whose Nana (fig. 3) had been rejected in 1877, leading him to boldly display the work in the window of Giroux's boutique on the Boulevard des Capucines, which sold women's accessories and decorative objects rather than fine art.  In the years surrounding these controversies, Émile Zola introduced the reading public to fifteen-year-old Anna, nicknamed Nana, in his book L'Assommoir, published in serial form from April 1876 to January 1877.  The daughter of the laundress Gervaise and her alcoholic husband Copeau, Nana was "as plump as a pincushion" with a "milky completion and skin as velvety as a peach" (Émile Zola, L'Assommoir, trans. L. W. Tancock, New York, 1970, p. 340-1). She first appears as an abused daughter in L'Assommoir, and it is not until she is reintroduced in the eponymous novel of 1880 (serialized in October 1879) that she becomes known as the actress and courtesan "treading Paris under foot in the manner of an all-powerful mistress" (Émile Zola, Nana, trans. Burton Rascoe, 2006, p. 294). Zola's naturalistic style and story, rooted in contemporary social reality, allowed his reader to connect with the narrative of a woman who brashly acquired material comfort and fame through her beauty — and suffered brutal consequences as a result.

Nana was an immediate success, and its courtesan became a well-known icon in popular culture. Critics and writers such as Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans claimed that Manet's painting of a half-dressed woman standing before a top-hatted suitor depicted Zola's "heroine," even though the artist began the painting well before the author completed Nana.  In turn, Zola did seem to acknowledge inspiration from images like Manet's when planning for his novel in 1878 (this has long been debated by literary and art scholars. See: Beth Archer Brombert, Edouard Manet, Rebel in a Frock Coat, Boston, 1996, p. 385-6; Carol Armstrong, Manet Manette, New Haven and London, p. 2002, p. 230).  In this same context, and at nearly the same time, a similar audience viewed the enigmatic red-haired beauty of La Toilette.  Indeed, Gervex's composition is set within the same type of private, well-appointed rooms of both the painted and literary Nanas.  While the viewer is the only outsider invited into the space of La Toilette, Gervex's uninhibited model, like Manet's, has retained her undergarments and still wears ribboned and red-heeled shoes, while her dress has been tossed over a chair, suggesting an impending encounter, one of many described by Zola in his fiction. Beyond this cultural association, Gervex, Manet, and Zola moved in the same circles both professionally and socially, and no matter the order of their specific works, they informed each other's masterpieces. Yet, Gervex's La Toilette, painted as the young artist was exploring his own developing artistic sensibilities, is a particularly nuanced and likely highly personalized depiction of the themes that so captivated his contemporaries.

Though Gervex's original title for the present work remains unknown, the interior depicted was his own apartment and the model portrayed is the courtesan Madame Valtesse de la Bigne. The discarded clothes across the chair in the foreground allude to the infamously discarded corset of his Rolla (and of course the one worn by Manet's Nana), which indicated that the sleeping female nude was not a model but a courtesan.  Specifically, she is Marion from Alfred de Museet's 1833 novel Rolla in which Jacques Rolla spends the last of his squandered inheritance on a night with the fifteen year old courtesan before throwing himself from a balcony.  The blue and white color scheme of Rolla's bedroom, its Louis XVI style furniture, and the patterned fabric of the duvet is repeated in our painting, from the curtains and wallpaper to the columned chiffonier on which sits a small mirror and other silver objects of a woman's toilette.  Much of the furniture in the present work could be found in Gervex's home on the rue Bouchart-de-Saron, where he lived in 1878 — specifically the "X-shaped" table of Japanese style, which Gervex acquired from the art dealer Siegfried ("Samuel") Bing. 

In Gervex's celebrated portrait of Madame Valtesse de la Bigne (fig. 4), submitted to the Salon of 1879, she wears a hat of the same pale cream color and shape as that set on the small table in La Toilette. Born in 1848 as Lucia Emilia Delabigne, Valtesse began her career as an actress, but is best remembered as a noted courtesan in French society, and was involved with aristocrats and artists such as Gustave Courbet, Eugène Boudin, Édouard Detaille, and Gervex, her companion from 1876 to circa 1880.  So many were her artistic affairs that she was dubbed "l'union des peintres" (Leah Rosenblatt Lehmbeck, Édouard Manet's portraits of women, Ph.d diss., New York University, 2007, pp. 267-8).   Valtesse, with her trademark red hair, served not only a model for Gervex's work, but soon after her introduction to Zola by the artist, became a ready source for his Nana (the model for Manet's painting was yet another courtesan, Henriette Hauser, Brombert, p. 384).  Moreover, Valtesse's boudoir, specifically her ornate bed, inspired Nana's own, and can be seen today in the Musée des Art Décoratifs, Paris. (Lehmbeck, p. 267).  Though the famous bed is not a part of La Toilette's furnishings, the décor scheme does resemble that of Nana's overstuffed private rooms described in great detail by Zola: with seemingly limitless financial resources, Nana indecisively redecorates her bedroom first "hung in mauve satin" the second time in "white lace on blue silk" with furniture of "blue and white lacquer, inlaid with fillets of silver" (Zola, Nana, trans. Burton Rascoe, New York, 2006, p. 296).  Further, the blue and white of the rumpled skirts thrown over a floral upholstered chair in Gervex's work are of the same palette as Manet's Nana's undergarments; similarly, Zola's Nana wears "the colors of the Vandeuvres stable, blue and white, intermingled in a most extraordinary costume" when attending the races at Longchamp (Zola, Nana, p. 237).  While it remains to be determined if Zola wrote these words before Gervex painted La Toilette or vice versa, it evidences yet another fascinating interchange between novel and artwork as both connect the courtesan with material wealth.  Nana and Gervex's models live in sumptuous spaces and wear beautiful clothes of their own design made possible by their feminine power (Carol Armstrong discusses a similar relationship in Manet's work, pp. 232-6).

With its assorted associations with both the work of Zola and Manet, La Toilette was painted at a time when Gervex was building his career and experimenting with various techniques and modes of expression. Though the present work may be compared to and inspired by Manet's Nana and Zola's novels, Gervex's choices in depicting a similar subject divert from these more realistic illustrations of the courtesan (and is apart from his later, more literal interpretation of the subject a work now known as Nana and exhibited at the Galerie Georges Petit in 1885).  Rather, in its broad strokes of color and evocative use of light and shadow, La Toilette resembles the technique of Rolla,  and points toward the artist's understanding of the Impressionists, with Edgar Degas being a particularly important influence.  By combining both contemporary aesthetics and cultural sources in his La Toilette, Gervex offers an interpretation of the courtesan that in its subject, setting and painterly technique is absolutely of the moment.  Without knowing Gervex's specific intentions, it is left to the viewer to decode the clues and consider the artist's meaning for his work. In so doing, La Toilette invites Flaubert's consideration of  Zola's fiction:

Nana tourne au mythe, sans cesser d'être réelle
(Nana turns into myth, without ceasing to be real.)

(As translated from Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, vol. 4, 1893, p. 366)