Lot 381
  • 381

HENRI MARTIN | L'École et le pont sur le vert à Labastide-du-Vert

Estimate
180,000 - 250,000 USD
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Description

  • Henri Martin
  • L'École et le pont sur le vert à Labastide-du-Vert
  • Signed Henri Martin and dated 35 (lower right)
  • Oil on canvas
  • 28 3/8 by 33 in.
  • 72 by 84 cm
  • Painted in 1935.

Provenance

Marcel Bernheim & Cie., Paris
Private Collection (acquired by 1961 and sold: Sotheby’s, London, June 27, 1990, lot 129)
Sale: Christie’s, New York, November 19, 1998, lot 165
Richard Green Fine Paintings, London
Acquired from the above in 1999

Condition

The work is in very good condition. The canvas has not been lined. There are some areas of hairline craquelure, most notably in the water. Under UV light, there are some extremely minor stokes of inpainting along the bottom edge, as well as in the upper right corner, and some along the upper left edge. There are a couple of pindot strokes of inpainting in the sky.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Catalogue Note

Henri Martin falls into that rare category of artists whose mature style best defines their work. In his case, Martin developed a unique synthesis of a broadly Impressionistic approach combined with Pointillist brushwork. At the age of forty he bought a seventeenth-century house above the village of Labastide-du-Vert in the South-West, which, as Claude Juskiewenski has noted, brought Martin “his equilibrium, his personal and artistic fulfillment” (Henri Martin, exhibition catalogue, Musée de Cahors, Cahors, 1993, p. 103). If Baudelaire (whom he admired) aimed to highlight in his writing the ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, Martin lived out the truth of it by retreating from Paris to a rural idyll annually during the summer and early autumn where his work centered on the exact opposite: the timelessness of man’s harmonious co-existence with nature. 

Confronted by changeable natural light, at times brilliant and then diffuse, Martin noted the challenges presented by diverse atmospheric effects. But although his technical solutions and softened contours are masterful, what set Martin  apart from contemporaries is his ability to combine both a human and spiritual dimension in his landscapes. Martin’s bucolic views of the valley are unmistakably populated and cultivated. The bridge of the present work, for example, is a recurring motif, and his perspectives are never sublime in the sweeping Romantic sense. But as Jacques Martin-Ferrières has correctly pointed out, his scenes are nonetheless deeply sensitive and poetic, his palette “an enchantment” (Jacques Martin-Ferrières, Henri Martin, Paris, 1967, p.35), and indeed his entire vision has an enchanted air. Man is ever-present, but with Martin’s increasingly sophisticated use of Pointillist techniques, the weighty human forms and buildings in his later paintings such as The Mowers (1905) paradoxically feel more ethereal than the ostensibly mythical figures of his Symbolist paintings of 1890s for the portentous Salon de la Rose+Croix exhibitions. In the words of another poet who inspired some of Martin’s more straightforwardly allegorical work as a young man, it is “the garden of the Everlasting Gardener” that is gently evoked in his elysian views of La-Bastide-du-Vert and the pagodas and pools of Marquayrol (Dante, Paradiso, Canto XXVI, lines 55–56).

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by the late Cyrille Martin.