HENRI BRISPOT | En Province

Douwes Fine Art, Amsterdam

Acquired from the above by the family of the present owner in the 1980s

Paris, Salon, 1881, no. 302, illustrated in the catalogue

Paris, Exposition universelle internationale, 1889, no. 203 

Maurice du Seigneur, L'Art et les artistes au Salon de 1881, 1881, p. 114, described

Ferdinand Hodler, exh. cat., Munich, 1999, p. 33, illustrated & mentioned

Ferdinand Hodler, Towards Rhythmic Images, exh. cat., Tokyo, 2014, p. 25, fig. 8, a print after the present work illustrated & mentioned

A keen observer of the social types of his day, Henri Brispot was also the designer of the first cinema poster, made for the Lumière brothers in 1896. A rare example was sold at Sotheby's in 2018 for £160,000, a record sum for any film poster. At the Salon of 1881, when Brispot received an honourable mention for the present work, the critic Maurice du Seigneur brought the composition to life in a humorous ekphrasis:

'Five old fellows sitting on a bench under a telegraph wire. They're waiting for the train. It makes you want to give them names, so well known are their types. The first, wearing a cap and leaning on his cane, is old Grenouillet, the one most likely to win a game of bowls; the second, with his umbrella, is M. Ducauroy, aka My Uncle,  horitculturalist emeritus, who five times was on the verge of discovering the blue rose; as for the man in the green suit and the battered grey hat, let us make a bet that it's the schoolmaster Morizard, who sometimes gives amusing mathematics lectures in the vicarage on Sundays after Vespers. The penultimate one, in a white waistcoat with crossed legs, smoking his Meerschaum pipe, a panama hat atop his head, has influence on the municipal council; he does curveballs when playing billiards and is often seen by the ladies of Saint Odile. The one at the end of the bench, bareheaded and laughing at his dog, is clearly no stranger to the grocery shop; it looks like he used to have a townhouse in the suburbs of a large town.'

A print was made after the composition by Perrichon and Lavée.