GEORGES DE FEURE | Femme dans la neige (Élégante au petit chien)

Collection Bardou-Job, France
Sale: De Quay & Lombrail, Paris, March 29, 1995, lot 22
Hazlitt, Godden & Fox, London
Acquired from the above on May 17, 1996

Tokyo, Odakyu Grand Gallery & Osaka, Daimaru Museum, Umeda, Georges de Feure, 1990, no. 53, illustrated in color in the catalogue

Ian Millman, Georges de Feure, Maître du symbolisme et de l'art nouveau, Paris, 1992, illustrated in color p. 224

A talented painter, illustrator and decorative arts designer, Georges de Feure was born in Paris to a Dutch architect father and a Belgian mother. In 1886, he was admitted to the Rijkscademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, but de Feure shunned the rigidity of academic artistic training for the bohemian neighborhoods of Paris. By the mid-1890s, he became a professor of decorative arts at the École des Beaux-Arts and worked in a distinctive Art Deco style that contained traces of japonisme. Around this time, de Feure had an advocate in Samuel Bing, an influential art dealer who operated a successful import-export business between Japan and France and owned the Maison de l'Art Nouveau gallery. After Bing's death and as Art Deco gradually went out of vogue, de Feure moved to England to design theater sets.

It is likely that de Feure's model for Femme dans la neige (Élégante au petit chien) was none other than the artist's companion Julienne Raskin, whom he went on to marry in London in 1915.

The authenticity of this work has been kindly confirmed by Ian Millman.